Back in the late 90s’ the first macro viruses appeared on the scene. The leveraged a feature of Microsoft Office that allowed a malware developer to execute programmed instructions via the office interface. This new option opened a lot of avenues for inserting a malicious payload on to a target system. Now some 20+ years later Microsoft is finally really doing something about this hole in their Office product. The are blocking all downloaded/external macros by default.

Immediately after the launch of Office for iPad, four applications of this package have reached the top spot by the popularity on the App Store. And with the arrival of new data it seems that the number of downloads is constantly increasing.

Microsoft has scheduled a conference for 27th March. What will be the main topic is not yet known, but according to the announcement, the event will be focused on the overlap between the cloud and mobile computing.

Office 365 Personal is a new and cheaper version of the Microsoft Office subscription package. This edition is intended for individual home users. Suggested retail price is $69,99 per year, but monthly subscription will also be available.

Office for iPad is coming, but still it is not known exactly when. According to ZDNet, it could happen by June this year.

Microsoft has finally released a version of their famous Office tools for mobile devices based on Android. Office Mobile for Android devices, brings an optimized support for Word, PowerPoint and Excel. On mobile devices, it is possible to create new Word and Excel documents, edit existing Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents, it has a special presentation mode for PowerPoint, offline editing, viewing and editing of Office documents from e-mail attachment.

Is Microsoft starting to change Windows 8 and RT? Back when Windows 8 was being broken out into the three main categories (“Home”, Pro and RT) we noticed that Microsoft was making some rather unusual moves and changes to the way that Windows worked. One of the first ones we noticed is that with Windows 8 you no longer get the Media Center component like you used to. This feature is only available for purchase if you have Windows 8 Pro or if you want to buy the Windows 8 Pro Pack (if you have the basic edition). This is odd in that most people that would want Windows 8 Pro are probably not interested in having Media Center. Sill Microsoft wants you to have the “pro” version of Windows 8 before you can have that feature. It is pretty obvious that they are trying to kill of that little feature and replace it with their Xbox Live Services. With Windows RT Microsoft pushed this as a great productivity device because it comes with a stripped down version of Office 2013. Unfortunately Microsoft messed this one up too as we found out very soon after they announced the full details on Windows RT.

Microsoft has changed the terms of use of the new version of Office. Originally, with the retail version of Office, customers could have installed Office on another computer (provided it is installed on only one computer). However, with Office 2013 this is no longer the case.

The General Manager of Microsoft's applications for large companies, Julia White, told the New York Times that Google has not yet proven that it is really serious with their business applications. According to her words, Google is still mainly an advertising company and that 96% of its revenue comes from ads, while only 4% comes from services to business users.

Since Microsoft Office price per seat per year for businesses is around $75 two public administrations in the German cities of Freiburg and Munchen decided to switch to OpenOffice. One of them went well while other one did not do so well. The Unsuccessful transition occurred in Freiburg. Their calculations went like this - $75 per year per computer for public administration, which for as many as 2,000 users per year is $ 150,000. However, after five years, although they saved on the prices for licenses, they have spent $600,000, with a disgruntled employee who complained about the incompatibility of file formats. To make things worse, they returned to Microsoft Office, which was at the first year cost of at least half a million dollars.