Articles about Microsoft

From powerful formulas like SUMIF to dynamic arrays, Excel Power Moves equips readers with tools to streamline data management and boost productivity.

This book will help you learn to create hyperlinked table of contents, automate tasks, and uncover hidden features that transform your workflow. The guide also explores formatting tricks and VBA shortcuts for building efficient processes.

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Looking to familiarize yourself with the world's most popular and effective productivity apps? Then look no further than the latest edition of Office 365 All-in-One For Dummies, packed with 9 mini-books covering each of the super-apps included in the famous productivity suite from Microsoft.

In the books, you'll get a handle on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, Access, and more.

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Six-hundred-thirty-seven in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and Windows 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft released a new version of its Copilot app on Windows to the Microsoft Store for Insiders. This one, finally, is a native application and no longer a progressive web app. May take some time before it lands on stable though.

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Looking for another reason to shake a fist at Microsoft? How do you feel about a new batch of unwanted prompts in Microsoft 365?

Search no more! This very reason is about to materialize in Word, PowerPoint and Excel as Microsoft starts to pester users to back up their files to OneDrive. By May, but perhaps as early as this month, you could find that you’re hit with ads badgering you to add files to Microsoft’s cloud storage service.

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With Windows 11, Microsoft tried to make the new OS look different from Windows 10, mainly by centering the taskbar and Start menu. This wasn’t the most popular change for a lot of people.

As we’ve covered before, there are a good number of third-party tools that you can use to put the Start menu and taskbar back to how they were, as well as tweak other areas of the newest operating system, including improving icons and updating File Explorer.

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As promised recently, Microsoft has released PowerToys v0.89.0 complete with new features. While there are no brand-new modules this time around, exiting utilities have been given amazing new capabilities, not least of which is Advanced Paste.

While you might think of copying and pasting as being related to text and images, the PowerToys development team has applied it to media files. What does this mean? It means the arrival of easy-to-use media transcoding so you can covert audio and video files into different formats. This PowerToys release also has exciting hints of what is to come.

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Six-hundred-thirty-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and Windows 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

One option for Windows 10 users who do not want to pay Microsoft for extended support is to switch to Linux once Microsoft's operating system runs out of support. Linux veteran Brian suggests to try a dual boot or VM instead at the beginning, to test the waters.

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It's that time of the month when Microsoft releases preview versions of next month’s updates for Windows. For the eager -- and brave -- they provide a way to get early access to new features and options as well as fixes for problems.

Windows 11 users now have the KB5052093 update to download and install if they want to jump in ahead of Patch Tuesday, and this is a nice little update that not only patches a bunch of bugs, but adds a tasty selection of new bits and pieces. A highlight is the ability to use a single webcam in multiple apps.

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Every so often, we hear rumors about Microsoft’s next operating system, widely expected to be called Windows 12. The tech giant has been keeping quiet about its future plans, preferring instead to continue to update Windows 11, adding more AI features, and deprecating functionality it thinks we no longer need.

Although plenty of people still prefer Windows 10 to its successor, Windows 11 will be the only game in town in a matter of months when the older OS comes to its end of life later this year. Windows 11 isn’t bad -- far from it -- but it could be better, as evidenced by Windows 11 2025 Edition.

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The gradual move towards a subscription-based model for software payments has been continuing for a number of years now -- and the costs can soon add up. For anyone who is looking for ways to make things a bit less of a strain on their wallet, Microsoft has come up with a solution -- ad-supported versions of its Office apps.

If you are happy to endure advertising in the likes of Word and Excel, you can opt for a free Microsoft 365 subscription. Sadly, ads are not the only catch.

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For a lot of people, the biggest, most noticeable difference between Windows 10 and 11 is the centered taskbar and Start menu that Microsoft introduced to its latest operating system.

The software giant made the change to give Windows 11 a fresh, modern look and set it apart from its predecessor, but Windows has had a left-aligned taskbar and menu since Windows 95, and as the company proved when it gave us a tiled Start screen in Windows 8, change isn't always good -- or welcome.

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Over the years, I have suggested leaving Windows for Linux many times, with some readers saying I sound like a broken record. In hindsight, however, that was arguably a foolish thing to suggest (in some cases, at least). No, that doesn’t mean I have soured on Linux -- quite the contrary. Actually, I am as enthusiastic as ever!

So, have I changed my tune? Well… not entirely. I still think people should install Linux, but instead of replacing Windows, I would suggest dual-booting instead. This way, you get the best of both worlds -- Linux and Windows on one machine. I suppose if you find you don’t ever use Windows, you could get rid of it down the line. But even if you don’t use Windows, why bother getting rid of it? You might find having a Windows installation handy one day. Hey… you never know.

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Six-hundred-thirty-five in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and Windows 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft is working on a new app. Currently in development, Migration App is designed to help users smoothly transfer files from one Windows PC to another.

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Windows XP hasn’t been supported by Microsoft for a decade now, but it’s in use in many places. According to the most recent figures from Statcounter, the ancient OS still holds 0.27 percent of the Windows market, placing it above Windows 8/8.1.

There is even a Linux version of XP that you can run if you want a hit of nostalgia, but don’t want to risk using an unsupported OS. You’ve no doubt seen Doom running on all sorts of hardware, and XP is similar in some respects. We’ve already seen it running on Apple’s Vision Pro, and now it appears that with a bit of creative thinking it’s possible to run Windows XP on an Apple TV.

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Snipping Tool is one of the most useful apps to be found in Windows 11, making light work of grabbing on-screen content. Primarily concerned with taking screenshots, it has developed over the years to include a handy OCR component for extracting text.

And now this feature is in line for an upgrade. Microsoft is improving the text extraction capabilities of Snipping Tool so that text can be grabbed without the need to take a screenshot first.

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