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TidBITS Watchlist: Notable Software Updates for 17 October 2016

Microsoft Office 2016 15.27 and Office 2011 14.6.9 — Microsoft has issued version 15.27 of its Office 2016 application suite with improvements to Excel, OneNote, and PowerPoint. The OneNote note-keeping app (also available as a free standalone app from the Mac App Store) now corrects spelling mistakes by using suggestions from the spell checker and enables you to find and fix accessibility issues in your notes with Tools > Accessibility Checker. For Office 365 subscribers, PowerPoint now lets you trim
unwanted content from the beginning or end of audio or video files, and you can use CONCAT or TEXTJOIN to shorten text formulas in Excel. On the security front, both Office 2016 and Office 2011, which Microsoft has updated to version 14.6.9, resolve memory corruption vulnerabilities. ($149.99 for one-time purchase, free update through Microsoft AutoUpdate, release notes, 10.10+)

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OmniFocus 2.7.2 — The Omni Group has released OmniFocus 2.7.2, reverting a change made in version 2.7 that made TaskPaper text the default pasteboard format (see “OmniFocus 2.7,” 22 September 2016). The task management app gains a new Copy as TaskPaper menu item that includes full TaskPaper details and copies the children of a selected item if they are visible. The update also includes the TaskPaper tags @autodone and @parallel tags when copying, fixes problems with column visibility, eliminates several crashes, and ensures that syncs triggered over the local
network using Bonjour no longer show as “Received Push” in the logs. ($39.99 new for Standard and $79.99 for Pro from the Omni Group Web site, $39.99 for Standard from Mac App Store (with in-app purchase option to upgrade to Pro), 29.6 MB, release notes, 10.10+)

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Typinator 6.11 — Ergonis has released Typinator 6.11, a maintenance release for the text-expansion tool that fixes several bugs. The update provides a workaround for an issue that caused the abbreviations to stick around after expansion for some users in macOS 10.12 Sierra, fixes a cursor-positioning problem in Microsoft Word, resolves an expansion problem in Mellel, improves the reliability of long-distance cursor moves, and adds support for the Shouxin input method for Chinese. (€24.99 new with a 25 percent discount for TidBITS members, free update, 8.0 MB,
release notes, 10.6.8+)

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TextExpander 6.1 — Smile has released TextExpander 6.1, adding the capability to use fill-in snippets with Apple’s Dictation. The text-expansion utility also improves the Snippet Editor by enhancing drag-and-drop support, lets users preview a snippet before expansion with the new Preview button, speeding up the load time, and restoring Bold and Italic menu commands. The update also eliminates a fatal save error when the server invalidates a stored token, correctly handles HTML tags in fill-in defaults, and fixes localizations of Include in Inline Search. TextExpander 6.1 is available via a monthly or annual subscription, but
Smile continues to offer TextExpander 5 as a standalone app for $44.95 (TidBITS members receive a 20 percent discount only on the purchase of version 5). ($40 annual subscription, $20 upgrade subscription, free update from version 6, 6.5 MB, release notes, 10.10+)

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