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As announced earlier today, over the next few days we are releasing an update to Microsoft account. For people who use Outlook.com, this includes a number of new features such as two-step verification, the ability to sign in with an alias and new international domains for your email address. OPTIONAL TWO-STEP VERIFICATION HELPS KEEP YOU MORE SECURE You can now choose to enable two-step verification for your entire account. Two-step verification is when we ask you for two pieces of information when you sign in to your account-your password plus a code sent to a phone or email that you gave us as security info. Many of you have asked for this and we're delighted to be able to offer this capability. Two-step verification is a great way to add extra protection to your account. Once you've enabled two-step verification, even if a criminal gets your password (for example, through malware on a friend's machine that you used, or if you use the same password for another service that gets breached) they can't access your account. You can read more about two-step verification here, or just start setting it up at https://account.live.com/proofs/Manage -it only takes a few minutes. SIGN IN WITH ANY ALIAS ON YOUR ACCOUNT We've heard from a lot of you that you love using Outlook.com but you wish you had more flexibility signing in. Many of you have added an email alias to your account, but you can't use the alias to sign in to your account. Previously the only option was to permanently rename your account, which is a hassle and requires you to reset certain devices. With this release, you can now sign in with any alias that has been added to your account. We've also simplified the experience of adding and managing aliases, with better advice on when you should add an alias vs. renaming your primary alias.

Bella Engen is a Technical Writer on the SharePoint User Content Publishing team, focused on search-driven experiences. Cross-site publishing is a new publishing method in SharePoint Server 2013 that can help streamline the publishing process in your organization, and at the same time reduce costs associated with maintaining and updating your website. By combining cross-site publishing with SharePoint search features, you can reduce the number of pages needed to maintain your website, and gain flexibility in how content is presented to your customers. In a nutshell, cross-site publishing simplifies the authoring experience by separating the process of how content is authored from the process of how content is displayed. SharePoint search features enable you to add user-specific behavior to your website, such as displaying different content to different customer groups, or displaying recommendations based on user behavior. In a blog series on the SharePoint IT Pro blog, you can learn how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. The blog posts describe the different functionalities that are involved when setting up such a site, and show you step-by-step how the features are configured. To demonstrate how it all comes together, data from a fictitious company is used. The blog posts use several screenshots and diagrams to explain everything from how the cross-site publishing feature works, to how you can use search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site. To give you an idea of what type of site this blog series describes, here are a few screenshots of the final website: www.office.com/setup Visit the "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013" blog series overview page for the complete list of current and upcoming posts.

In this tutorial, you will lean a quick way to calculate percentages in Excel, find the basic percentage formula and a few more formulas for calculating percentage increase, percent of total and more. Calculating percentage is useful in many areas of life, whether it is restaurant tipping, reseller commission, your income tax or interest rate. Say, you've been lucky enough to get a 25% off promotion code on a new plasma TV. Is this a good deal? And how much will you eventually have to pay? In this tutorial, we are going to explore a few techniques that will help you efficiently calculate percent in Excel and learn the basic percentage formulas that will take the guesswork out of your calculations.

Five shows into the series, we've looked at what your options are, what's changed and what's new with the new Office. We threw skydiver Fully Sik out of a plane to test if Office 365 ProPlus could be installed during 90 seconds of free fall; we took a look at the new Office telemetry to help you optimize your Office configuration; and we've explored identity and data access with the new user-based Office and caught up with Zero Day and Trojan Horse Sci-Fi author and industry renowned cyber-security expert, Mark Russinovich on the security model for online services. We even performed the great race of Office installs. We've received a lot of your questions along the way so, for our sixth show, we changed gears to present a live 60-minute episode of the Garage Series Live! on real world adoption tips and tricks with live Q&A. If you missed the show you can see it again here.

