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News
Microsoft Windows 10 Anniversary Update
Steve Hirst - Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Microsoft often sends out important updates for their operating system and they’ve recently released the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, packed full of features requested by their customers.
This is an automatic download but if you don’t have it yet and want to manually download it, click here.
This is an automatic download but if you don’t have it yet and want to manually download it, click here.
20 Amazing features in Office 365
Steve Hirst - Tuesday, September 20, 2016
Office 365 is Microsoft's subscription based model for providing their software to users. The service consists of a number of different products and services, and all of Office 365's components can be managed and configured through an online portal.
Use PowerPoint 'Morph' to make the stuff on your slide automatically move
PowerPoint has a new transition called Morph.
Simply duplicate a slide, move stuff around on the second slide and when you play the slideshow, your objects will move from where they are to where you placed them. No animation or programming needed.
Use the 'tell me' box to get help
Tell Me lets you ask Office how to do something using regular language, similar to how you might search in Google.
You can ask it to show you how to 'insert a photo' or 'add pic' or even just type 'picture' and it will help you what you’re looking for.
Do Bing searches from within documents
No need to fire up a browser to look something up on the Web.
Just right click on a word, then click 'Smart lookup' and a Bing search will pop up in a window inside your document.
Find your most important emails with the Focused Inbox
Similar to how Gmail offers its uses 'Priority inbox' where it shows you what it thinks are your 'Important emails,' Outlook offers the 'Focused inbox.'
It looks at how you organise your mail and puts the messages it thinks are most important into a 'Focused' folder, with the others moving into an 'Other' folder.
Use 'ink' on the iPad Pro
With the new iPad Pro, Office apps support 'ink' just like they do on all Windows tablets.
Choices include pens, highlighters, an easy-to-use thickness control, and a new colour wheel. Using the Apple Pencil, you can also draw and mark-up documents.
Try some Outlook add-ins Find them on the Office Store.
Starbucks - With the Starbucks add-in for Outlook, you can send Starbucks e-gifts within Outlook and schedule meetings at nearby Starbucks locations instead of a conference room.
PayPal - Access your PayPal account to send money to others through email with the PayPal add-in for Outlook. This is available for Office 365, but the add-in can also be used by Outlook 2013 users.
Uber - With the Uber Outlook Add-on, you can set up an Uber ride reminder for any calendar event. Once you set up the Uber reminder, it sends it to your phone at the appointed time with the destination already set. Swipe the notification to confirm your Uber ride.
Boomerang - Boomerang will schedule emails to send at a later time, remind you to follow up if you don't get a response and add a calendar assistant that lets you schedule meetings and share your availability right from Outlook.
Delve - If your company is using the Enterprise edition of Office 365 and is storing documents in OneDrive for Business, or Microsoft's onsite app SharePoint, then you have access to Delve.
Delve is a search tool that automatically shows you the popular documents and other important content in your company. You can also use it to see what co-workers are working on by clicking on their names.
Set up a joint project-management planner for your work group
Microsoft just rolled out a new feature called Microsoft Planner to all the folks with an education or business edition of Office 365. It's like a joint to-do list on steroids for a work group.
With Planner, teams can assign and collaborate on tasks, set due dates, update statuses, share files and a dashboard keeps everyone in the loop.
When it becomes available, Planner will appear in the Office 365 app launcher.
Set up a work group for your teammates with Office 365 Groups
By setting up your team as an Office 365 Group, the team gets a shared Outlook inbox, OneDrive for Business folder, and a plan in Office 365 Planner.
If your version of Office supports groups, you can set up the group via the web version of Outlook or through OneDrive for Business.
Add a poll to your online presentation
Microsoft Sway is Microsoft's online presentation software, an alternative to PowerPoint, that makes it easy to add internet photos, videos, material from your computer, or your Microsoft cloud to your presentation
You can also add a live poll to it, with PollEverywhere.com. Create the poll and embed it into Sway.
Use GigJam to share just parts of documents
A new sharing app called GigJam that you download to your phone, let's you temporarily show and share bits and pieces of an Office 365 file with others.
Send a bit of text to one person to review, and a photo to another person.
Have multiple people edit the same document at the same time
Everyone can edit a document at the same time in Word, PowerPoint or Excel.
You can see the changes as they make them and who is doing the editing.
Skype with co-workers while working on a document
If you are collaborating with others on a document and it's stored in OneDrive for Business, you can click a 'Chat' button to chat with everyone working in the document over Skype.
