Zoom online meeting software has become very popular with many people joining it for the first time. Here’s how to fully get ready for a Zoom meeting, there’s more to it than the official advice. Two Office Watch readers found themselves asked to join a Zoom meeting at short notice.
Microsoft’s Team collaboration service has hit some snags this week in stark contrast to the company’s shameless promotion of Teams over other useful services. We’ll explain what happened and what you can do if the Teams troubles happen again. On both Monday and Tuesday this week, many people had trouble
Microsoft has quietly announced some minor but important slow down in some of their cloud services including the way real-time edits of Office documents are handled. It’s a wise move given the increased demand for cloud services. Microsoft had an outage on their much-hyped Teams services earlier this week. Like
Skype subtitles are great if you’d prefer a text record of your call or you’re hard of hearing and like a text extra. As a bonus, the same subtitles service will translate when talking to someone who speaks another language. Try Skype’s Live subtitles option. It will convert the spoken
Instead of people looking at your face during a Skype call, they can see a computer screen instead. That includes a Word document, worksheet or PowerPoint presentation. Start a call as usual, either an audio or video call. In the call window, look for the menu ‘three dots’ button. It’s
Skype can be integrated into collaborating on Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents. It’s not officially part of Microsoft Office collaboration but is easily done. It lets you work on a document while talking to other collaborators at the same time. Like this … This works with any modern version of
Already we’ve seen signs of stress on Internet access, cloud and streaming services. Do you have alternatives ready to use? Two popular collaboration services, Slack and Microsoft Teams have already suffered slow downs or outages. Part of our Remote Life and Work coverage. Tips and help from experts in working
You can set up your own shortcuts to quickly apply any style in Word. You’re not limited to the in-built shortcuts for Normal and a few Headings. You may be familiar with using keyboard shortcuts to such has Ctrl+B or Ctrl+I to quickly change text to bold or italic but those don’t apply styles, just
We can say plenty about Skype, but it’s setup and testing is easier than most. Here’s how to get ready for Skype calling on Windows, Mac and others. While Skype’s text messaging service is awful (clumsy and insecure with Microsoft reading every message!), it’s video and voice calling are good.
When the speakers or headphones don’t work on a Windows computer don’t make a noise, fixing the problem can be frustrating. Here’s our no nonsense guide to the problem and finding a fix. The problem with Windows audio Windows audio support is a mess. Anyone who has tried to get
No surprise that criminals are using Coronavirus/COVID-19 as a way to trick people into opening nasty Word document that could infect your computer. All the usual suspects are trying to take advantage of Coronavirus to sell stuff. Plenty of fake ‘cures’ being touted, usually existing ‘miracles’ rebadged to take advantage
Microsoft has just fixed the latest security bugs discovered in Word. They caught our eye because it’s more widespread than usual which is ‘interesting’ in the way of the old proverb*. The bugs are called CVE-2020-0850, CVE-2020-0851 and CVE-2020-0852 Microsoft gives all the deliberately bland title “Remote Code Execution Vulnerability”.
There are several free options to access one computer from another. You can see the screen, type and mouse from a remote location, just as if you were in front of the real computer. Access work computer from home computer Use desktop computer from a laptop or tablet Interact with
Working on an Office document can easily be done between many people no matter how far away they are. Most organizations will have some way to share documents remotely If not, there are clever options available. Instead of exchanging documents (we’ll get to that in a moment), save the document
There are many free tools available to make work and life continue if your movements are limited. Things you should do to prepare for a possible ‘work from home’, ‘no school’ or at worst ‘quarantine’ or ‘social isolation’ of some type. We know what we’re talking about because Office Watch
Microsoft is cunningly pushing Teams as part of its COVID-19 preparedness recommendations. But Teams isn’t the best option for everyone, far from it. Promoting Teams is good for Microsoft and their sales partners but not necessarily their customers. At Microsoft.com there are now special banner ads promoting Teams as the
Microsoft has been talking about document collaboration for a long time but now it’s available to everyone with a recent version of Office and OneDrive. So here’s a simple guide to opening the same document at the same time on multiple computers. You don’t need two people to try out
Here’s how to share a Microsoft Office document that’s saved on a compatible cloud service like OneDrive or Dropbox. All you need is Office 365/2019 or 2016 for Windows or Mac. Document collaboration works in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Sharing a single file via cloud storage is a lot faster
Fit a little more onto your Outlook 365 for Windows display. Sadly the option doesn’t apply to the entire Outlook window. On the View tab, Layout there’s a choice Use Tighter Spacing with the choice of ‘Relaxed’ or ‘Tight’. What does that mean? The main list vertical spacing changes. With
Here’s another example of why older .DOC Word documents should be avoided. This time it’s a fake Norton LifeLock email and hacked document. The Word .doc document has a fake login dialog . Source: Unit 42 The document executes a known remote access tool NetSupport Manager. That tool has legitimate
Excel’s NetworkDays() and NetworkDays.Intl() need more help to cope with realistic situations with public holidays and more than one vacation. Annabelle Almer started looking at NetworkDays() & NetworkDays.Intl() and we ended up deep down a geeky rabbit hole trying to get the functions working in realistic situations. The functions work,
Making a list of all the days between two Excel dates is possible in various ways, manually, an Excel 365 formula or some VBA code. We need a way to make a list of all the dates between a start and end date. Use this to make a list of
The Konami Code symbols can be used together or separately in PowerPoint slides, Word documents or elsewhere. They serve to demonstrate some tricks and failings in Office and it’s SVG support. The Konami Code graphics caught our eye because they are a useful set of icons or graphics either complete
If you’ve ever tried to enter a number starting with zero into an Excel spreadsheet, you will have had the frustrating experience of finding that as soon as you exit the cell, the zero disappears from the front of the number. Here’s how to stop Excel from ‘helping’ you when