Videos of the Office 15-Minute Webinars are available in new apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. These videos can help you get the most out of Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote, PowerPoint, and other Office applications. Watch on your phone or Windows 8 computer, or use the app as a second screen as you follow the steps in the demo on your main screen. So now you have another option to view past Office Webinars in addition to the Office Blog, Office YouTube channel, or joining live-plus participate in the live Q&A session-every Tuesday at http://aka.ms/offweb. Windows 8 App Windows Phone 8 App Or just search for "Office Webinars" next time your are at the Windows Store. -Doug Thomas

Learn about Visio, a program designed to help you make diagrams for flowcharts, room layouts, timelines, organizational charts and a lot more. We'll start at the key of Visio: understanding how its shapes work.

Today's post was written by Howard Kourik, Director, Information Systems, San Diego County Regional Airport Authority The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority manages operations at one of Southern California's busiest regional airports, San Diego International. We were created to serve the public and have a mandate from the state of California to address the local area's long-term transportation needs. While we are a public entity, we function very much like any other business. In fact, we don't accept any tax dollars to support our operations. Instead, we rely on landing fees, the rent we receive from tenants, and a percentage of the profits from concessions-the restaurants, newsstands, and other shops located in the airport-to fund our growth. And like every business, we're constantly looking for ways to bring down our costs by operating more efficiently. We evaluated a lot of technologies to help us trim costs, but we selected Office 365 because it not only saves money, it gives us what we need to meet future IT demands. With our eyes on current and future needs, we did some modeling to gauge regional demand for our airport services over the next decade. It quickly became clear that we needed to add runways, terminals, and other "bricks and mortar" facilities, and upgrade our network infrastructure. Still, the only way we could budget for that expansion was to reduce or eliminate some of our fixed capital costs. I knew that one important way we could trim expenses was by taking a closer look at the technology we use and how we manage it. Our email system offered a prime example of how, by rethinking the way we deliver core IT services, we could cut down on operational "drag" and potentially save our IT team lots of time. Historically, we've managed our email in a clustered environment across four physical servers. So, we were not only worrying about the cost of the servers; we had to invest in mirroring software and an antivirus so

Today's post was written by Jacob Guttman, IT Manager, Menchies It's hard to believe it when you look at our rapid growth, but Menchies is still a very young company. We were founded in 2007 with a single store in Valley Village, California. Now, we have more than 300 franchise locations around the world. Maintaining connections between Menchies headquarters, the franchise community, and our guests is critical to our success. In the past, we used hosted services for email, collaboration, and document management. And we used a separate, Java-based application for instant messaging. One of the most persistent challenges I faced was trying to support our company's growth with a set of applications that weren't tightly linked together and that didn't fit the day-to-day work needs of our employees. An increasing number of our employees want to be able to access email and other applications on a range of different devices, including their smartphone or tablet. Ultimately, they want to be able to connect with colleagues and seamlessly move information between applications without having to think much about the underlying technology. When we started looking at moving to a new productivity and collaboration solution, the major factors influencing our decision were ease of use, anywhere access, simplified administration, and cost-effective scalability. As we took a closer look at Microsoft Office 365, it was the obvious choice. And, with help from our partner Cal Net Technology Group, we were able to make the switch to Office 365 quickly and easily. With Office 365, we get online access to all of the capabilities we need-email, calendaring, document management, and unified communications-all rolled into one solution. And it automatically works together with the Microsoft Office tools that our employees use every day. One great example of how Office 365 supports the business needs of Menchies and fits the way our people like to work is through our use of Micro

Yana Terukhova is a Product Marketing Manager on the Microsoft Visio team. Visually displaying always up-to-date information on clearly laid out diagrams helps to communicate information effectively. In this post, we will see how to connect data from external sources to a diagram. Linking data to Visio diagrams was first introduced in 2007 and has been overwhelmingly popular. We've improved the functionality since then and the capability has become increasingly more powerful. Associating data with shapes on a diagram does not require any code. There's a simple wizard which guides you through linking your data source to your diagram. Once you've linked data to diagram shapes, apply data graphics to shapes-text, data bars, icons, or color by value conditional formatting-to visually display numerical data. The important point here is that data-linked diagrams are dynamic; the data graphics change when data is refreshed in the source (like Excel).

