Excel Makes Better Predictions in Office 2016

Microsoft revamps the software's forecasting features, enabling users to fine-tune their business predictions.

Excel 2016, part of Microsoft's newly released Office 2016 productivity software suite, has new built-in tools to help users peer a little further into the future.
Data forecasting is not new to Excel. Before the new version, "many used the FORECAST() sheet function, which performs a linear forecast or extended trendlines in chart properties to extrapolate forward," reminded Microsoft's Excel team in an Office Blogs post.

Office 2016 for Mac update doesn't include fix for crashes under OS X El Capitan - Computer World

Microsoft on Tuesday updated Office 2016 for Mac with Security patches and a host of smaller Changes feature, but did not fix the problem users constant-crash on OS X Have Reported El Capitan, Apple's newest operating system.

Source (computerworld.com/article/2992488)

Instead, the company Told customers to sit tight and wait for Apple to ship an update for El Capitan, aka OS X 10.11, Strongly suggesting the mess That was Apple's Responsibility.

Excel 30 Years - The History of Excellence!

Product legendary Microsoft Office, which is used today by more than one million people worldwide, was created in 1985 to ... Apple

Microsoft's Excel Might Be The Most Dangerous Software On The Planet

I am sharing the very interested article regarding the Microsoft Excel. This article written by Tim Worstall and published in Feb 13, 2013 in Forbes.com. 

No, really, it’s possible that Microsoft‘s Excel is the most dangerous software on the planet. Yes, more dangerous than rogue code running a nuclear power plant, than the Stuxnet that was deliberately sent off to sabotage Iran‘s nuclear program, worse, even, than whatever rent in the fabric of space time led to the invention of Lolcats. Really, that serious.

There’s a danger at one level: it’s all become so complex and it’s handled in such a slapdash manner that no one is really on top of it anymore. And don’t just take it from me as an assertion, there are very serious people indeed warning about this:

Both the Switzerland-based Basel Committee on Banking Supervision1 (BCBS) and the Financial Services Authority2 (FSA) in the UK have recently made it clear that when relying on manual processes, desktop applications or key internal data flow systems such as spreadsheets, banks and insurers should have effective controls in place that are consistently applied to manage risks around incorrect, false or even fraudulent data. The citation by the BCBS is the first time that spreadsheet management has ever been specifically referenced at such a high level, a watermark in the approach to spreadsheet risk.

To give you and idea of how important this is here’s a great tale from James Kwak:

The issue is described in the appendix to JPMorgan’s internal investigative task force’s report. To summarize: JPMorgan’s Chief Investment Office needed a new value-at-risk (VaR) model for the synthetic credit portfolio (the one that blew up) and assigned a quantitative whiz (“a London-based quantitative expert, mathematician and model developer” who previously worked at a company that built analytical models) to create it. The new model “operated through a series of Excel spreadsheets, which had to be completed manually, by a process of copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another.” The internal Model Review Group identified this problem as well as a few others, but approved the model, while saying that it should be automated and another significant flaw should be fixed.** After the London Whale trade blew up, the Model Review Group discovered that the model had not been automated and found several other errors. Most spectacularly,

“After subtracting the old rate from the new rate, the spreadsheet divided by their sum instead of their average, as the modeler had intended. This error likely had the effect of muting volatility by a factor of two and of lowering the VaR . . .”


To translate that into the vernacular, the bank, JP Morgan, was running huge bets (tens of billions of dollars, what we might think of a golly gee gosh that’s a lot of money) in London. The way they were checking what they were doing was playing around in Excel. And not even in the Masters of the Universe style that we might hope, all integrated, automated and self-checking, but by cutting and pasting from one spreadsheet to another. And yes, they got one of the equations wrong as a result of which the bank lost several billion dollars (perhaps we might drop the gee here but it’s still golly gosh that’s a lot of money).

And the various financial market regulators are rather waking up to how these decisions are being made in the markets. And thus the warning at the top: guys, do you think you could pay a little more attention to the tools you are using to move these billions and tens of billions around? For as we can see getting it wrong can be painfully expensive.


So that’s one sense in which Excel could be dangerous: that we’ve tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of financiers and bankers throwing trillions of dollars around the markets on the basis of their incomplete spreadsheets and their ignorance of how they’re doing it wrong. Pretty scary really.

But there’s another deeper level of risk here. That very throwing of trillions a day around the markets (and it really is trillions a day: the foreign exchange market in London alone is over $2 trillion a day) is dependent upon the existence of Excel itself.