Turn rows of data into a map
For those with business editions of Office 365, Excel includes a feature called the Power Map.
It helps convert rows of data into images. And if that data is geographic in nature, Power Map will put it on a 3D map.
If your version of Excel supports Power Map, you'll find the button under Insert/Map.
Let Excel reformat your data
You know how powerful Excel's Fill Down 'Control -D' command is?
With a feature called 'Flash Fill' Excel sees what you are doing and does the rest of it for you.
For example, say you’re changing the formatting of a list of people's names from being spread across two columns (first name, last name) into a single column. When you type the second reformatted name, Excel displays the whole list, reformatted. Just click to accept it.
This feature isn't brand new (Office 2013 users have it) but it is currently only available for Windows users, not Mac users.
Scan your whiteboard or meeting notes and make them readable
The free Office Lens app for iOS and Android turns your phone's camera into a scanner.
Take a picture of a whiteboard or document and it reads it and puts into Microsoft's note app, OneNote.
Let PowerPoint design your presentation
Drop an image into your presentation and a new feature called PowerPoint Designer will automatically give you choices on the best way to display it. This lets you create a professional presentation faster, with less hassle.
Drop an image into your presentation and a new feature called PowerPoint Designer will automatically give you choices on the best way to display it. This lets you create a professional presentation faster, with less hassle.
Use PowerPoint 'Morph' to make the stuff on your slide automatically move
PowerPoint has a new transition called Morph.
Simply duplicate a slide, move stuff around on the second slide and when you play the slideshow, your objects will move from where they are to where you placed them. No animation or programming needed.
Use the 'tell me' box to get help
Tell Me lets you ask Office how to do something using regular language, similar to how you might search in Google.
You can ask it to show you how to 'insert a photo' or 'add pic' or even just type 'picture' and it will help you what you’re looking for.
Do Bing searches from within documents
No need to fire up a browser to look something up on the Web.
Just right click on a word, then click 'Smart lookup' and a Bing search will pop up in a window inside your document.
Find your most important emails with the Focused Inbox
Similar to how Gmail offers its uses 'Priority inbox' where it shows you what it thinks are your 'Important emails,' Outlook offers the 'Focused inbox.'
It looks at how you organise your mail and puts the messages it thinks are most important into a 'Focused' folder, with the others moving into an 'Other' folder.
Use 'ink' on the iPad Pro
With the new iPad Pro, Office apps support 'ink' just like they do on all Windows tablets.
Choices include pens, highlighters, an easy-to-use thickness control, and a new colour wheel. Using the Apple Pencil, you can also draw and mark-up documents.
Try some Outlook add-ins Find them on the Office Store.
Starbucks - With the Starbucks add-in for Outlook, you can send Starbucks e-gifts within Outlook and schedule meetings at nearby Starbucks locations instead of a conference room.
PayPal - Access your PayPal account to send money to others through email with the PayPal add-in for Outlook. This is available for Office 365, but the add-in can also be used by Outlook 2013 users.
Uber - With the Uber Outlook Add-on, you can set up an Uber ride reminder for any calendar event. Once you set up the Uber reminder, it sends it to your phone at the appointed time with the destination already set. Swipe the notification to confirm your Uber ride.
Boomerang - Boomerang will schedule emails to send at a later time, remind you to follow up if you don't get a response and add a calendar assistant that lets you schedule meetings and share your availability right from Outlook.
Delve - If your company is using the Enterprise edition of Office 365 and is storing documents in OneDrive for Business, or Microsoft's onsite app SharePoint, then you have access to Delve.
Delve is a search tool that automatically shows you the popular documents and other important content in your company. You can also use it to see what co-workers are working on by clicking on their names.
Set up a joint project-management planner for your work group
Microsoft just rolled out a new feature called Microsoft Planner to all the folks with an education or business edition of Office 365. It's like a joint to-do list on steroids for a work group.
With Planner, teams can assign and collaborate on tasks, set due dates, update statuses, share files and a dashboard keeps everyone in the loop.
When it becomes available, Planner will appear in the Office 365 app launcher.
Set up a work group for your teammates with Office 365 Groups
By setting up your team as an Office 365 Group, the team gets a shared Outlook inbox, OneDrive for Business folder, and a plan in Office 365 Planner.
If your version of Office supports groups, you can set up the group via the web version of Outlook or through OneDrive for Business.
