Articles about Microsoft Office

Microsoft may not have a strong presence in the smartphone market as a vendor, but the software giant is trying to make a splash in a different way, by partnering with other players to make its mobile apps available on as many devices as possible. And it stands a very good chance of making serious inroads.

Microsoft has so far teamed up with 74 companies, in 25 countries, to ship its apps on their Android smartphones and tablets. The latest major player to partner with Microsoft is Acer, which will preload some of the software giant's most-prominent Android apps.

Continue reading →

Cloud storage is everywhere these days, with many big players in the game. Despite that Microsoft runs its own service, OneDrive, which fully integrates with Office, that doesn't mean the company isn't open to allowing its customers to use a service of their choosing.

One of those options is Box, which has worked with Office for some time, but now the two pals are getting a bit closer by expanding the integration.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has decided to let Mac users participate in its Office Insider program. It gives users running the popular suite on an Apple computer the opportunity to test new features earlier than the general public.

Windows and Android users have been able to be a part of the Office Insider program for some time now, and Mac users are finally getting their chance to try it out.

Continue reading →

Businesses are increasingly keen to unlock the insights contained within their data. But the tools to do this are often expensive and complex, putting them beyond the reach of smaller organizations.

Analytics specialist BeyondCore has announced a collaboration with Microsoft to make its data discovery solution available to Office users for free.

Continue reading →

Excel was born in 1985, and the business world has never been the same. This fall, the program celebrated its 30th birthday, giving spreadsheet users everywhere the chance to reflect on its success, its drawbacks, and its importance in the corporate marketplace. Rather than allowing this major milestone to pass us by, businesses should use the remainder of 2015 as an opportunity to consider their ongoing relationship with Excel.

Microsoft’s dominant spreadsheet software has claimed an unparalleled share of the corporate market, which is an outstanding achievement in itself. However, even though many businesses feel like they can’t live without it, some larger organizations have realized that they can’t live with it particularly well either.

Continue reading →

With the roll out of Microsoft Office 2016, enterprises and workforces will be put under intense pressure to not only consider migrating to Microsoft Office 2016 but to manage and effectively sync the software with existing systems and programs, with no perceived system downtime.

The new software offers a variety of productivity development tools that will appeal to enterprises and their workforce. However the need and urgency to deploy such software must be evaluated thoroughly by CIO’s or key decision makers in comparison to the existing IT infrastructure; in order for it to succeed and not cause any level of threat to current workforce productivity.

Continue reading →

With Windows 10, Microsoft's Windows Insider program proved immensely popular. The chance to try out new features ahead of an official launch gave millions of people an insight into the development process and provided an opportunity to give feedback and influence the future of the operating system.

Today Microsoft is giving Office the same treatment. With the launch of the Office Insider program, Office 365 subscribers are being given the chance to try out upcoming releases of Office 2016.

Continue reading →

Hit File > Open in any modern edition of Microsoft Office and all your OneDrive cloud files are just a couple of clicks away.

That’s less than helpful if you keep your files on Google Drive, of course, but fortunately there’s a simple solution.

Continue reading →

What’s the next step after an operating system upgrade on a Mac or PC? To see if you can work with your existing applications. When moving to OS X El Capitan and Windows 10 I got off to a rough start, which left me frustrated.

Let’s address the El Capitan problems first. Did the upgrade install? Yes! Was I able to work? Nope.

Continue reading →

Microsoft is promoting Skype more than ever before. Not content with desktop and mobile apps, now the company is bringing the voice and video messaging tool to its office suite. Starting with Office Online integration Skype messaging is now available in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote Online, as well as Outlook.com.

This is a continuation of Microsoft's increased focus on the cloud, and a recognition of the importance of communication for collaborative projects. There are times when simply being able to work on the same document with colleagues is not going to be enough, and this is where Skype integration comes into play.

Continue reading →

Microsoft has just released its Q1 FY2016 (Q3 CY2015) earnings report, posting revenue of $20.4 billion, operating income of $5.8 billion, net income of $4.6 billion and earnings per share of $0.57 (all GAAP figures). The software giant's numbers beat analysts' expectations, which has added around 10 percent to its stock price in after-hours trading. Here are the highlights of the software giant's quarter.

Microsoft has divided its earnings in three categories, namely Productivity and Business Processes, Intelligent Cloud, and More Personal Computing. The good news comes from Intelligent Cloud, where revenue is up by eight percent, while the bad news is in More Personal Computing, where the poor performance of Lumia and Surface devices lead to a 17 percent decrease in revenue, year-over-year.

Continue reading →

Call it the "curse of runaway success". Over the past 20+ years, Microsoft's Office suite has grown from a laughable also-ran in a market dominated by Lotus 123 and WordPerfect to become the dominant productivity platform for both personal and professional computing. Along the way, it has picked up a plethora of sophisticated features and obscure developer plumbing that makes it one of the most complex code bases ever deployed on a PC -- second, perhaps, only to the Microsoft Windows operating system upon which it runs.

No question, the Office of today is an incredibly intricate bit of software. So when casual users, like the Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey A. Fowler, call on Microsoft to "reboot office" -- ostensibly to make it easier to use in a particular workflow context (e.g. collaboration) -- they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of just what Office is and how difficult it would be to make any wholesale changes to the product.

Continue reading →

I make my living with words. I type, I edit, I revise -- it’s been the rhythm of my life for nearly three decades. So when my primary tool of the trade (Microsoft Office) sneezes, my whole world catches the flu.

Case in point: Windows 10 "Insider" build 10547. After updating to this, the most current build of post-RTM Windows 10, I started noticing a new and potentially catastrophic (for me, at least) behavior. Whenever I tried to save a document in Microsoft Word, the application would hang. Any subsequent attempts to load the program and resume working were blocked by the fact that that previous crash had somehow left the document file in question locked by the file system.

Continue reading →

Microsoft Excel has been around for 30 years, it’s one of the most popular programs in the world and it’s likely that most of us at some point or other have used spreadsheets at work.

Recent reports show that, 78 percent of middle-skill jobs require digital literacy and 67 percent of office roles require expertise in Microsoft Excel. So sharpening up your Excel skills really can help improve pay and job prospects.

Continue reading →

After testing its productivity suite for more than four months and pushing seven updates to it, Microsoft today announces that it is releasing Office 2016 for Mac users. Available in 139 countries and in 16 languages, the productivity suite is now ready for Office 365 subscribers to snag. Those who want a standalone version of it will have to wait till September, however.

In its latest version of Office, the company is betting on the cloud power and integration. It says that with Office 2016, users will be able to access their documents "anytime, anywhere, and on any device". Office 2016 integrates with a number of popular services including Office 365, of course, as well as OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint.

Continue reading →