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Microsoft introduces Microsoft Dynamics CRM updates 2016

Microsoft today announced new capabilities that will be delivered later this year in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016. The updates are designed to make the software easier to use and include even deeper integration with other Microsoft business applications such as Office 365, Word, Excel, onedrive, Cortana and Delve.

Announcing the Office 2016 IT Pro and Developer Preview

Valuable updates for IT pros and developers

Data Loss Protection (DLP)
In recent years Microsoft Office added DLP Exchange, Outlook, and SharePoint Business OneDrive. Now bringing these same characteristics classification and policy to Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With these new capabilities, administrators can centrally create, manage, and enforce policies for content creation and sharing documents and end users will share tips political or restrictions when applications detected a potential violation of the policy.

Outlook
Significant technical improvements to Outlook
MAPI-HTTP protocol have replaced the timing based on a new MAPI RPC-HTTP protocol to use Internet connectivity that supports Exchange / Outlook.
Red flame foreground. Eliminated the use of the network of foreground called to make sure that Outlook remains open on unreliable networks.
Multi-factor authentication. With this version of the Outlook client, support multi-factor authentication through integration with Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL).
Performance email delivery and reduced the amount of time it takes to download messages, display the list of messages, and displaying a new email after emerging from hibernation.
Lean storage space have added settings that allow users to better manage storage only hold 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days of mail on the device.

Search  have improved the reliability, performance and ease of use of Outlook search, and integrated search engine FAST-based Exchange.

Click-to-Run deployment
For customers of Office 365 subscription, the 2016 version includes new deployment features:

Introducing a new transfer service Intelligence background (BITS) to help prevent network congestion. BITS accelerates again using bandwidth when other critical network traffic is present.
Improving integration with ConfigMgr to allow IT administrators to efficiently download and distribute monthly updates ConfigMgr Office using native features.
Created a way for administrators to manage the rate at which they receive feature updates and bug fixes while receiving regular security updates.

Adding a feature of Office 365 Portal Administration to allow administrators to manage devices activation's by users.

Macros and Add-ins
There is no changes to macros or add-ins in this release. It is rare that "no change" is one thing we would like to highlight, but we think worth celebrating consistency in programming model through communications and realize how important this is and committed to a high level of compatibility as we continue to innovate
(See dev.office.com for more on how we’re innovating in Office extensibility.)

Accessibility
Addressed a number of issues of readability in Outlook and introduced a dark theme for visually impaired users.

Information Rights Management (IRM)
Extended the protection of IRM Visio files, allowing both online and offline protection of Visio diagrams.

For more details on the Office 2016 Preview program and instructions on how to download the applications, please visit the Office 2016 Preview program on the Microsoft Connect site. 

post was written by Kirk Koenigsbauer

Announcing Customer Lockbox for Office 365

As a provider of cloud services, we recognize that organizations understandably want to have full control over access to their content stored on cloud services. Today at RSA, announced Lockbox client for Office 365, a new capability designed to provide customers with unprecedented control over their content on the service. Lockbox client offers customers explicit control in rare cases when a Microsoft engineer may need access to the contents of the client to solve a customer's problem.

In our efforts to maximize data security and privacy for Office 365 customers, we designed the service to require almost zero interaction with customer content for Microsoft employees. Almost all service operations performed by Microsoft are fully automated and human involvement is highly controlled and an abstraction of the contents of customers. As a result, only rarely, such as when solving a customer problem with voice or documents contained not a Microsoft engineer has no reason to access the contents of the client in Office 365 cases.

Microsoft engineers are not entitled access to any service. All access through a rigorous control technology called Lockbox access is obtained. Today, Lockbox applies access control across multiple levels of approval within Microsoft that provides fair access to time limited authorization and time-bound. In addition, all access control activities in service are recorded and audited.

With today's announcement, we are bringing to customers in the approval process Lockbox for cases involving access to customer content. Using client Lockbox function ensures that the Microsoft engineer does not get access to the contents of customers without the explicit approval of the client. When the client receives the request for access, they can review the request and approve or reject. Until the application is approved, the engineer of Microsoft Access will be granted.

This post was written by Vijay Kumar, senior director of product marketing, and Raji Dani, director of the main program for the team of the Office 365 Security.

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Microsoft launches Office 2016 developer preview, with a focus on business (PC World)

Microsoft is going heavy on enterprise features in its first public peek at Office 2016, which is available now to Office 365 Business subscribers.

Developers and IT pros can sign up for the preview through the Microsoft Connect website. Eventually, Microsoft will open up the program to individual Office 365 users, but this option doesn’t appear to be available yet. Note that this Office 2016 release is separate from the touch-friendly Office apps that Microsoft has released as part of the Windows 10 Technical Preview.