Anyone who regularly presents will have had the occasion when there’s a need to wander around the stage, or instead be marooned behind a lectern on the side, yet if there’s no presentation “clicker” provided, it’s difficult to control the flow. A/V professionals complain that they can never keep hold of clickers as they grow legs and walk, so unless you bring your own, you might be out of luck.
There have been any number of attempts to build remote control software for Pocket PCs, Stinger smartphones, but none have been altogether successful – usually requiring faffing about with esoteric networking to make them work. There was also the snappily-named Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, which could be flipped over from its primary rodent function, to expose PowerPoint clicker type buttons below. It’s so bulky, maybe the mouse’s best use in retirement is to torment cats with its laser pointer.
Enter Microsoft Research, who recently produced Office Remote – and a means, with your Windows Phone in paw, to remotely operate Office apps using a Bluetooth connection direct to the PC.
Frankly, controlling a remote Word doc (by jumping around the structure of the document, zooming in/out etc), or Excel (moving about, using Slicers/Filters/Pivots, as well as the jumping/zooming around) is something of a novelty. How many cases will you find yourself where you’re looking at a screen showing your document from your PC, but you don’t have the means to control the document directly?
Where the remote control really comes into its own, however, is with PowerPoint. You can read speaker notes and even use your phone screen as a virtual laser pointer on the main screen – as well as swiping back and forth to move through the slide being shown on the main PC.
There are two routes to go about installing the software – there’s an agent that needs to run on your PC, and an app on the phone. If you run the Setup app on your PC, then look under the “OFFICE REMOTE” tab in your Word/Excel/PowerPoint apps, you can remotely install the controller app on your phone. Or start with the phone install first.
Simply install the app on both PC (running Windows 7 or 8.x) and on your mobile device, bond the two together in Bluetooth settings (part of the setup to add a new device) and you’re off. Simple, effective and free. Thanks to Simon Boreham, Ant Austin, Rina Ladva and others for recommending the application.
There are any number of 3rd party screen grab utilities but here are some integral ways of doing so. Snap, Snap, Grin, Grin…
Windows 8.1
ToW #183 uncovered a hack to replace the WindowsKey+S combination OneNote used but which was appropriated by Windows 8.1 preview, meaning that Win+S snappers were left with no easy way of capturing areas of the screen.
GREAT NEWS! The RTM of Windows 8.1 (or is it an update to OneNote?) has restored the ability to capture areas of the screen, this time by using WindowsKey + SHIFT + S. This method has the benefit of being able to screen grab parts of the Start screen and of modern apps too.
Windows 8.x devices
To quickly add the whole screen (or a combination of all of your displays if you’re running multi-mon) to the clipboard, just press WindowsKey + PrtScn.
If you want to capture the whole screen and find yourself lacking a PrtScn button (eg on the Surface) or in fact with no keyboard at all (eg tablets aplenty), you are able to grab the screen(s) by holding the volume down button and pressing the hardware Windows logo, at the bottom of the screen. The screen dims momentarily in both of the above methods, to let you know that the image has been dropped into the clipboard, ready for pasting into Word, Outlook or your favourite image manipulation app. Or MSPAINT.
Windows Phone 8
Simple – lightly press & hold the power/standby button and quickly press the Windows button on the front of the phone. The screen flashes briefly, the camera shutter noise may play (so careful playing with this feature in any situation where you wouldn’t want to look like you’re taking a photo…) and the resulting image is saved to the Screenshots folder within the Pictures hub.
One of the best presents you can buy your PC is a second monitor. There have been a few ToW’s past that have explored the delights of running a second screen, where even just plugging your laptop into a desk monitor can make a really noticeable difference to the way you work.
The basics are all there – use WindowsKey + SHIFT + Left / Right to move the current window between monitors (though do try to remember that most desktop monitors don’t have touch input, or you might look like you’re from the Far Side). Windows 8.1 adds extra functionality though, including using the same key combo to move the main Start Screen around.
Andrew Warriner has a neat tip to maximise real estate on the 2nd screen -
Remove the task bar on a second screen.
How often do you use a second screen for presenting or running a demo and the task bar uses up valuable space along the bottom of the screen? To remove it, simply right click on your taskbar and select Properties then toggle “Show taskbar on all displays”.
Obviously, you can drag windows between monitors, and if you right-click on the desktop and select Screen Resolution then you can even position the two monitor icons in such a way that they reflect the physical arrangement of the screens, to make it easier to move the mouse around, and even position windows spanning the two (if you like to be really perverse).
