Microsoft has announced seven extra languages added to their ‘speech to text’ Dictation feature in Outlook and Word. The new languages announced are: Hindi Russian Polish Portuguese (Portugal) Korean Thai Chinese (Taiwan) Your milage will vary As a cloud service, the available languages will vary. It depends on the version
PowerPoint is getting a new feature ‘Auto Fix’ that Office users have wanted for many, many years. We hope it’s the start of deployment to Word and Excel across all platforms. Auto Fix is a way to automatically arrange a collection of shapes and other objects into neat rows and
You may have heard about ‘Project Monarch’, Microsoft’s plan for a single Outlook program for Windows, Mac and maybe other platforms. This is what we know so far about Microsoft’s ‘vision’ for ‘One Outlook’ Project Monarch is an early Progressive Web App (PWA) which will have email, contacts, calendar and
Here’s how to install Outlook as a standalone web app or PWA. This looks like Outlook in a browser but it’s not, it’s Outlook as a standalone Progressive Web App (PWA). It’s available now in Windows 10. It’s not the upcoming Project Monarch but a part-way step in that direction. See
Microsoft Office (plus Word, Excel and PowerPoint) can be installed as a standalone web apps or PWA. We’ll explain how and the current limitations. This looks like the Office.com web page but it’s not, it’s Office as a standalone Progressive Web App (PWA). It’s available now in Windows 10 with
Windows 10X is coming and you’ll hear a lot about it in the coming months. Let’s see what Windows 10X is, how it will run Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook) and why most people won’t need to worry about Windows 10X. What is Windows 10X? Windows 10X is
Word and PowerPoint online, the browser versions, now have the same Synonyms feature that’s in the Windows and Mac releases. Synonyms helps you vary your vocabulary by suggesting alternative (different, substitute, other ) words. If you’ve used Synonyms in Office for Windows or Mac, there’ll be no surprises in the
We’ve tried out famous and classic lines on Microsoft suggested reply feature. Inspired by The New Yorker’s tests with Gmail. In Google Smart Reply, Literary Critic, Bruce Handy checks out the Smart Reply suggestions from Gmail to lines like this from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Microsoft 365 hosted Exchange Server has
Microsoft is trying a new way to push Office or Microsoft 365 to new customers by dropping links into the Windows Start Menu. We’ve seen this on the Start Menu of Windows 10 preview releases. It’s a group of icons for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote and Skype. Most of
Microsoft appears to be pre-installing the Office web apps into their Edge browser. The web based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outook are way beyond mere web pages. They are programs in their own right known as Progressive Web Apps or PWA. As reported by WindowsLatest, these Office PWA’s
Dictate now has formatting commands with two ways to apply bold, italic, underline and other text formatting as you speak. Dictate with formatting is now available in Word Online (in a web browser) for Microsoft 365 customers. It’ll spread to other Word releases (for Windows, Mac etc) later. To use
Setting up and testing a microphone to work with Windows 10 is necessary before using Dictate in Office. Go to Windows settings to control which microphone is used by Word 365’s Dictate. Dictate has no microphone settings of its own (in Word for Windows or Word Online). Both use the
Click on Dictate in Word Online (in a web browser) and it looks like nothing happens. Don’t worry, you can still speak to Word and it’ll type but the interface has been minimized. Instead of opening a Dictate pull-down list, it’s now a trio of icons at the bottom of
According to Microsoft, there’s only four audio formats accepted by their new Transcribe option to convert audio into a text transcription. That’s not true, there are more formats possible with no conversion necessary. The official list of audio formats for Transcribe is .MP4 .M4A .MP3 and .WAV. Strictly speaking that’s
The Immersive Reader features of modern Word 365 are also available in Microsoft Teams and Word Online (browser based Word) to view documents and messages. Look for the Immersive Reader option on the menu for post threads. It’s also available on the View menu for any Word documents opened in
Microsoft has dumped a lot of news in a single day. As a result there’s a lot of misunderstanding and, sorry to say, misreporting. Journos not accustomed to Microsoft’s PR tricks have fallen for them. We’ll try to ‘unpack’ what’s been announced into what’s happening now, in the known future
Microsoft says we should stop calling the browser-based version of their apps ‘Office Online’. It’s now just ‘Office’. ‘Word Online’ is now just ‘Word’. ‘Excel Online’ is ‘Excel’, ‘PowerPoint Online’ is merely ‘PowerPoint’. Make sense? No, we don’t understand either. Microsoft’s explanation of the name change doesn’t help. According to
Slow, but surely, the online version of Microsoft Office gets better. Word online will never have everything that Word for Windows or Mac does, but it’s becoming more viable for occasional users and as a backup in case your usual software fails. It also adds some interesting features that’s aren’t
Microsoft has really made Office 365 more compelling by raising their online OneDrive storage from 1 Terabyte to Unlimited for Office 365 subscribers. If you have Office 365 Personal, Home, University or Business account, the OneDrive storage limit will be effectively removed entirely. For Home subscribers, shared among several people,
Microsoft has jumped on the iPhone 6 bandwagon with an offer of 30GB to iPhone 6 users who also use OneDrive. As usual for a Microsoft offer, the devil is in the detail. For once, it’s not all bad news for customers. Despite the hype, anyone with the OneDrive app
Dropbox plays ‘catch up’ on OneDrive and Google but still lose the cloud storage lead. And there’s a competitor that might beat them all. Dropbox has announced price decreases / storage increases to match offerings from Microsoft and Google. The lowest level of paid Dropbox is ‘Pro’ for $9.99 a
Microsoft delivers 1,000GB for Office 365 users. As we mentioned last month, Microsoft decided to greatly increase the OneDrive storage available for Office 365 subscribers. The base storage for paid customers is now 1 Terabyte. That change has now been implemented. If you’re an Office 365 subscriber, go to OneDrive
Some great tips on table formatting. Joey Cherdarchuk has a nice posting on a very different table styling to the type that Microsoft prefers. Under the banner ‘Clear Off the Table’ he suggests getting rid of gridlines and colors to simplify the look of tables. In his example, Joey takes a
Updates to Office Mix – a new way to make PowerPoint interactive. A while ago we told you about Office Mix, Microsoft’s way to put a presentation online with quizzes and other interactive elements. Mix has been updated with a wider range of examples via a Public Gallery It’s nice
