Microsoft has restored an important missing part of Word 2016 for Windows; the Grammar and Style checking! It’s available for all Word 2016 for Windows users including the ‘perpetual licence’ users who normally don’t get ‘new’ features. This important improvement hasn’t had the usual Redmond hype, presumably because it’s more
Office 2013 won’t be available for Office 365 Enterprise customers from the end of February 2017. Incomplete reports have unnecessarily raised concerns, so Office Watch will try to clarify. This deadline applies to Office 365 ProPlus client applications customers only. It does NOT apply to Office 365 Home or Personal,
Microsoft’s cloud push continues. Redmond’s conversion and deployment service for Enterprise customers, FastTrack, now includes Windows 10, Dynamics 365 and Teams. FastTrack is a ‘service’ to corporate customers. ‘Helping’ them to migrate to Office 365 or other Microsoft products. It’s a sales vehicle, presented as a ‘help’ to customers. The
The latest updates to Word, Excel and PowerPoint is the usual mix of good news and a mystery. The good news is for Excel and PowerPoint. You can now format multiple objects at once. Move, resize, or format them by taping and holding, then tap another object. It’s the equivalent
Office Lens, a way to convert pictures of documents or whiteboards into text is finally available for Apple iPads. Back in 2015 Office-Watch.com demonstrated some of the clever crop and rotation tricks in Office Lens, plus the ‘convert to text’ option shameless stolen from OneNote. Source: Microsoft Images can be
Microsoft continues to expand the uses for their cloud storage of calendar information with the introduction of StaffHub. It’s an extension of the existing calendar and resource scheduling to include shift workers and especially those who mostly use mobile devices. Staff can download a StaffHub Apple or Android app (no
“Why doesn’t Word for Mac have a reading view like Word for Windows?” Clare C. Nottingham, UK? Word 2016 for Mac does have a variation on reading view. It’s similar to Word for Windows, but it’s renamed. Look for Focus on the View tab. Word for Windows has Read mode.
Microsoft has released a new version of Office 2016 for Windows to the ‘Slow’ insiders. This means Office 365 customers have more goodies to look forward to in coming months. You’ll need Office 2016 Version 1612 (Build 7628.2048) or above. The new features, as described by Microsoft are: View and
The latest ‘Slow’ insiders release for Office 2016 has a new feature for shared documents – the Activity view. This pane shows who has saved a shared document on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or SharePoint. There are ‘Open version’ links offered but these only give errors in our tests. Perhaps
There’s very few security patches this month but the major fix is for Word 2016 for Windows. Alas, as usual, Microsoft tries to overwhelm with a lot of standard phrases leaving key questions unanswered. This months security flaw is similar to many others over the years. A hacked document can
Microsoft is extending their ‘beta testing’ of Office to Office for iPhone and iPad. The Office Insider Programs gives people access to test releases of Office software with new and changed features. The downside is reliability. The software doesn’t always behave the way it should and might even ‘crash’. Any
Shared calendars are now supported in the Outlook apps for Apple and Android devices. At this stage, you have to setup the calendar sharing from an Outlook web interface. Both the sharing and acceptance of the share have to be done on the web site. Only view and edit permissions
Excel will support Bitcoin in an upcoming release. According to Microsoft’s roadmap for Excel, Bitcoin support will: “… track, calculate and analyze Bitcoin data using native Bitcoin number formatting options. Feature is first being rolled out to Excel 2016 for Windows, Excel Online, Excel Mobile for Windows and Excel Mobile
There’s a piece of malware about that tries to trick Microsoft Office users into ‘activating’ their Office software when there’s really no problem. Here’s how to deal with it if you get caught. Once it’s running, the malware appears ‘on top’ of your screen with a phone number to call.
A dozen different Office security breaches are patched this month, in addition to many for Windows and other MS products. All supported Office versions are affected. Office 2016, 2013, 2010 and 2007 for Windows plus the Office compatibility pack and the standalone viewers for Word and Excel. Also patches for
If you want to pay more for Office 365, just renew automatically when your subscription ends. There’s a cheaper way and you’ll get 13 months for less than Microsoft will charge you for 12. Here’s how: You can renew or extend your Office 365 Home or Personal account at any
If you’re interested in the hard numbers about the 2016 US election, David Wasserman @redistrict has done the work for you. Channel your inner ‘Nate Silver’ <g>. Go to https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/133Eb4qQmOxNvtesw2hdVns073R68EZx4SfCnP4IGQf8/htmlview?sle=true#gid=19 to see a ‘read only’ Google Docs worksheet showing the state-by-state results. Not visible above are columns with the total
Office 2016 for Windows will soon support scalable vector graphics (SVGs). Preview/Insiders can try them now and it’ll be available to all Office 365 subscribers in 2017. That means you’ll be able to make your documents look even better with vector-based SVG files that won’t pixelate when increased in size.
A story in the UK’s Daily Telegraph got us thinking about some of the traps when buying Microsoft Office with a new computer. The Telegraph reader bought a new computer and was told by staff that Office 2007 wasn’t supported on the new computer. The reader was sold, as a
Here’s a ‘no fuss, no muss’ way to grab the latest exchange rates and use them in Excel. No need to lookup a rate and type it in, let Excel do all that work for you. You might expect Excel to do this out of the box. After all, Microsoft
Microsoft has announced that they’ll stop updating the Outlook spam filter (“Smartscreen”) at the end of this month – on 1st Nov 2016. This might be a worry, but not a disaster, for most Outlook users and we’ll explain why. What’s Happening From 1st Nov 2016 there will be no
Microsoft is gradually adding to Office some interesting new Ink related features; Replay and Math. Rewind and Replay Until now drawings or ‘ink’ in Office documents has been static and fixed, much like real ink. OneNote Mobile for Windows 10 is the first Office app to make ink additions animated.
A new report shows that Excel is causing errors to creep into genetic studies because of data conversion problems. Excel tries to figure out the type of information you are typing or importing into a worksheet. Those rules work most of the time, but not always. If Excel converts a
Sometimes we wonder what happens in Microsoft development meetings because the software we get from those discussions seems so out of touch with reality or even sense. Today’s example comes from Outlook for Windows and it’s curious ‘one way’ translation feature. Office for Windows has good language translation options, though