Windows 8.1 adds some further goodness, such as the ability to adjust the scaling on individual screens – if you have a new laptop with a full HD quality screen then you may already be familiar with the fact that the pixels are really tiny so therefore everything looks small – but if you plugged your machine into an old fashioned 4:3 ratio 17” monitor, the screen resolution and pixel density would be a lot less, so windows will look larger in comparison.
If the mix is wrong, then a window that moves from one screen to another will be small on one and dis-proportionately huuuge on another – an effect akin to Billy Connolly’s Prescription Windscreen. The other side of the scaling tweak is that as we get higher resolution monitors (with 4K monitors on the horizon, even if the technology is still a little on the expensive side just now), then this will be more of an issue going the other way – an app that takes half the physical screen on a 17” widescreen laptop, would be postage stamp sized on a large high res external display.
To change the scaling on an individual monitor, go into the Screen Resolution settings, and look under Make text and other items larger or smaller – by selecting the monitor first, you can change the scaling for each individual screen, to get something a little more even.
Windows 8.1 also allows the running of “Modern” (aka M***o) apps on multiple screens too, even combining them with the desktop environment, so you can mix & match. This fellow’s got interesting taste in apps, combining Python development with looking at puppies, alongside food, maps and pictures. Riiiight. There’s more detail on how, here.
If I was to ever write a style guide for these Tip o’ the Week emails, it would say to never use the first person, and to maintain a degree of relatively irreverent humour that hopefully makes it easy to read and not get in the way of the content. When I was thinking about what to write for the ToW #200, a few areas were considered…
Rob Fraser suggested some intriguing but frankly unprintable ideas.
I considered writing an off-piste article such as “How to wash your car properly”, or “How to cook the perfect fillet steak”, amusingly the most popular (by a factor of x10) old post on my blog.
All old externally-relevant ToWs end up on the blog, so if you want to send this stuff to your customer then by all means forward the emails, or just point them at the blog.
But no. After thinking about 4 years’ worth of Tips o’ the Week, some of which are now superseded by new product releases or defunct intranet or external web sites, I decided to showcase my favourite ten, presented here in no particular order. Some are a little out of date now (eg the steps to follow changed due to a new release) but the core principle still holds up and is easy enough to figure out.
#1 – Hide Outlook New Mail Notification. In Outlook 2013, go into File | Options | Mail and look for the Message arrival section. Switch off particularly the Desktop Alert and the sound – you don’t need to know you have a new mail, and it’ll still be there next time you go to look.
#45 – Focus! Silence the interruptions! Featured a brilliant application which puts Outlook into offline mode and Lync into Do Not Disturb, for a period of time… to let you do your day job without interruption. Sadly not available externally, but you should check out the principle of the Pomodoro technique for time management.
#19 – Navigating multi-sheet Excel workbooks. Particularly useful when you’re using Multi-monitor setups (a scenario first covered in ToW #39, and updated for Win8.x in ToW #115).
#101 – Finding files for dialogs. The Copy As Path method of clicking on a file somewhere and adding its full file name and path to the clipboard is such a useful tip, it saves me practically several minutes every week. Hey, every second counts.
#71 – Formatting tips for Office apps. Introducing the “Magic Office Key no-one knows about”, F4. Not useful very often, maybe, but when you do need it, you’ll be singing praises to the Office product group.
#5 – Contact number formatting. Install this little utility into Outlook and it will live forever in your mailbox, so never needs to be re-installed. Run it to sweep your Contacts folder for number formatted 0118 etc and it will tidy them up as +44118 etc, so you can click to dial from Lync. It’s UK specific but easy enough to modify for other country codes if you’ve got any VBScript coding skills in you.
#175 – a ‘tastic OneNote add-in. The great OneNote addin “OneCalendar” has featured in a couple of ToWs, it’s so good. This is the latest incarnation, either as a standalone addin or as part of the OneTastic suite.
#102 – When did someone really put something in their calendar? I really wondered whether to “out” this technique for sneaking a look at another user’s calendar, to see how long ago they created a meeting that they are now saying conflicts with the thing you’ve already invited them to.
#105 – Productivity? Learn to type! By far the best thing you can do to increase your productivity, is to learn how to use your keyboard properly. That’s all.
#125 – Ban the Mail Bomb. Another internal-only Tip, aiming to Stop Reply-all madness. It doesn’t just affect Microsoft, though. Me too! You could employ the great and simple addin to Outlook courtesy of Microsoft Research, which disables the Reply All functionality from any subsequent emails, without having to rely on Rights Management. See here for a description, and here to install.