Forms are the cornerstone of business applications, and plenty of options exist to create a form in SharePoint. Which one you use will depend on your needs, technical skill and the version of SharePoint you are using. In this article we'll explore seven ways to build forms in SharePoint along with some of the pros and cons of each. All these options will be storing the data in an existing SharePoint list. SHAREPOINT LISTS Default forms are available for any SharePoint list. Create a list and you have a corresponding form to add and modify items. Options are available to organize the order of fields, format them, validate input, add basic calculations and attach files. There are also more advanced options such as limiting permissions to item owners and enabling workflows. You can modify all of these under List Settings for the list. These generic SharePoint forms are a good choice for simple applications that don't have too many columns or records and that only require basic functionality. Lists also offer a data sheet view to edit a limited set of columns, much like a spreadsheet. What you see is what you get with these basic forms. If you need to break fields up into multiple tabs, or perhaps have business logic run on them in real time, you'll need to keep on reading. And although theoretically a list can store millions of items, you can only access up to 5,000 items in any view (in reality the numbers are far lower before performance degrades considerably). Basic Sharepoint list form - www.office.com/setup SHAREPOINT DESIGNER Creating a custom form in SharePoint Designer is relatively easy. You take an existing SharePoint list and use Designer to create a new .aspx page which renders and controls the form. There are files used by a list to create forms, one each to add, edit and view. These are located in the same folder as their associated SharePoint list. With Designer you can show or hide fields based on certain criteria, change the layout, use va

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Once your slide show is complete, you'll need to learn how to present it to an audience. PowerPoint offers several tools and features to help make your presentation smooth, engaging, and professional. Optional: Download our practice presentation. Watch the video below to learn more about presenting your slide show. PRESENTING A SLIDE SHOW Before you present your slide show, you'll need to think about the type of equipment that will be available for your presentation. Many presenters use projectors during presentations, so you might want to consider using one as well. This allows you to control and preview slides on one monitor while presenting them to an audience on another screen. TO START A SLIDE SHOW: There are several ways you can begin your presentation: Click the Start From Beginning command on the Quick Access Toolbar, or press the F5 key at the top of your keyboard. The presentation will appear in full-screen mode. clicking the Start From Beginning command on the Quick Access Toolbar - www.office.com/setup Select the Slide Show view command at the bottom of the PowerPoint window to begin a presentation from the current slide. Switching to Slide Show view from the Status bar in the lower-right corner - www.office.com/setup Go to the Slide Show tab on the Ribbon to access even more options. From here, you can start the presentation from the current slide and access advanced presentation options. starting a presentation from the Slide Show tab - www.office.com/setup TO ADVANCE AND REVERSE SLIDES: You can advance to the next slide by clicking your mouse or pressing the spacebar on your keyboard. Alternatively, you can use or arrow keys on your keyboard to move forward or backward through the presentation. You can also hover your mouse over the bottom-left and click the arrows to move forward or backward. hovering the mouse to access navigation buttons in Slide Show view - www.office

