Articles about Microsoft

Knowing your way around Microsoft Office requires you to be part mathematician, part storyteller, and part graphic designer -- with some scheduling wizard and database architect sprinkled in. So what do you do if these talents don't come naturally to you? 

Fear not! Office 2019 All-in-One For Dummies fills in the gaps and helps you create easy-to-read Word documents, smash numbers in Excel, tell your tale with PowerPoint, and keep it all organized with Outlook. With additional books covering Access, OneNote, and common Office tasks, this is the only Office book you need on your shelf.

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Anyone who has invested in Windows 10 LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel) has had the comfort of knowing that Microsoft offered 10 years of support. But this is changing.

The company has announced that the support period for Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC is being halved to just five years, bringing the operating system in line with the recently announced changes to Office support. However, support for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC will remain at 10 years.

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Earlier in the week, Microsoft officially announced the first Windows 10 feature update of the year -- 21H1 -- and made it available for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel to test.

Today, the software giant releases Windows 10 Build 21318 (RS_PRERELEASE) to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel (it’s also available for ARM64 devices).

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Although Microsoft is expected to begin giving Windows 10 a bit of a long-overdue redesign later in the year, the truth is that operating system has become a bit, well, boring. The last feature update, and the next one due out in he coming months (21H1), have made only minor tweaks to the OS.

Isn’t it time for a full, proper new version of Windows? Isn’t it time for Windows 11?

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Four-hundred-twenty-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store in the past seven days.

Microsoft announced Office 2021, a non-subscription based version of Office. In other news, the next feature update for Windows 10 is ready for testing. It will be a smaller update similar to Windows 10 20H2.

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Microsoft Office is the best software in the world. If I was running a company, I would choose it over any other solution. While free alternatives like LibreOffice are pretty good, they are all inferior to Microsoft's class-leading office suite. Any spreadsheet power user, for instance, knows nothing compares to Excel. These are indisputable facts.

Today, Microsoft announces that Office 2021 is coming to both Windows 10 and macOS later in the year. And yet, I am not excited about that, nor would I recommend anyone buy it. Why? Because Microsoft 365 exists.

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The death of Flash has been on the cards for quite some time. What was once a staple of the online experience soon became little more than a security nightmare, and all of the major web browsers have slowly but surely dropped support for the software. Back in October, Microsoft released an update to not only remove Flash from Windows, but also prevent it from being reinstalled.

Now the company is upping the ante, and is pushing out the KB4577586 update to Windows users. The update is installed automatically and kills Flash once and for all.

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The next feature update for Windows 10, 21H1, is rumored to be set to arrive later than usual this year, with reports claiming we could expect it as late as June.

Microsoft hasn’t said exactly when we’ll get it, but in a new post announcing the feature update it reveals it will be in the first half of the calendar year. More excitingly however, it’s making it available to "seekers" in the Beta Channel to test from now.

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Windows 10 users are keenly awaiting the release of the next big update to the operating system. Due for release in the next four months -- in June if a recent leak is correct -- Windows 10 21H1 is not a major release, and this has important implications.

The fear with milestone releases to Windows 10 is that hardware requirements change. But ahead of the release of Windows 10 21H1, Microsoft has made it clear that this will not be the case with this update.

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Some Windows 10 users who have installed the KB4535680 update from last month are experiencing problems with BitLocker.

The update was released on January 12 to fix issues with Secure Boot DBX, but some users are complaining that the patch is triggering BitLocker recovery. For people using BitLocker on just one computer, this may not be too much of an issue, but for administrators taking care of lots of systems it is rather more problematic.

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A cumulative update for Windows 10 is making another appearance as Microsoft prepares users' systems for more significant service updates further down the line.

This is far from being the first time Microsoft has pushed the KB4023057 update, and it's not hard to understand why. This update improves the reliability of the Windows Update Service components which will prove so essential when a bigger feature update is released later in the year.

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Just days after the regular update release date of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released an out-of-band patch to address a problem with WPA3 connections in Windows 10.

The KB5001028 update is for Windows 10 version 1909, and it fixes a problem that caused blue screens and stop error 0x7E in nwifi.sys when using a WPA3 connection. Microsoft says that the problems arose after users installed the KB4598298 or KB4601315 updates.

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It’s been a while since Microsoft last released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build to the Dev Channel, and with the weekend looming you’d be forgiven for thinking there might be an even longer wait ahead.

Today, however, the software giant rolls out Build 21313 and it’s worth the wait.

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If you’re not familiar, Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is an open source C development environment from Microsoft. It is available for Windows, macOS and x64 Linux, and now you can run it on Raspberry Pi too.

The tool supports text editing, full web development (with JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js) and git source code control. It supports extensions too (although not all of them), so you can further expand its capabilities.

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Whenever Microsoft releases updates for Windows, the company is always keen for as many people as possible to get the patch installed. But with this month's Patch Tuesday bug fixes, the company is encouraging Windows users even more than usual.

Referring to two Critical security issues and one Important one, all affecting TCP/IP, Microsoft says that "it is essential that customers apply Windows updates to address these vulnerabilities as soon as possible". The CVE-2021-24074, CVE-2021-24086 and CVE-2021-24094 vulnerabilities affect Windows 7 upwards.

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