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
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
