"What do you mean you didn't receive it? I sent it last night!" At least you thought you did. Now you're red-faced in a meeting set up to review the PowerPoint presentation that never made it to your recipients.  You check your Outbox and there it is. If you ever find yourself in this situation, here are some reasons why and some steps you can take.

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A few months ago, I described the new features we have added to Excel 2007 in the area of conditional formatting. One of the new formats we added is called a “data bar” … check out this earlier post for a refresher , but the basic idea is that Excel draws a bar in each cell representing the value of that cell relative to the other cells in the selected range. Here is a shot from that post. (Click to enlarge) The Excel 2007 UI allows you to choose whatever colour you want for your data bars, but,...

If you've been using OneNote on your iPhone for a while, you already know how useful it is for keeping tabs on all of your busy life's tasks, commitments, ideas, and decisions.

Today, just in time for the holidays, we’re releasing OneNote 1.3 for iOS that further expands on the full OneNote experience with brand-new mobile features — including a version that's tailored for the iPad. Today also marks the app's worldwide debut in over 50 new markets.

Read the full blog post for a first look at the new version!
 

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How often have you sent a message to someone only to receive an Out of Office message in reply a moment later? Or (like me) you might have sent a message to a Contact Group, only to find out too late that group contained hundreds of people – when it happened to me I surely wished I had known in advance. MailTips make these email “accidents” a thing of the past! As you start adopting Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 in your organization, we believe that MailTips will help make you feel more in control...

On July 16^th, we unveiled the new Office, a cloud service that works beautifully with touch, stylus, mouse or keyboard on new Windows devices - from PCs to tablets. With this release, we're modernizing Office, and an important part of that is the introduction of new subscriptions. Subscriptions open a host of possibilities, and subscribing to Office 365 will be the best choice for many - especially families, people with multiple devices and small businesses.

With a single subscription, you can use Office across a wide variety of devices - everything from PCs and tablets to Macs. You can easily save to and access your documents from the cloud and personalize your experience with Office. We will update Office more frequently to support new scenarios, and subscribers will always be current with the latest innovations. Subscriptions also open new possibilities like integrating web services into Office in ways never before possible; in this release, we've added Skype calling minutes and SkyDrive storage, and in the future, we'll do more.

In this post, you'll find details on how to get the new Office 365 subscriptions for consumers and small businesses when available.

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Today's author, Eric Patterson, a Program Manager on the Excel team, describes how to use Excel Tables as a source for a mail merge – a great productivity tool for sending out holiday greeting cards! :) Eric wrote this before the holidays but unfortunately I was out of the office and didn’t get to post this until now. Very useful nonetheless. At this time of the year I find myself preparing to send out a large number of greeting cards to friends and family. I have most of my addresses...

Do you need to use a Euro symbol in an economics paper? How about a Celsius degree in a lab report? Or, maybe you need to insert special characters into your math homework. I recently discovered the Math AutoCorrect feature in Word and realized that I could use it for more than just math stuff.

Math AutoCorrect lets me insert symbols and special characters into my documents using keyboard shortcuts. Click the full post to watch a short video where I demonstrate how to insert symbols and special characters into a Word 2010 or Word 2007 document. I also provide step-by-step instructions and keyboard shortcuts, if that's your preference.

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After several months of beta testing, Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 has officially been released as a replacement for Outlook Connector 12. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 is compatible with Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010. Why use the Outlook Hotmail Connector? If you have been using Outlook Connector 12.1, you already know that it enables you to manage your Windows Live Hotmail e-mail messages, calendar, and contacts from within Outlook. Outlook Hotmail Connector 14.0 introduces several...

Today Eric Patterson returns with a few more guest posts on Compatibility. Thus far the discussion about compatibility has been focused on how new features in Excel 2007 are handled when saving files to previous versions or when working in Compatibility Mode. The flip side of the discussion is the list of features that are being deprecated for Excel 2007. That will be the topic for today’s post. Why Remove Anything? Before jumping to the list of which features are being deprecated or removed, let...

Today's author, Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses charts. As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart. On an earlier post , there were a lot of comments about this particular aspect and I agree we could do better in helping users accomplish this goal...