Two Indian banks clamped down use of unlicensed Microsoft Office, leaving staff to use calculators or open-source alternative spreadsheets. Mid-Day.com reported that Bank of India and Saraswat Bank had some licenses for Microsoft Office but not enough for all the computers the bank had allocated to staff. Branches were instructed
Both Windows and Office send an astonishing amount of data from your computer to Microsoft. Here’s how to see what’s being sent. The Diagnostic Data Viewer shows, as it happens, what your computer is sending to Microsoft. The tool does NOT give you the choice to not send your private
Later this year, you’ll be able to buy an Office 365 annual ‘subscription direct from the App Store on a Mac. Buying through the App Store will be a bad move for any Mac users. That was one of the lesser noticed announcements at Apple’s WWDC 2018 conference. The whole App
Office Watch reader, John Hoffmann has some more detail on variable fonts, supported in Windows 10 and Windows 11 Variable fonts are a single package that includes many variations (Light, Heavy etc), instead of having separate font files for each variant. That takes up less disk space (important on tablet
It’s time again to put the mighty brains and resources of Microsoft against the best and brightest of American youth. Yet again, the kids put Microsoft Word to shame. Each year, Office-Watch.com get the word lists from the finals of the US Scripps National Spelling Bee and runs them through
An overdue and very welcome addition to OneDrive for Office 365 customers is password protected sharing links. Until now, you could send a link to a OneDrive stored file or folder but there was no control over who used that link. If the link ‘escaped’ to other people, they could
Microsoft has extended their OneDrive Files Restore feature to all Office 365 customers, not just their business users. It’s a simple way to recover files that have been lost, in particular if you’ve been caught in a ransomware attack. Ransomware will encrypt all the files on your computer and network
The increasing popularity of Office 365 hosting has a downside; targeting of the platform by hackers. Just like Microsoft Office software, the wide deployment of Office 365 means it becomes a large target for baddies to try infiltrating. They are succeeding. A report from Beazley Breach Response Services suggests that
Office 2016 for Windows or Mac has an inconsistent set of privacy and diagnostic data options depending on exactly which Office variant you have, your ‘Insider’ choice and even the toss of a coin! Microsoft’s intention is clear … they want more information about how you use Word, Excel and
Here’s how to make a parallax slide transition from one slide to another. Strictly speaking, to fake it! The parallax effect is created by making a text box ‘below’ the visible slide then animating that text box into view. See Cool Parallax Slide Transition in PowerPoint Ideally, you’d be able
New and improved ‘Pro’ fonts are a lesser known part of the April 2018 update to Windows 10. You can install, free, updated alternatives for Windows standard fonts like Arial, Georgia, Gill Sans and Verdana. Windows 10 now supports ‘Variable Type’ fonts where a single font file contains many variations
Looking for 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar calendar info? … click here The upcoming Football World Cup (soccer) is a little more complicated than usual. There are 64 matches playing across three time zones in Russia which makes it hard to figure out what time the live broadcast will be
Microsoft Word for Android devices has achieved a seemingly impressive milestone, 500 million downloads. Is that ‘half a billion’ number truly big when compared to the number of Android devices in use? We’re inspired by the wonderful More or Less program and podcast from BBC Radio 4 to ask the
Continuing our tutorial on making a parallax slide transition in PowerPoint. In Parallax Effect in PowerPoint, part one we setup the extended slide with the image and text boxes needed. We showed how to add text boxes outside the visible slide area, the vital selection pane, renaming objects so they
It seems every other business is using the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as an excuse to sell something, so Office Watch has joined the bandwagon … with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Our book Keep Calm with Microsoft Office has sample Word documents and PowerPoint slides
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
Microsoft Outlook 2016 for Mac (Office 365) is getting some ‘new’ features or, at least, features that other Office users already have. Quick Reply The Reply/Reply all options in the reading/preview pane are promised ‘later this summer’. Time Zone support Outlook for Mac finally gets time zone support but, unfortunately