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: While you can always enter data directly into database tables, you might find it easier to use forms. Forms ensure you're entering the right data in the right location and format. This can help keep your database accurate and consistent. This lesson will address the benefits of using forms in a database. You will review examples of different forms and form components. Finally, you will learn how to use forms to enter new records and view and edit existing ones. Throughout this tutorial, we will be using a sample database. If you would like to follow along, you'll need to download our Access 2016 sample database. You will need to have Access 2016 installed on your computer in order to open the example. Watch the video below to learn more about working with forms in Access. WHY USE FORMS? Many of us fill out forms so often that we hardly notice when we're asked to use them. Forms are so popular because they're useful to the person asking for the information and to the person providing it. They are a way of requiring information in a specific format, which means the person filling out the form knows exactly which information to include and where to put it. Illustration of a paper form - www.office.com/setup This is just as true of forms in Access. When you enter information into a form in Access, the data goes exactly where it's supposed to go: into one or more related tables. While entering data into simple tables is fairly straightforward, data entry becomes more complicated as you start populating tables with records from elsewhere in the database. For instance, the orders table in a bakery's database might link to information on customers, products, and prices drawn from related tables. For example, in the Orders Table below the Customer ID field is linked to the Customers table. The Customer ID field links to the Customers table - www.office.com/setup In fact, in order to see the entire

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Whenever you work with Excel, you'll enter information-or content-into cells. Cells are the basic building blocks of a worksheet. You'll need to learn the basics of cells and cell content to calculate, analyze, and organize data in Excel. Optional: Download our practice workbook. Watch the video below to learn more about the basics of working with cells. UNDERSTANDING CELLS Every worksheet is made up of thousands of rectangles, which are called cells. A cell is the intersection of a row and a column-in other words, where a row and column meet. Columns are identified by letters (A, B, C), while rows are identified by numbers (1, 2, 3). Each cell has its own name-or cell address-based on its column and row. In the example below, the selected cell intersects column C and row 5, so the cell address is C5. cell C5 - www.office.com/setup Note that the cell address also appears in the Name box in the top-left corner, and that a cell's column and row headings are highlighted when the cell is selected. You can also select multiple cells at the same time. A group of cells is known as a cell range. Rather than a single cell address, you will refer to a cell range using the cell addresses of the first and last cells in the cell range, separated by a colon. For example, a cell range that included cells A1, A2, A3, A4, and A5 would be written as A1:A5. Take a look at the different cell ranges below: Cell range A1:A8cell range A1:A8 - www.office.com/setup Cell range A1:F1 cell range A1:F1 - www.office.com/setup Cell range A1:F8 cell range A1:F8 - www.office.com/setup If the columns in your spreadsheet are labeled with numbers instead of letters, you'll need to change the default reference style for Excel. Review our Extra on What are Reference Styles? to learn how. TO SELECT A CELL: To input or edit cell content, you'll first need to select the cell. Click a cell to select it. In our exampl

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Even though PowerPoint presentations are designed to be viewed on a computer, there may be times when you want to print them. You can even print custom versions of a presentation, which can be especially helpful when presenting your slide show. The Print pane makes it easy to preview and print your presentation. Optional: Download our practice presentation. Watch the video below to learn more about printing in PowerPoint. PRINT LAYOUTS PowerPoint offers several layouts to choose from when printing a presentation. The layout you choose will mostly depend on why you're printing the slide show. There are four types of print layouts. Full Page Slides: This prints a full page for each slide in your presentation. This layout is most useful if you need to review or edit a printed copy of your presentation. preview of a full page slide printout - www.office.com/setup Notes Pages: This prints each slide, along with any speaker notes for the slide. If you've included a lot of notes for each slide, you could keep a printed copy of the notes with you while presenting. previewing the notes pages layout - www.office.com/setup Outline: This prints an overall outline of the slide show. You could use this to review the organization of your slide show and prepare to deliver your presentation. preview of an outline printout Handouts: This prints thumbnail versions of each slide, with optional space for notes. This layout is especially useful if you want to give your audience a physical copy of the presentation. The optional space allows them to take notes on each slide. preview of a handouts printout - www.office.com/setup TO ACCESS THE PRINT PANE: Select the File tab. Backstage view will appear. selecting the File tab - www.office.com/setup Select Print. The Print pane will appear. clicking Print in the Backstage view - www.office.com/setup Click the buttons in the interactive below to learn more about using

