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Recent articles

Team collaboration around a laptop in an office.
Published 
3 min read

Using conditional formatting to highlight dates in Excel 

Date functions in Excel make it possible to perform date calculations, like addition or subtraction, resulting in automated or semi-automated worksheets. When you mix date functions with conditional formatting, you can create spreadsheets that display date alerts automatically when a deadline is near or differentiate between types of days, like weekends and weekdays. In this tutorial, learn how to put this functionality to work, with some examples in the Excel Web App so you can experiment with the results.
Published 
3 min read

Take control of your schedule with a modern calendar experience for Outlook.com 

<p>Today, we're releasing a new, modern calendar experience for Outlook.com. The Outlook.com calendar has been entirely redesigned with a modern, intuitive interface that puts you in control of your schedule. Our calendar service is faster than ever, helps you focus on the events and appointments and tasks you've added, and lets you take your calendar with you on any device. The new Outlook.com calendar is rolling out now and will be available around the world this week.</p>
Published 
12 min read

What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10 

<p>SharePoint Online (SPO) has a gaggle of new innovation and welcome improvements. The premier sharing service is updated with a new, fluid user interface, active personal file sharing, higher storage limits for both personal and team sites, a high-end cloud app development model, and more robust tooling for admins to more easily and effectively control their SPO environment. Everyone benefits from the new SharePoint Online! Users benefit with new ways to share internally and externally and anonymously, in how they search and discover the right information and people and how they build sites and experiences in a more self-service fashion. Project managers now have better ways to organize documents, project details and timelines. Developers are no longer limited on the types of solutions they can deliver to the Office 365 cloud. IT Professionals can more easily manage sites and permissions on behalf of their entire company. This article will cover the top 10 new SPO innovations with a pointer at the end to the new SPO service description - home to all SharePoint features across all offerings (online and on-premises).</p>
Published 
1 min read

Business Process Modeling with Visio at the Gartner BPM Summit 

<p>The new Microsoft Visio, powered by interoperability with Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365, provides a strong social, mobile and cloud-based infrastructure for Business Process Modeling (BPM). In addition to the newer workflows and collaboration features, it also offers several new diagram templates that support the latest industry standards, such as BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.4. Look for us at the Gartner BPM Summit April 2-4, 2013 as we take our very compelling and well-recognized BPM story to the Washington D.C. area. Microsoft is a Platinum sponsor of the summit, and we are very excited to speak with a variety of customers, partners, analysts and press while at the event. Do join us if you can!</p>
Published 
5 min read

Format and customize Excel 2013 charts quickly with the new Formatting Task pane 

<p>The new Excel makes creating and customizing charts simpler and more intuitive. One part of the fluid new experience is the Formatting Task pane, which replaces the Format dialog box. The new Formatting Task pane is the single source for formatting--all of the different styling options are consolidated in one place. With this single task pane, you can modify not only charts, but also shapes and text in Excel. </p>
Published 
3 min read

Four reasons why governments trust Microsoft 

<p>As governments strive to become more responsive and transparent, it's important for them to make public information easily accessible to citizens. At the same time, it's critical that they protect confidential data. A key reason why governments choose Microsoft Office 365 is Microsoft's leadership in the industry when it comes to privacy, security, and compliance practices. In short, governments know they can trust Microsoft to help protect their data. </p>
Published 
3 min read

Use Webservice functions to automatically update Excel 2013 spreadsheets with online data 

<p>Have you ever wanted to incorporate data from online resources into your Excel spreadsheets, such as stock quotes, weather, Bing Search results or even Twitter feeds? With new Webservice functions, now you can pull data from the internet into Excel--and the best part is the information updates automatically in your spreadsheet! Read on to find out how to put this functionality to work for you.</p>
Published 
9 min read

Enhanced Video Experience in SharePoint 2013 

<p>A picture is worth a thousand words, but did you know that a video is worth a thousand pictures? Videos are revolutionizing the way teams and organizations communicate with each other and are increasingly being used to facilitate knowledge-sharing and training within organizations. Intranet video portals for the enterprise are gaining popularity because they are effective for sharing information across the entire organization. SharePoint 2013 does a great job supporting video communications-from sharing a video across a team site to building a knowledge management/video portal for the enterprise. The video experience in SharePoint 2013 is enhanced greatly-the videos are easier to upload, the UI is clean and simple, videos are easy to search, and more! </p>
Published 
1 min read

Office 2013 now transferable 

<p>Effective immediately, we have changed the Office 2013 retail license agreement to allow customers to transfer the software from one computer to another. We made this decision based on feedback from our customers who asked for additional flexibility in this area. </p>
Published 
2 min read

Options to Create Forms in SharePoint 2013 

<p>Forms are an intricate part of many organizations as they feed information into business processes that allow the organization to manage day-to-day processes.  Forms are used for internal processes such as hardware and software acquisition as well as externally for collecting information on a new potential customer. For almost a decade, we've delivered a best-in-class forms experience as part of Microsoft Office.  As with much in the technology world, customer needs in the forms space have evolved and, with the new Office and new SharePoint, we have enhanced the forms experience to meet these needs.      You have a choice of tools for building forms with SharePoint, including InfoPath, Access, Excel, and Visual Studio. These tools can create custom forms within a SharePoint solution or an app for SharePoint. This post provides an overview of the tool choices, including the benefits and common scenarios for each. </p>
Published 
2 min read

Office 365 provides Advocate Health Care with a platform for innovation 

Today's post was written by Rance Clouser, Vice President, IS Support Services and Communication At Advocate Health Care, thinking holistically is core to our mission of meeting the health needs of individuals, families and communities. Our approach to IT is similar. As the healthcare industry evolves and we work to remain competitive, having state-of-the-art technology for our staff of more than 30,000 is key. We wanted a solution that gave us a variety of unified communications capabilities, increased our productivity, and brought our network of hospitals and clinics closer together. With Office 365 we achieve these goals every day. Our staff, associates and physicians are connecting with patients and each other and making a difference at the bedside and beyond.