Microsoft’s PR department must be laughing themselves silly this week. A press release for an existing Excel feature is getting wide coverage even though there’s nothing new and the feature is at least six months old. The blog posting on 5 June 2019 announces Microsoft is working with “Nasdaq and
Excel 365’s new ‘Data from Picture’ feature is now available for iPhone and iPad. It converts a photo into a spreadsheet grid you can work from. We told you about ‘Data from Picture’ back in March when it became available in Excel for Android. Data from Picture is on the
How does Excel 365’s Data from Picture work outside the carefully selected demos shown by Microsoft? Data from Picture converts a photo of a document or table into an Excel worksheet. It does that by sending the image to Microsoft’s cloud servers for interpretation. The converted table comes back to
Microsoft has announced that the Office apps for Android won’t update for older versions of Android. These are the Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook apps for Android. Quietly, the system requirements were changed to cover only the last four major versions of Android. Misleading news alert Despite what you may
Here’s some other problems with the Word Sort feature and tricks to work around them. Generally speaking, long or complex sorting is better done in Excel. Excel has much better data management features to split and sort. The final result can be copied into Word. Sort a list of names
Microsoft has released a series of pages describing their support for the new Japanese era in Windows, Office and .NET. Plus a new Windows feature to support a nicety of Japanese date formatting. Japan’s traditional dating system works around the Emperor’s reign. The abdication of the last Emperor and enthronement
As part of Microsoft’s support for the new Japanese Imperial era, they’ve added support for traditional Gannen writing of dates as well as the newer Ichinen style. Windows 10 now supports Gannen style Japanese dates but that support doesn’t flow through to Excel formatting. Normally the default date presentation in
Yet again, Microsoft Word is beaten by mere humans when we pit the software against words used in the 2019 Spelling Bee finals. We made a list of some words from the 2019 Spelling Bee finals including the last eight words which confirmed the winners. See for yourself how Microsoft
WhatsApp will starting showing ads in 2020 which is another reason to give up on the messaging app and move to a more private and secure but very similar app, Signal. WhatsApp has over 1.5Billion users which makes it a too tempting target for the owners Facebook and advertisers. Facebook
Excel has a new currency option. Bitcoin BTC is now available as a Currency symbol or text from the main list but we’ll show how to get it now on any version of Excel. There are four options available: Bitcoin symbol ₿ prefix ₿12.34 Bitcoin symbol ₿ suffix 12.34 ₿
How to easily make and receive appointments with other people using Outlook. This is a feature that’s been in Outlook for many, many years and so is often overlooked amid the hype for the latest ‘exciting’ thing from Microsoft. We’ll look at how to send an create an appointment to
There’s an important feature in Word and other Office programs that we all have, and many people use, except the US Congress … document collaboration and comparison. It’s even more amazing because most, if not all congressional offices have Microsoft Office. An article about the Select Committee on the Modernization
Word can automatically add a bibliography or list of sources or works cited in a document. Here’s how to do it with formatting to make your teacher or professor happy. To make a Bibliography, you first have to add citations and sources to your document. Once you’ve added all the
A lovely email from Mary S in New Hampshire proves that the Office-Watch.com money saving tips for Office 365 Home or Personal really do work. It’s exactly why we write those articles, so our customers can buy Office 365 for less than what Microsoft wants. “Just followed your “Office Watch”
Office 365 is the most popular target for phishing and scamming. A new record that you won’t find mentioned in all the hype about Office as a service. Vade Secure reports that Office 365 is the #1 target for criminals trying to get your password and login details. Microsoft has
Finally, and quietly, Microsoft Access has been given a new icon. We know people have worried about this omission <not>. A few months ago, Microsoft released new icons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook to a collective yawn across the globe. Now they’ve slipped the MS Access icon into the
Office 365 documents can be autosaved to OneDrive or SharePoint Online but there’s a major exception which Microsoft needs to fix. AutoSave is prominent in Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Office 365, on the left of the top bar. It will regularly save your document for you but only if
Here’s how to change the Outlook folder labels from large text labels to smaller icons. Also tricks hiding under those folder labels. Microsoft’s default in modern Outlook is large text labels across the bottom. Click on any label to switch to that folder view. The text is large and might
“I followed your advice and bought another year of Office 365 Home cheaply to extend my subscription. Microsoft offered an extra month if I turned on auto-renewal so I took that offer. Accidentally, I discovered how to make sure the full price renewal doesn’t happen. My credit card details saved
The US Dept of Homeland Security has published advice on the extra precautions that Microsoft Office 365 customers should take to protect themselves. The advice is politely titled as Microsoft Office 365 Security Observations but should perhaps be called ‘Office 365 defaults you need to change’. Many of the recommendations apply
For the first time we can remember, Microsoft is publicly advertising the Office 365 Home Use Program. The Home Use Program changed in February 2019 to an ongoing discount on Office 365 Home plans for staff of organizations with Office volume licenses. That’s instead of a very low price on
The WhatsApp security bug made a lot of headlines this week. As the virtual dust settles, what should you do and what is there still to worry about. A company discovered a bug in WhatsApp which they packaged up and sold to various parties. The Pegasus bug allowed hacking of
Excel 365 for Windows and Mac has a clever way to add the latest stock prices into spreadsheets in a truly quick and easy way. Stock data type has been in Excel 365 for Windows since late last year but has gradually improved as the development team react to feedback
Reports that Microsoft has removed Office 365 from their flagship Windows 10 / Microsoft Store seem to be overstating things a bit. Both Office 365 Home and Personal are for sale, at full price via the Microsoft Store. Here’s the result of our search. Sometimes a big ad for Office