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: WHICH VERSION OF MICROSOFT OFFICE IS BEST FOR ME? www.office.com/setup Blogs: Office 365 and Office 2016 share a lot of similarities, yet deciding between the two involves a lot of factors. Office 365 is a subscription-based service that currently uses Office 2016 apps, but when the next version of Office is released, users will get that as part of their subscription. Office 2016 is a buy-once app suite that brings you the Office 2016 apps as they are, without any available updates in the future. If you want to upgrade to the latest version of Office without paying for a subscription, you'll have to pay full price for the new version - there's no discounted upgrade option. These are only a couple differences between the two products. Looking to invest in Office? We break down the differences between the two products to help you decide which is better for personal and home use. See at Microsoft Store Quick-reference table Apps and pricing Multiple devices Connectivity Support Storage Conclusion QUICK-REFERENCE TABLE Category Office 365 Home Office 365 Personal Office Home & Student 2016 Office Home & Business 2016 Office Professional 2016 Price $99.99 /year $9.99 /month $69.99 /year $6.99 /month $149.99 $229.99 $399.99 Users Up to 5 1 1 1 1 Apps Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Outlook Publisher Access Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Outlook Publisher Access Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Outlook Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote Outlook Publisher Access Devices 5 PCs or Macs 5 tablets 5 phones 1 PC or Mac 1 tablet 1 phone 1 PC 1 PC 1 PC Skype minutes 60 per month for each user 60 None None None OneDrive storage 1TB each for five users 1TB None None None APPS AND PRICING Office apps on the go. - www.office.com/setup Office 365 is a subscription-based service. If you choose to pay on a yearly basis, you essentially get a discount that works out to two free months per year. If you choose to pay on a monthly b

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: CHANGING YOUR DEFAULT SETTINGS IN WORD www.office.com/setup Blogs: There may be certain settings in Word that get on your nerves, like default settings that you find yourself changing over and over-the paragraph spacing, the font size-each time you start a new document. Maybe you prefer a different font style instead of the default Calibri. Maybe you like all of your documents to have narrower margins so you can fit more information on the page. Maybe you even work for a company that has very specific document standards-regarding the color scheme or layout-and you're tired of changing these settings every time. Luckily, you can customize many of the default settings in Word. You just have to know where to look. USING SET AS DEFAULT You can't change the default settings for everything in Word, but there are certain tools and features that give you this option. Popular examples include: Font Paragraph spacing Line spacing Margins Page orientation To find out if you can customize the default settings for a certain element, look for an arrow in the bottom-right corner of the group. This will open a dialog box where you can access all of the basic settings, plus some more advanced ones that you won't find on the Ribbon. Screenshot of Microsoft Word - www.office.com/setup Next, look for a button near the bottom of the dialog box that says Set as Default. All you have to do is click this button, and Word will assign your current settings-like the font or font size you've chosen-as the new default for this particular element. Screenshot of Microsoft Word - www.office.com/setup Finally, Word will ask whether you want to set this as the default for this document only, or for all documents based on the Normal template (in other words, all documents in the future). Choose the second option, and Word will use these settings from now on. Screenshot of Microsoft Word - www.office.com/setup If you don't have a lot of experience with

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: SIMPLE RULES FOR BETTER POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS www.office.com/setup Blogs: Have you ever given a PowerPoint presentation and noticed that something about it just seemed a little … off? If you're unfamiliar with basic PowerPoint design principles, it can be difficult to create a slide show that presents your information in the best light. Poorly designed presentations can leave an audience feeling confused, bored, and even irritated. Review these tips on making your next presentation more engaging. DON'T READ YOUR PRESENTATION STRAIGHT FROM THE SLIDES If your audience can both read and hear, it's a waste of time for you to simply read your slides aloud. Your audience will zone out and stop listening to what you're saying, which means they won't hear any extra information you include. Instead of typing out your entire presentation, include only main ideas, keywords, and talking points in your slide show text. Engage your audience by sharing the details out loud. FOLLOW THE 5/5/5 RULE To keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed, you should keep the text on each slide short and to the point. Some experts suggest using the 5/5/5 rule: no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row. Screenshot of Microsoft PowerPoint DON'T FORGET YOUR AUDIENCE Who will be watching your presentation? The same goofy effects and funny clip art that would entertain a classroom full of middle-school students might make you look unprofessional in front of business colleagues and clients. Humor can lighten up a presentation, but if you use it inappropriately your audience might think you don't know what you're doing. Know your audience, and tailor your presentation to their tastes and expectations. CHOOSE READABLE COLORS AND FONTS Your text should be easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large, simple fonts and theme colors are always your best bet. The best fonts and colors can va

