Office Blogs

A feature from OneNote I love and nobody knows about because of poor marketing is the "[email protected]" [1]. You send an email to it, it creates a note where Email subject = Note title, and email content = the note text I linked my gmail account to it (it doesn't require to sync email between the gmail and the outlook account) and I email "[email protected]" all the time. If you just put a URL in the subject of your email, OneNote will create a note with the HTML page extracted (so it's fully searchable) as well as a screenshot of the page! [1] https://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/email-your-notes-into-onenote-with…

Looks like the non-tablet iPhone/Android phone versions of Office Mobile have gone free to use as well, forgoing the previous requirement of an active Office 365 subscription: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/27/announcing-the-office-you-love-now-…

Well, considering their general attitude towards IMAP (and other EAS rivals such as CalDAV and CardDAV), I certainly wouldn't hold my breath. Just see this blog post for an idea: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2012/12/17/outlook… Edit: Can it really be true that there's no auto-discovery mechanism that works with IMAP and *DAV?

biased opinion here, i helped build Excel 2013. We did a lot of investments in making it easier to work with your data. Off the top of my head here are some of the top things we did: Flash fill : Automatically detects what you are trying to fill/parse and does it for you. Suggest Pivottables: Select a range and ask excel to aqutomatically create a Pivot for you. -Suggest charts: Excel suggest what type of charts work best with selected data. Data model - Although you need Pro Plus to use powerpivot and powerview, basic functionality that "converts excel into a database" is built in. You can combine data from multiple sources and create relationships between data. Apps for Office : A new way of programming against the productivity suite in javascript and html5 Chart enhancements: creating beautiful charts is easier and the options are more accesible. A lot of this information is on our blog: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/ Twitter account: @MSEXCEL and if your particularly inclined to data analysis and business intelligence I blast cool features and how tos on my personal account: @doppenhe

I use native Outlook on my Mac for work, connected to an Office 365 mailbox, and whenever I change my password, native Outlook pops up a little webview (instead of native username/password widgets) with our ADFS SAML flow [0]. We use Duo Security as our MFA solution on another SAML IdP we have (not ADFS, but Shibboleth), and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work within that Outlook webview in the event that we hooked it all up [1]. We also use some native Android/iOS apps (vendor apps, not in-house) where users log in with SAML, and thus could use Duo MFA. TL;DR: web-based authentication is not just for full-fledged browsers that users type URLs into. [0] https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2015/11/19/updated-office-365-modern-au… [1] https://duo.com/docs/adfs-30

btw : wunderlist will be shutdown by Microsoft https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-… in the "What'nest part"

I wonder how many of the investors didn't read the latest Microsoft blog before tipping in their funds. Sure Word isn't a web browser, but it's install base is massive and it is still very relevant, even if it isn't web-based or written by a bunch of hipsters. And I suspect (although don't know) that word online also got this functionality, or will at some stage in the future. My bet, this is $110m up in flames in a few years' time. https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/26/the-evolution-of-office-apps-new-i…

If any other news site would submit this article it would be marked as "blog spam" and replaced with the original announcement, which is here: https://blogs.office.com/2017/04/19/introducing-microsoft-to-do-now-av…

Well I tried inbox by google for a while and must admit i preferred it over normal gmail. But recently I switched back to Mac own mail app and am very happy. i do plan on giving ms outlook for mac a try sometime though after reading this: https://blogs.office.com/2017/03/01/outlook-2016-for-mac-adds-support-…

OneDrive used to have "placeholder files" (online-only, downloaded on demand), but it was removed due to poor UX. https://blogs.office.com/2015/01/07/taking-the-next-step-in-sync-for-o… Sounds like the feature could be coming back to Win10 relatively soon: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3124429/data-center-cloud/onedrives-fil…

Written by a Slack and Microsoft competitor. Teams is still in preview, and the developer platform w/ 3rd party integrations hasn't even launched. https://blogs.office.com/2016/11/02/introducing-microsoft-teams-the-ch… Q. When will Microsoft Teams roll out broadly to all eligible Office 365 customers? A. Microsoft Teams is available in preview to eligible Office 365 commercial customers beginning November 2, 2016. We expect the service to become generally available in the first quarter of calendar year 2017.

the new client syncs sharepoint document libraries fine. the only reoccuring problem i have right now is with excel files locking (for 10m??) after editing. https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-preview-hea…

