by Terrence O'Brien on November 22, 2010 at 05:37 PM

Rather than continue to try and kick down the front door of Microsoft Office, Google is sneaking around the back. Google Cloud Connect is an Office add-on that syncs all your Office docs for easy viewing and sharing online. It even brings real-time collaboration and revision control to Office 2003, 2007 and 2010. You can sign up for early access here. ...
by Terrence O'Brien on October 19, 2010 at 02:45 PM

Ever since Google started cramping Microsoft's style by offering its top-notch suite of communications and productivity apps to schools and businesses, the boys and girls at Redmond have been working overtime to modernize their approach to the Office suite. The company is increasingly shifting its focus to sharing, collaborating and the cloud. The next step in Microsoft's move from software to ...
by Lee Bains on August 12, 2010 at 09:10 AM

This week, Microsoft hosted the final rounds of the Worldwide Competition on Microsoft Office, during which 50-odd young people gathered in Park City, Utah, and competed to prove which four were the most proficient in Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007, and Microsoft Excel 2003 and 2007, respectively. Those few dozen showed themselves to be the best of the best among a pool of 115,000 entrants. As part ...
by Terrence O'Brien on July 13, 2010 at 02:15 PM

In February, Microsoft announced that its Outlook Social Connect plug-in would be integrating the world's most popular social networks into the office standard e-mail client. When it launched in February, only LinkedIn was compatible with the tool, but today Microsoft has released its Facebook add-on, which will identify the people listed in your Outlook contacts, and compile their info from ...
by Terrence O'Brien on June 16, 2010 at 08:40 AM

Before Microsoft Office 2010 even had a chance to hit shelves Tuesday, online retailers were already slashing prices on the suite. Amazon and Newegg lead the way by cutting the 'Home and Student' edition, which retails for $149.99, to $129.99. Amazon, in turn, marked down the 'Home and Business' and the 'Professional' versions by $40, offering them for $239.99 and $459.99, respectively.
...
by Amar Toor on May 13, 2010 at 09:55 AM

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Although Gmail has only been around since 2004, it's gathered enough steam in recent years to come within arm's length of Hotmail as the world's top e-mail service. With Google hot on its trail, then, Microsoft has decided to unveil a new version of its mail provider, and, according to early reports, it's aiming straight for Gmail's jugular.
On Wednesday, Microsoft revealed its response ...
by Terrence O'Brien on April 13, 2010 at 06:30 AM

Google is gearing up for a war with Microsoft. We all know that later this year the Office product standard bearers will unveil a new version of its flagship productivity suite that will be accompanied by a Web-based component. So today, not about to give up its turf without a fight, Google announced a major update to its Google Docs products.
Some changes are quiet and primarily ...
by Terrence O'Brien on February 17, 2010 at 12:50 PM

Software
Software
When it comes to purchasing pre-loaded software with your computer, our advice is to avoid it at all costs. Most companies, like Dell and HP, will allow you to decline at least some of the crapware that comes loaded on a PC, but only Sony offers the option of getting an unmolested Windows 7 install. While it's tempting to have Microsoft Office and security software (a ...
by Warren Riddle on December 22, 2009 at 05:15 PM

Last summer, when U.S. District Court Judge Leonard Davis ordered Microsoft to permanently shelve Word (and pay a whopping $290 million in damages), some analysts dismissed the ruling as a publicity stunt. Microsoft just received a swift and powerful kick to the groin, though, as the decision has reportedly been upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals. According to Engadget, Microsoft only has until ...
by Terrence O'Brien on November 30, 2009 at 08:28 AM

Microsoft Office 2010 officially hit the beta channels last week, and the crew at Lifehacker has spent some time getting acquainted with it. According to their early judgment, the newest version doesn't make the leap that Office 2007 made from 2003, or even that Windows 7 made from Vista, but there are enough little tweaks and improvements to keep things interesting.
Some of the changes are ...
by Terrence O'Brien on October 10, 2009 at 02:25 PM

Microsoft has spread itself pretty thin in recent years by offering a bewildering array of products that often have overlapping feature sets or compete directly with one another. This confusion, combined with the increasingly ridiculous fees for joining Club Microsoft, has helped out competitors like Google, Apple, and Open Office. This problem has been no clearer than it has in the productivity ...
by Terrence O'Brien on September 16, 2009 at 01:35 PM

The SANS Institute, an IT security education and research group, has released a study of computer and network vulnerabilities that can only be described as massive. Involving some 15,000 organizations, the study is one of the first to offer hard data about the the number and severity of digital threats across the entire computing landscape. According to the data collected by SANS, the biggest ...
by Terrence O'Brien on August 14, 2009 at 06:40 PM

Microsoft is doing its part to heal the Mac / PC divide. The next version of Office for Mac will ditch Entourage (icon pictured above) and replace it with a proper version of the slightly less awful Outlook. Now PC and Mac users will be able to come together at the table and voice the same frustrations with Outlook's unreasonably slow search performance, convoluted interface, barely functioning ...
by Terrence O'Brien on August 13, 2009 at 06:01 AM

Leonard Davis, U.S. District Court Judge for the Eastern District of Texas, is putting himself in the headlines by issuing a permanent injunction against Microsoft, prohibiting the company from selling "Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files." That, as all geeks know, includes both Office 2007 and the upcoming Office 2010. The ruling is in reaction to a ...
by Terrence O'Brien on June 27, 2009 at 09:00 AM

We're not gonna lie. We can't stand 'Outlook.' Or its Mac-based sister app, 'Entourage,' either. There just isn't aren't enough words that can convey how we feel about this stalwart of the corporate world. It's a shame, too, because we really are actually quite fond of the rest of the 'Microsoft Office' Suite. One big complaint about Outlook is how it handles HTML-formatted e-mails. The problem ...