Add a poll to your online presentation
Microsoft Sway is Microsoft's online presentation software, an alternative to PowerPoint, that makes it easy to add internet photos, videos, material from your computer, or your Microsoft cloud to your presentation
You can also add a live poll to it, with PollEverywhere.com. Create the poll and embed it into Sway.
Use GigJam to share just parts of documents
A new sharing app called GigJam that you download to your phone, let's you temporarily show and share bits and pieces of an Office 365 file with others.
Send a bit of text to one person to review, and a photo to another person.
Have multiple people edit the same document at the same time
Everyone can edit a document at the same time in Word, PowerPoint or Excel.
You can see the changes as they make them and who is doing the editing.
Skype with co-workers while working on a document
If you are collaborating with others on a document and it's stored in OneDrive for Business, you can click a 'Chat' button to chat with everyone working in the document over Skype.
Turn rows of data into a map
For those with business editions of Office 365, Excel includes a feature called the Power Map.
It helps convert rows of data into images. And if that data is geographic in nature, Power Map will put it on a 3D map.
If your version of Excel supports Power Map, you'll find the button under Insert/Map.
Let Excel reformat your data
You know how powerful Excel's Fill Down 'Control -D' command is?
With a feature called 'Flash Fill' Excel sees what you are doing and does the rest of it for you.
For example, say you’re changing the formatting of a list of people's names from being spread across two columns (first name, last name) into a single column. When you type the second reformatted name, Excel displays the whole list, reformatted. Just click to accept it.
This feature isn't brand new (Office 2013 users have it) but it is currently only available for Windows users, not Mac users.
Scan your whiteboard or meeting notes and make them readable
The free Office Lens app for iOS and Android turns your phone's camera into a scanner.
Take a picture of a whiteboard or document and it reads it and puts into Microsoft's note app, OneNote.
Windows 10 Anniversary Update
Steve Hirst - Friday, August 19, 2016
Microsoft have just released the Windows 10 Anniversary Update.This update is being rolled out progressively so it may be a week or two before it is available on your device.
There are a lot of new features including being able to log into apps using face recognition.
Click here to learn more.
Just a note of caution. Plan when you are going to run this update as your device will be unavailable for at least an hour while the upgrade is installed.
Just a note of caution. Plan when you are going to run this update as your device will be unavailable for at least an hour while the upgrade is installed.
Ransomware - heading your way in macro enabled Word documents
Steve Hirst - Thursday, July 21, 2016
Recently we heard about a file containing a malicious macro (this is a small program, that once run expands into something larger) that Microsoft have flagged under a family of Trojan viruses that have been targeting MS Office software for several years.The problem was, there wasn’t an immediate, obvious identification that this file was actually malicious. It’s a Word file that contains seven VBA (Visual Basic for Applications – the programming language used within Office to develop Macros) modules and a VBA user form with a few buttons.
These modules appeared to be legitimate programs powered with a macro; no malicious code found there … However, after further investigation Microsoft noticed some anomalies within the macro. These anomalies cause the macro to connect to a URL and download a Locky ransomware payload.
This means the Locky virus will be downloaded to your PC if macros are enabled when opening the Word file in question.
We strongly suggest that to help prevent Office-targeting macro-based malware from infecting your system, you only enable macros if you wrote the macro yourself, or completely trust and know the person who wrote it.
As always, if you’re unsure about your system’s susceptibility to these attacks, or you would like some assistance preventing or dealing with this, please give us a call.
Free Windows 10 upgrade ends soon
Steve Hirst - Monday, May 23, 2016
The free Windows 10 upgrade expires 29 July 2016.
Microsoft’s Statement:
“We are excited to offer a free upgrade to Windows 10 for qualified new or existing Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices that upgrade in the first year. Once a Windows device is upgraded to Windows 10, we will continue to keep it current via Windows Update for the supported lifetime of the device – at no cost.”
Please call us if you have any concerns relating to upgrading or would like us to assist you with the upgrade.
Important MYOB News
Steve Hirst - Monday, May 23, 2016
MYOB have released new information stating they will be ending support on MYOB products still running on technologies, such as Windows 7, that Microsoft has ended mainstream support for.
It’s important to consider upgrading, as running outdated software no longer covered by mainstream support introduces an element of risk into your business. When Microsoft ceases mainstream support for a product, it ceases to fix anything other than security issues.
By continuing to use old technologies you also limit yourself to old programming and components up to a static point in time. In other words, using software that has been on the market for approximately six years means you aren’t able to take advantage of the improvements made in that time.
