Microsoft Office

As I noted in a tweet yesterday, Microsoft's Office unit has scheduled an event for Tuesday in San Francisco. But folks hoping that the company is ready to move its productivity software to the iPad may be disappointed.

Instead, I'm hearing that the event will likely be focused on Microsoft's hosted online services, which today center around the awkwardly named Business Productivity Online Suite, a bundle of hosted Exchange and SharePoint. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley says the next version is in testing and may also be getting a less cumbersome name--possibly the moniker "Union." (… Read more

Those of you still running the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010 have only three more weeks to use the software.

Today's Microsoft Office blog broke the news that the Office 2010 beta will expire on Sunday, October 31, meaning that all installations of the software will stop working the night of Halloween.

Launched almost a year ago, the Office 2010 beta has proved very successful, according to Microsoft's figures, triggering 9 million downloads, more than six times the number seen by the Office 2007 beta.

People who want to install the released version of Office 2010 will … Read more

Microsoft Word's AutoText feature got a serious face-lift with the debut of Building Blocks in Word 2007 and 2010. (The Microsoft Office Support site offers a basic primer on creating and using Word 2003's AutoText feature.)

In a nutshell, you create AutoText entries by selecting the material you want to reuse and clicking Insert > AutoText > New (or simply press Alt-F3). You then enter a name for the entry that's between 4 and 32 characters long and press Enter. This adds the entry to the Normal.dot template and makes it available to all documents. To … Read more

A Microsoft job posting suggests that Office is the latest of Redmond's products that will get its own app store.

Already there are marketplaces for Zune, Xbox, and Windows Mobile. Windows Phone 7 will have one and Microsoft is adding one to its CRM product. A leaked planning document suggests that Windows 8 may get one. Now a job posting for a product manager suggests that Office, too, may get an app store.

"As we launch Office 2010, we are beginning the process of planning for Office 15 and are looking for a product manager to drive Office … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Microsoft is tired of seeing Salesforce.com get all the headlines by dishing out a combination of pithy quotes and branded chocolates to the technology press.

Although Redmond has no plans to one-up Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff in the candy distribution business, it is starting to speak out more strongly.

"I think Marc and Salesforce have done a good job of getting out there and telling their vision, their story," Corporate Vice President Michael Park told CNET in an interview this week. "I think we have an opportunity to do better."

Of course, Salesforce.… Read more

Although officially only two months old, Microsoft's Office Web Apps is already growing up a bit.

To satisfy just some of the many user requests for new features, Microsoft this week updated its online version of Office with enhancements to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

One of the most requested features, according to a company blog post, was the ability to print from the Word editor. Previously, you could only print from the Word viewer. Clicking on the File menu in the Word Web App editor now displays a Print command that lets you send a document to your local … Read more

Microsoft said Wednesday the next version of Office for Mac will get two key features that were part of the latest Windows version: photo editing and mini charts in Excel, known as Sparklines.

In a video posted on its Office for Mac Web site, the company showed how the two features will work. Sparklines are tiny charts that fit in a single cell and allow one to see the trend in individual data points.

As for the photo editing, Microsoft said Office for Mac will allow such things as color correction or background removal from within the new versions of … Read more

Adrian Mercado credits Mr. Gates at Microsoft with turning around his life.

No, it's not Bill Gates--although Microsoft Office did play a starring role in Mercado's transformation from wayward youth to motivated future worker. Rather, it is Kevin Gates--a dreadlocked, African American Microsoft employee, who Mercado said really inspired him.

Mercado, 17, was one of more than 50 teenagers and young adults who competed this week in a global competition to determine the world's most proficient users of Excel and Word.

More than 115,000 people--mostly students--entered the Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office, with the best of … Read more

Microsoft will issue 14 security bulletins on Tuesday to plug 34 holes, including eight that are critical, in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, SQL and Silverlight, the company said on Thursday.

"This will be the most bulletins we have ever released in a month; we have released 13 bulletins on a couple of occasions," Angela Gunn, security response communications manager at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. "However, in total CVE [common vulnerabilities and exposures] count, this release ties with June 2010, so there's no new record there."

Affected software includes: Windows 7; Windows XP; Vista; … Read more