It’s nice to see journalists used advanced Microsoft Word skills to keep government officials and politicians on their toes. CBC News, Canada received an early copy of a Manitoba government report on mental health. The final report was officially released a few hours later. The smart reporters at CBC compared
The so-called ‘Efail’ security bug affects Microsoft Outlook for Windows (among others) but only if you’re using a PGP encryption plug in like Gpg4Win and S/MIME. The bug means that messages that should be encrypted can, instead, be viewed in plain text. The current advice is to uninstall Gpg4Win. The
This might rate as the most nerdy Microsoft Office news item of the year … Microsoft is changing the build number format for Office from four significant digits to five. Please try to contain your excitement … The current MS Office for Windows public release has a version/build like this:
Excel has three PercentRank() functions to give you the percent ranking of a value in a list of numbers. It’s different from the Excel rankings we’ve discussed before, because this is a percentage or percentile ranking Let’s start with a simple example. There’s a list of values from 1 to
There’s an amazingly simple but effective way to bypass some security scans used by Office 365 hosting and possibly infect a computer. Called BaseStriker, this trick is so simple. It’s amazing that any professional security software doesn’t check for it already. It hides a dangerous link from Microsoft’s own and
One of the recent security patches from Microsoft is being actively exploited by hackers hoping to trap people who don’t update their computer quickly. The security bug can use an Office document to infect your computer. The security hole is in the Internet Explorer browser and the VBscript engine. It
Another month, another set of security bugs in Microsoft Office. It’s Microsoft’s version of Groundhog Day. The May 2018 dump of patches involves 102 updates covering: Office versions from Office 2010 to the latest Office 2016 Core Office features Word Excel Sharepoint and Project server. Most people don’t need to
Microsoft has announced upcoming new features in Office for Windows, Office 365. We’ll be looking at them in detail but here’s Microsoft’s summary. We’ll start with the important rollout information, these features aren’t in Office yet, they are coming to Insiders first and later to regular users. Here’s the Microsoft
In case you thought making a Word or Excel virus attack was hard, think again. The ‘Rubella Macro Builder’ will sell you a DIY kit with updates for just US$40 a month. The virus maker will take you through the steps to make a hacked Word or Excel document that
It’s easy to get mixed up between two seemingly similar Excel functions – Vlookup() and Choose() . Here’s how to, er, choose between the two. Choose( index_num, value1, [value2], [value3].. ) lets you select one item from a list within the function. For example: Choose(2, “High”, “Middle”, “Low”) will return
In an entirely predictable move, Microsoft is dropping the full OneNote desktop program from their lineup. OneNote 2016 for Windows, the traditional Windows program is being killed. It’ll be a slow death but it’ll still be dead. OneNote 2016 for Windows will be supported with security patches until October 2025
It’s a simple question – How can I delete a blank page in Microsoft Word? The answer isn’t so simple because there are many reasons for Word to add another page and various tricks to getting rid of them. The most common type of extra page is at the end
An infected email supposedly from the UK government appeared in our Outlook Inbox. It’s a good example of what to be careful of in emails and how some Outlook settings protect you from harm. Here’s the message that got through our mail hosts checks and Outlook’s. Many things in this
Jeff Bezos doesn’t like PowerPoint or any other slideshow system at Amazon meetings. That’s what leapt out at us from his 2017 Letter to Amazon shareholders (published in April 2018). “We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos.” Those memos
A KPMG team in Florida, USA are embarrassed and lost an important client all because of a slip of the keyboard and Outlook’s email AutoComplete feature. Miami Today has the story of the proposed new Miami-Dade courthouse and a mistake by the courthouse consultant’s KPMG. A confidential proposal and evaluation
In the UK there’s been a lot of laughs and some red faces about a money raising letter ‘signed’ by the Conservative Prime Minister to a ” Mr Youmustbe F*ckingjoking ” and sent to a pensioner. It’s easy to laugh but anyone who has done large mailings knows that it’s
Microsoft’s half-hearted attitude to security matters is demonstrated yet again with a new patch for Outlook. The patch has taken over a year to be released and doesn’t properly block the security lapse. It all started back in November 2016 when Microsoft was informed of a problem with RTF documents
Will R. an Office-Watch.com reminded us of a trap when dealing with .doc and .docx files. “I opened a command prompt and did a del *.doc. Imagine my surprise when it deleted both .doc and .docx files (I have backups). ” Firstly, a teacher’s gold star plus wise owl stamp to Will
Last Friday, Office 365 customers in Europe and especially the UK had to stop working as the Microsoft hosting servers stopped working. When trying to use email online, users only saw an ‘AADSTS90033’ error, and the message: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.” As usual, Microsoft’s communications were mixed.
Options to easily import live data about stocks and locations into Excel are coming. Microsoft is uncharacteristically quiet about these new features and not using their usual hype. Microsoft is soft pedaling these features by talking about ‘new data types’ which sounds very dry and complicated. It looks more interesting
Should you even bother bulk converting old documents (.doc .xls .ppt) into the newer Office formats (.docx .xlsx .pptx etc.)? It’s tempting to look at your older documents (doc etc) and think about converting them into the newer Office formats. There’s some advantages to conversion but it’s more difficult than
If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times … ignore or delete any .DOC .XLS .PPT files you get via email or shared. The main carrier of virus infection is Microsoft Office documents, a fact that Microsoft doesn’t like to talk about. What Microsoft doesn’t say is
What should you do when Microsoft asks to see one of your documents? Submit the files or not? There’s no easy answer when Microsoft asks to see a file from your computer for their anti-virus system, Windows Defender. Do you send the files or not? This can happen with Defender
One thing we can rely on a Office-Watch.com is the regular flow of emails asking about Winmail.dat attachments to emails. What they are and what to do about them. Winmail.dat is part of Microsoft’s own Rich Text Format for emails. RTF has been mostly superseded by the more open HTML