Why would you want to use a cloud storage service that has blatantly lied to their customers? https://blogs.office.com/2015/11/02/onedrive_changes/

They have Office 365 Video for folks on that platform: https://blogs.office.com/2016/07/18/what-microsoft-stream-means-to-off…

This looks very much like the REST API that MS released back in 2011 for the SharePoint hosted Excel Services [1]. Obviously that configuration required a SharePoint deployment on your own server. It looks like this new offering [2] [3] simply makes that functionality available on the MS Cloud for .xls[x] that are stored on OneDrive. IIRC the 2011 SharePoint Excel Services didn't support VBA or addins which are often critical for the heaviest spreadsheets that are most in need of serverization. I can't find any mention of addins or VBA in the docs for this new REST API, so I'm guessing those aren't supported. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/ee556413.aspx [2] https://blogs.office.com/2016/08/03/announcing-the-general-availabilit… [3] https://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs/api-reference/v1.0/resources/exc…

In case anyone else was confused, Fabric is also the name of the CSS framework from Microsoft for developing Office 365 add-ins. https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-fabric-your-…

Tell Me is part of Office 2016 desktop edition [1] It has been part of Office 365 since 2014 [2]: Available now, an easier, faster and more convenient way of doing things in Word – Tell Me. Tell Me understands what you’re trying to accomplish and helps you do it faster. So if I’m trying to make my document horizontal, Tell Me knows it’s the orientation feature I’m looking for. It brings everything I need to my fingertips. [1] https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/22/thenewoffice/ [2] https://blogs.office.com/2014/01/22/new-year-more-goodness-tell-me-foo…

I wonder if this has anything to do with their inclusion of Skype call support directly in Edge. http://www.digitaltrends.com/?p=836715 http://www.pcworld.com/article/2984806/web-apps/microsofts-edge-browse… http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/19/skype-for-web-will-soon-work-withou… https://blogs.office.com/2015/09/18/enabling-seamless-communication-ex…

I think all the front-end frameworks are pretty similar, but if you are building Office add-ins, or some other application that lives in that ecosystem, then there is value in adhering to consistent UI elements. I think there may be additional insights on their announcement post: https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/31/introducing-office-ui-fabric-your-…

Bing won't go away. Search is more than 'searching for a term in a browser', it can and should be integrated deeply into the OS (well, at least a consumer OS) and other software products. Bing will be -- and to some extent, is -- the basis of information lookup in Microsoft products. A first, simple example of this is the 'Insights' menu in Office Online (see http://blogs.office.com/2014/12/10/whats-new-office-online/). Microsoft cannot possibly risk relying on Google in these cases as Google could break the functionality of core Microsoft products in a second.

I wouldn't really say it's a significant announcement. It takes up about two sentences at the end of Microsoft's announcement of new Office Online features: http://blogs.office.com/2014/04/14/more-office-online-commenting-print…

Some comments here refer the potencially high cost of the membership for Office 365. It seems like there will be a new plan for $7/m ($70/y) supporting 2 devices[1]. Like the previous plan, it also seems to include 1h of Skype calls. [1] http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/13/announcing-office-365-personal-a-ne…

Also new, Livescribe integration: http://www.livescribe.com/en-us/landingpage/ls3_onenote. Apparently MS has been working with hardware partners to build more compatible apps and devices: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-everywhere-…

"especially wrt collaborative editing" - The office web apps got real time collaborative editing a couple of months ago [1]. I've used it and it works quite well. [1] http://blogs.office.com/b/office365tech/archive/2013/11/06/collaborati…

Outlook.com now supports IMAP http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-outlook/archive/2013/09/12/outlook… as posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6375770

Office365 is also FISMA accredited no? http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft_office_365_blog/archive/2012/05/03…

BTW, there's also an Office web viewer, which doesn't seem to require signing up for SkyDrive. http://blogs.office.com/b/officewebapps/archive/2013/04/10/office-web-…

I'm reminded of a similar situation involving treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and TurboTax. He initially blamed the software for underpayment of tax (or at least he said he used turbotax) and later admitted that he fudged the numbers. Excel is sometimes the culprit (Excel 97 bug: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-excel/archive/2007/09/25/calculati… ), but usually manual error is to blame.

Here's a list of the differences: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/09/13/building-offi… The main thing missing from OneNote is audio/video recording and searching, though you can insert audio/video files from elsewhere.

It's all documented here: http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/09/13/building-offi…