The Blog
Guides, analysis and licensing advice for Windows, Office, Visual Studio and more — from the Software Supplies team.
One. That is how many PCs a Windows 11 Pro licence activates — but it is only half the answer, and the missing half is the half people actually need. It is one PC at a time, not one PC forever. The licence is not welded to the first machine you use it on, and […]
Yes — but the answer depends entirely on which Office you bought, and the method most guides still describe stopped working in December 2025. Microsoft retired the automated activation phone line and replaced it with a web portal, which means the machine you are activating may never need an internet connection, while you will need […]
Access vs Excel is usually framed as a choice between two tools. There are really four options, and the one most people are missing is already installed on their PC. The deciding factor is almost never how much data you have — it is how many people are typing into it, and whether the records […]
Most people who go looking for this page do not need to reinstall Visual Studio 2026 at all. They need one of the three narrower fixes Microsoft lists above a reinstall — and reaching for the biggest hammer first costs an afternoon of downloads for a problem a five-minute repair would have solved. Here is […]
Since April, a spreadsheet has been a filing tool. Making Tax Digital for Income Tax went live on 6 April 2026, and HMRC accepts records kept in spreadsheets provided they reach it through compatible bridging software — which quietly turned the version of Excel sitting on your practice’s desks into a support question rather than […]
Setting up one Windows 11 PC is a twenty-minute job anyone can do. Setting up fifteen of them, identically, without spending a fortnight on it, is a different problem — and the advice you will find online is mostly written either for home users or for enterprises with a dedicated IT department. This guide is […]
Microsoft licensing has its own vocabulary, and most of it was written for procurement departments rather than for the person trying to work out which version of Office to buy. This is a plain-English reference to the terms you will actually run into — on product pages, in activation errors, in a supplier’s quote, or […]