Last week, Microsoft released the Dubai font to their Office 365 customers only. Now the city-state of Dubai has released it to everyone. Dubai is a new font which has both western and Arabic characters in the one package. It was created by the Dubai government with assistance from Microsoft.
A few Office-Watch.com readers asked if the Dubai font is really the first ‘city’ font. ” Hello? Geneva? Belfast? Casablanca? Gloucester? ” – Steve R. Probably Microsoft/Dubai are making a distinction between a font made specifically for a city (city-state) and a font named after a city. Back in February,
Sensepost has revealed an interesting way to hack your computer via Outlook. Microsoft’s public response has been to deny there’s a problem and put the responsibility on customers. The method hasn’t been used ‘in the wild’ and it’s not easy to infect Outlook. But we’ve heard that before (especially from
Office-Watch.com has joined Instagram — the photo sharing site. The Instagram posts act as another way to get the latest Office news to you immediately. We’re @officewatch or https://www.instagram.com/officewatch/ A few readers have asked us to do this and we’re happy to oblige. We’re not entirely sure that Microsoft Office news is
The Dubai font inspired us to look at the currency symbol for the United Arab Emirates – the Dirham. A quick guide for those of us who don’t know any Arabic! There’s no direct symbol for the Dirham – unlike the dollar, Euro or Yen/Yuan. The usual prefix is DH
Hyped as the first city to get its own font, Dubai and Microsoft have released the Dubai font. Office-Watch.com looks beyond the press releases for the details on the new font and Dubai font alternatives. Dubai is a sans-serif OpenType font available for Windows and Mac. It’s not a full-range
If you can’t get the new Dubai font, there are many alternative fonts. The closest match we could find was FF Fago by Ole Schäfer. Among the fonts supplied with Windows/Office, the most similar is Lucida Sans. It’s on the drop-down list of fonts in Windows and Mac. Here’s Lucida
Microsoft Publisher is the ‘desktop publishing’ part of MS Office. It has many formatting options not available in Word and is useful for making marketing documents like brochures, catalogs etc. Publisher was somewhat forgotten because it was only in the high priced Microsoft Office bundles. That changed with arrival of
Microsoft has announced reductions in service for customers who bought the ‘perpetual licence’ or one-off version of Office 2016 for Windows. Veiled? Some commentators are calling it a ‘veiled’ attempt by Microsoft to switch customers from the single-payment purchase to the annual ‘subscription’ system. The move is certainly aimed to
The preview release of Microsoft To-Do begs the question – what about Wunderlist? Wunderlist is a similar app which Microsoft bought only two years ago and continued to run. Wunderlist is on the critical list with no hope for recovery. Microsoft has announced that Wunderlist is going to ‘die’ when
Microsoft has quietly released a new service To-Do with apps for Apple, Android and Windows devices plus a web interface. It’s in preview or beta. To-Do lets you make simple lists of ‘action items’. According to Microsoft what makes the service special is “With its intelligent Suggestions, To-Do removes all the
It seems that every day there are more suggestions on how to reduce ’email overload’, here’s some that caught our eye. Bain & Company analyzed their staffs use of Microsoft Outlook and similar applications: Senior executives receive more than 200 emails each day A typical frontline supervisor spends about eight hours a
Even today, despite the public outcry, a document saved to docs.com will automatically be available to everyone. The privacy choices aren’t obvious and the ‘public’ default isn’t clear either. Here’s what you see when uploading to docs.com You have to click the ‘three dots’ menu button then scroll down a
If you’ve ever used http://docs.com it’s a good idea to check what’s saved there and what public access is set. Login with your Microsoft account (or other login) and check the list of saved documents (click on your name at top right. Depending on your wishes you can: Leave as
Shared Calendars is now available for the Outlook apps for Android and Apple devices. The Outlook app for iOS was recently updated to include shared calendars. This brings the Outlook apps into line with this important Outlook for Windows/Mac feature. Shared Calendars let one person make their appointments visible or
The debate about the Oxford Comma continues with news that a Maine company has lost a court case for the lack of a vital extra comma. Oxford Comma is one of the lesser known grammar checks in Microsoft Word. Sadly, Word would not have warned of the problem and saved
Microsoft Teams, their new collaboration and messaging service, has now gone live after a long beta test. As usual, the media have lapped up this news without a critical eye. Teams is certainly interesting and powerful, see below for a quick introduction. Microsoft is packing in a lot of features;
Amazingly, Microsoft has at least three programs that are called ‘Outlook 2016’. It’s not a trivial point, knowing which ‘Outlook 2016’ you have is important if you ask for help or tech support. Confused? Join the club. When Microsoft talks about ‘Outlook’ they probably mean ‘Outlook for Windows’. ‘Outlook 2016’
Microsoft makes it hard for people to move from their Entourage program data to modern Outlook for Mac. Entourage was the email/calendar/contacts part of Office for Mac. Office 2011 replaced it with Outlook 2011 for Mac. Outlook 2011 had a conversion option that let former Entourage users move to the
Last year we renewed one of our ongoing gripes with Outlook, the lack of an incoming email translation feature. See a ‘side-by-side’ translation of an email you’ve received. After many years, Microsoft has finally done something to fix this obvious gap, but they’ve done it in a typically self-serving way.
PowerPoint 2016 for Windows (Office 365 subscribers) is getting a new feature to help you make the basics of a presentation. QuickStarter is now available for PowerPoint for Windows Insider (Fast) build 16.0.7823.1000 and later. It will released to Slow ring Insiders then the public in the coming months. QuickStarter
The paid upgrade version of Outlook.com is now available with the usual, but enticing, opening offer. For an annual fee you get extras beyond the usual free offering: No Ads – on the browser interface version of your mailbox. Custom Domain – instead of using outlook.com, email addresses with your
Microsoft announced Touch Bar support with much fanfare back in October 2016. Over 3 months later and paying customers are still waiting. There’s been lot of talk about this feature including web sites with ‘tips’ on using Office with the Touch Bar without noting that it’s not got into ‘insider’
A few years ago we had a close look at the Oxford Comma (‘Comma required before last item’, serial comma, Harvard Comma etc) in Word 2013. We’ll now repeat those tests with the new “Microsoft’s own” grammar system to see if there’s any improvement. Office-Watch.com has already noted that the