Considering your IT plays a large part in the operating effectiveness of your business, updating your technology to get the latest features makes good business sense.
If you have any of the following applications in your business practice, you’ll find that MYOB will only be providing limited support for any of their software packages being used in conjunction with them.
- Windows 7 (all versions)
- Microsoft Office 2010 (all versions)
- Windows Server 2008 (all versions), including SBS 2011 (which is built on Server 2008 R2)
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, excluding MYOB AO clients with SQL 2008 R2 Express
You’ll need to look into making a plan for change however, as MYOB won’t be providing support beyond the 31st December 2016. This gives MYOB users some time to upgrade their IT infrastructure if required.
Feel free to talk to one of our friendly sales team to create a plan of action and ensure you’ll be operating on MYOB supported technologies in 2017 and beyond.
Important Changes to OneDrive
Steve Hirst - Friday, April 22, 2016
We wish to inform you about some upcoming changes to Microsoft’s OneDrive that may affect our customers. The amount of storage that comes with the free version of OneDrive will decrease from 15GB to 5GB. Microsoft is also discontinuing the 15GB camera roll bonus. These changes take effect on 13 July 2016.
We strongly recommend that users delete data and photos to ensure that they are under the new limit before this date. To ease this transition, users can claim a free one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal. This subscription includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Alternatively, additional storage can be purchased.
Please call us before July to discuss your cloud storage options.
We strongly recommend that users delete data and photos to ensure that they are under the new limit before this date. To ease this transition, users can claim a free one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal. This subscription includes 1 TB of OneDrive storage. Alternatively, additional storage can be purchased.
Please call us before July to discuss your cloud storage options.
Automatic Windows 10 Upgrade
Steve Hirst - Friday, April 22, 2016
It appears that some users are getting Windows 10 installed automatically if they had reserved their copy of Windows 10 previously. If they didn’t reserve Windows 10 it will not be installed automatically.
The upgrade is now a “Recommended” update, so if you reserved it you should get a pop up like this one:
It will tell you that a time has been scheduled for the upgrade to happen. If you click the link to change the upgrade schedule, you can re-schedule or cancel the install, otherwise it will go ahead and install at the time it says.
If you don’t like or don’t want Windows 10 you have 31 days to roll back to the previous version of windows which is fairly painful painless.
Windows 10 for Smartphones
Steve Hirst - Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Windows 10 Mobile has now been released after months of waiting. The OS is available to selected Windows Phone 8.1 devices, including the Lumia 1520, 930, 640, 640XL, 730, 735, 830, 532, 535, 540, 635 1GB, 636 1GB, 638 1GB, 430, 435, BLU Win HD w510u, BLU Win HD LTE x150q, and the MCJ Madosma Q501.Here is the procedure to upgrade your phone if your device supports the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade. If you are not confident about carrying out the upgrade yourself, or would like some advice please call our helpdesk.
1) Get Update Advisor
To check if the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade is available for your phone, you firstly need to install an app called Update Advisor app from the Windows Store on your Windows Phone 8.1 device, which you can download from here
2) Enable Windows 10 upgrade
Once you have downloaded and installed the Update Advisor, you need to open it by heading over to the All Apps list on your Windows Phone 8.1 device. After opening up the app, click on “Next” and let the app check for updates. If the app says that the Windows 10 upgrade is available, tick the Enable Windows 10 upgrade checkbox and tap on “Next”. Once the app tells you that your phone is “Ready to upgrade”, tap on “Done”
3) Get the update
After following the above two steps, you should now be able to get the Windows 10 Mobile update. To get it, open up the Settings app on your Windows Phone, scroll down and open “Phone Update” and check for updates to download the OS. Once the OS is ready to install, you will get a simple notification and be able to install the OS.
Surface Pro Power Cord Recall
Steve Hirst - Wednesday, February 24, 2016
Microsoft will be allowing Surface Pro users who bought earlier models of the company's tablet to exchange power cables for free due to possible overheating issues.This recall affects the following models: Microsoft Surface Pro, Microsoft Surface Pro 2, and Microsoft Surface Pro 3 devices sold before 15 July 2015.
Over an extended period of time, damage could result if the AC power cords is wound too tightly, twisted or pinched.
Microsoft will provide one AC power cord replacement free of charge for each eligible Surface Pro device that you own. No proof of damage is required to receive a replacement AC power cord.
Click here to get your free replacement.
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