www.office.com/setup Blogs: Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of Microsoft Forms for our Office 365 Education customers. Forms is the result of direct feedback from educators that they want to have a quizzing function with Office 365 Education. Educators told us they need an easy way to assess student progress on an ongoing basis. They also told us they want an assessment solution that will save them time, help differentiate instruction for all students and provide quiz takers with real-time personalized feedback. We designed Forms to be super easy so that anyone could confidently create a form and easily see results as they come in. Forms lets anyone with an Office 365 Education account create and/or respond to quizzes. What makes Forms unique and so valuable for educators is the automatic grading and in-quiz feedback functionality. Automatic grading does exactly what the name implies and greatly reduces the time spent grading. In-quiz feedback is a feature that lets quiz authors personalize messages depending how a student answers a question. For example, if a student answers a question incorrectly they may get a message, such as: "The answer is incorrect. I suggest you review chapter four as this will be on the final." HOW FORMS WORKS When an instructor wants to assess how well the students understand a given topic, they can quickly author a quiz directly from their desktop or mobile web browser. The instructor simply determines the questions they would like to ask and then chooses an answer type, such as multiple choice, text or a rating. The Forms authors can then send a link or QR code to quiz takers or embed the quiz into a web page, blog or Learning Management System (LMS), and recipients can complete the quiz on phones, tablets or PCs. And with the real-time feedback in Forms, the instructor can very quickly see where the class may need additional instruction or could advance more rapidly. Forms responses can also be exported to Mi

EMAILS STUCK IN YOUR OUTBOX? www.office.com/setup Blogs: A common complaint of Outlook users is that their email send process takes too long, "hangs," or traps messages in the outbox. Has that ever happened to you? We collected some troubleshooting instructions that should help you get your messages traveling smoothly again. These steps apply to Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016.

WWW.OFFICE.COM/SETUP BLOGS: INTRODUCTION www.office.com/setup Blogs: Access offers several options that let you design and run queries that return exactly the information you're looking for. For instance, what if you need to find out how many of something exists within your database? Or what if you would like your query results to automatically be sorted a certain way? If you know how to use query options in Access, you can design almost any query you want. In this lesson, you'll learn how to modify and sort your queries within Query Design view, as well as how to use the Totals function to create a query that can perform calculations with your data. You'll also learn about additional query-building options offered in Access. Throughout this tutorial, we will be using a sample database. If you would like to follow along, you'll need to download our Access 2016 sample database. You will need to have Access 2016 installed on your computer in order to open the example. Watch the video below to learn more about modifying queries. MODIFYING QUERIES Access offers several options for making your queries work better for you. In addition to modifying your query criteria and joins after you build your queries, you can choose to sort and hide fields in your query results. TO MODIFY YOUR QUERY: When you open an existing query in Access, it is displayed in Datasheet view, meaning you will see your query results in a table. To modify your query, you must enter Design view, the view you used when creating it. There are two ways to switch to Design view: On the Home tab of the Ribbon, click the View command. Select Design View from the drop-down menu that appears. Switching to Design View with the View command on the Ribbon - www.office.com/setup In the bottom-right corner of your Access window, locate the small view icons. Click the Design View icon, which is the icon farthest to the right. Switching to Design View using the View Icon - www.office.com/setup Once in Desig