Microsoft and Adobe are extending their close partnership this week with the integration of Adobe PDF services into Office 365. Adobe’s PDF services will be available from the ribbon inside web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Office 365 commercial users will be able to convert documents into PDFs all while preserving font choices, formatting, layouts, and password protection.
The PDF integration follows news of Microsoft’s plans to redesign its Office web apps to be more modern and a lot faster to use. Microsoft is starting to test a simplified ribbon for Office.com and its Office desktop apps, and Office on the web will now include avatars for comments and dedicated colors for participants who are also viewing and editing the...
Twitter has announced that it’ll apply a new label to US election candidates’ profiles. The badge will also show up below a candidate’s name on tweets in users’ timelines. For now, the labels will only apply to accounts of candidates running for state governor, the US Senate, or the US House of Representatives during the 2018 midterm election.
The company says it’s partnering with nonprofit Ballotpedia to identify candidates’ accounts once they’ve qualified for the general election ballot. These labels will start showing up on May 30th for candidates who have qualified for the ballot and have given Twitter consent to apply the badge.
The world is watching how all the social platforms handle this year’s US...
Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa has gone quiet today in an unintended, real world reproduction of the company’s Super Bowl ad. A regional outage impacting Amazon’s servers has led to Alexa becoming unresponsive on Echo products and other devices that support the assistant; I just tried a simple weather inquiry on the Echo Dot in my living room, and the signature blue ring stayed lit up for about 15 seconds without any answer. A tone eventually sounded, and Alexa said it had lost connection.
Subsequent attempts have all failed, producing a red ring accompanied by Alexa asking me to try again later. The Verge has reached out to Amazon for details on when its normally helpful assistant might be back up and running. The issue is likely...