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
Email services for Office 365 and Exchange Online should now be resumed but Microsoft handled it really badly. In Microsoft’s world, damage to sales is far worse than any failure to meet customers service needs. So on that score, Microsoft has done well for itself in the last day or
The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The competition among cloud storage providers continues with Box improving their Android app. The new Android app for Box includes ‘lightning fast’ document viewing including for Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as PDF and images. Specifically
Group calling returns to the Skype ‘free’ list. Good news for Skype lovers, group calling has returned to the list of free features. You can now add group calling to our list of Skype hidden extras Group calling is having three or more people on the same video/audio call. Microsoft
Court confirms that any US controlled cloud server is vulnerable to US government access. Here’s a story that got little coverage but deserves a lot more. A US district court has confirmed what has been known for the last decade, that US companies have to supply data to the US
OneDrive for Business customers get a 4,000% increase. Microsoft continues to push their cloud services with a big jump in available storage in OneDrive for Business from a default of 25GB to 1 Terabyte. It’s a whopping increase intended to put pressure on Google, Dropbox, Box etc to compete or
We asked Microsoft eight simple questions and got one response. To accompany our story about OneDrive for Business changing documents and files without notice or trace we asked Microsoft for answers to some questions. Alas the reply came too late for the Office Watch newsletter but here it is, in
Without a clear reason, Microsoft has started blocking paid OneDrive accounts. MyCE.com is reporting a disturbing new trend from Microsoft … locking customers out of their OneDrive accounts without notice or clear reason. According to the report, customers may get a message like this when they login to OneDrive Your
Why does OneDrive for Business change the Office documents and files you upload? MyCE.com has a worrying report on OneDrive for Business which appears to change the uploaded files. Microsoft seems to be adding information to customers uploaded files. We can’t find anywhere that discloses that and the reasons for
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