Tag: WORD

Yes. It's people. We get it. It's also a novel way of addressing complex writing problems. Soylent is an add-in for Microsoft Word that crowdsources tasks, like shortening copy and proofreading text, using Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace. You pay a small fee to enlist the hive mind to help you out. You can even assign complex tasks, like changing the tense of an entire paragraph. Video after ...

In the age of 140-character tweets and bite-sized blog posts, Mark Armstrong found it increasingly difficult to locate lengthy articles to read during extended periods of downtime. So, he created the Longreads Twitter feed, where similarly inclined followers could submit and share meatier online pieces among themselves. Armstrong clearly wasn't the only one looking for long-form pieces, either. ...

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 ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. Timo Arnall's short video 'Wireless in the World 2' visualizes the spread of wireless networks in our cities, public spaces and homes by overlaying a dotted circle ...

Share At a live event in New York City yesterday, Microsoft launched its Office 2010 software package. The ubiquitous productivity suite, available now for volume license holders, can be downloaded starting May 11th, and will hit store shelves in June. The updated package focuses on making Office more mobile and Web-friendly, which is likely Microsoft's response to the growing popularity of ...

Prepare to keep your lays from your lies and make sure everything is well (and not "good"), because today is National Grammar Day. Yes, that is a real thing, and since we don't get a vacation day to celebrate the proper use of semicolons, it's only appropriate to prepare a special feature for the occasion. We know that at least some of you rely entirely on Word's ability to catch your ...

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 ...

Believe it or not, you can take the pain-in-the-ass out of PDFs. Though most PDFs can't be edited, there is one freebie workaround if you're in a pinch. Go to pdftoword.com, upload your PDF, and enter the format to which you'd like it converted. Within an hour or two, you'll get an e-mail containing a regular old Word or RTF file that you can fully edit. If you're in a hurry, the site offers a ...

Ikea, the can-do-no-wrong Swedish purveyor of cheap designer furniture and meatballs, appears to have finally done something wrong. And it involves fonts. In a decision to change its branding, the company has gone with a new typeface to represent itself, and the move is causing quite a stir on the (to be fair, easily stirred) Internet. The new font is Microsoft's ubiquitous Verdana, which the ...

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 ...

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 ...

According to at least one estimation, the English language has collected its one millionth word. The Global Language Monitor, whose authority on the issue is on the questionable side, got us geared up for the Million Word March in May. At that time the Language Monitor was expecting the millionth word to be "noob" or "defriend," but both were beaten to the punch by "Web 2.0." The Global ...