Hopefully these may be a useful refresher for regulars or a new discovery for recent additions to the ToW list. Here’s looking forward to the next 200 tips – remember, keep the ideas and the feedback coming! Thanks,
Ewan
Those of us who like the idea of streaming music around our homes have a plethora of technologies available to make it a reality. Sadly, all of them – at least all the ones which work well – are proprietary and have some degree of “lock in” to the suppliers. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing from a user experience perspective, once you’re locked in, then you’re at the whim of a manufacturer deciding to continue supporting the system you’ve invested time and money into building up.
I’ve been playing around with streaming music for years, and have a few experiences to share, with some links to interesting discussion topics elsewhere on the net. Hands up – I work for Microsoft, and my preferences in the past have been to go down the Microsoft-compatible route as much as possible. Not necessarily the easiest route to take, as it turns out…
Apple AirPlay – see more on Wikipedia
Introduced in 2010 as an evolution of a previous proprietary protocol (AirTunes), Apple’s AirPlay is the slickest system around – as long as you have Apple devices everywhere. This alone makes it compelling enough for consumers who have already got an iPhone/iPad/iPod, to invest in other kit that purports to be compatible. There’s something of a dependency on Apple not shifting the goal posts in future, but for the majority of users who are in the Apple device fold, “it just works”.
Chris Hoffman recently published a great overview of all the wireless standards on How-To Geek. Chris highlights the various efforts the non-Apple industry has tried to counter AirPlay with – Intel’s WiDi wireless display, the somewhat disappointing DLNA alliance and the frustratingly non-aligned Miracast standard. In time, there might be a credible and non-proprietary alternative that works as well as AirPlay, but nobody seems to know when.
I have one old iPod bought only because a previous car had a 3rd party device available that swapped out its CD changer for an iPod; that side of things works well enough, but having to suffer iTunes on the PC ever since is the cross I have to bear.
Slim Devices / Logitech Squeezebox
Logitech bought over Slim Devices in 2006, to acquire their network streaming product, Squeezebox. After bringing out a number of well-regarded devices which supported the proprietary Slim Server (later “Logitech Music Server”) software, which offered a web interface as well as a number of 1st and 3rd party mobile control applications (such as SqueezeRemote for Windows Phone or Windows 8). Squeezebox devices have been discontinued now, and Logitech switched the brand to “UE Radio” – which used basically the same hardware as the last Squeezebox Radio, but with new operating software which was not Squeezebox compatible. After some disquiet from existing users, it’s now possible to “downgrade” the UE Radio back to Squeezebox however there appears to be no future development for Squeezebox apart from occasional updates to the server software. The UE Smart Radio has now disappeared from the US web site, and the UK one is showing pretty deep discounting. Looks like that’s the end of that.
I’ve had a Squeezebox Boom for a number of years, and it’s a great piece of kit – they change hands on Ebay now for not much less than they sold for brand new.
Logitech have switched tack to being a wireless speaker provider (eg the UE Mini Boom), which is possibly more user friendly if all you want to do is play music on your mobile device, but doesn’t really help if you’re looking to stream music around the house from a central library. it’s a pity, really – the Squeezebox worked really well when you got it up and running, and attracted a devoted set of users, audiophiles amongst them. Those looking for something else to replace SB with, seem to inevitably draw the conclusion that without relying on DIY or community-driven open source projects, there’s nothing much out there, but…
SONOS
Been around for since 2002, selling one platform for streaming over WiFi or over their own proprietary wireless standard. The range of devices is expanding (and to a degree contracting – the dedicated Sonos controller has been superseded with mobile apps for iOS and Android). A whole bunch of new devices have been released in the last year. SONOS starts to make a lot of sense once you have multiple devices, as you can specify different zones within your house, and play different music in each zone. Some of the devices can even be combined together – so the PLAY:1 speaker could be a standalone player in one room, could combine with a 2nd PLAY:1 to make a stereo pair, or could even be configured as satellite speakers for a home theatre system.
Downsides with SONOS? Well, they still haven’t come off the fence as to whether they’re going to build a Windows 8 or Windows Phone app controller app – ask SONOS directly and you’ll be sent to request it on their online forum, but at the time of writing and despite being the single most asked-for feature, the last comment from SONOS themselves was 6 months ago and doesn’t say whether they are planning on doing either. There are 3rd party apps out there – like Phonos or Sonata – but they don’t offer the same degree of control as the kosher apps do on other platforms, or on Windows 7/8 desktop.
Another bummer about moving from Squeezebox to SONOS is that the latter doesn’t support Lossless WMA playback – years ago, I ripped my whole CD collection in WMA, so it’s a bind to have to convert the whole lot to FLAC just so that SONOS can play it back without reducing the quality to 320kpbs. The free conversion software FOOBAR2000 did the trick of batch converting everything, but that’s just a pain to have to deal with.
SONOS supports Spotify (Premium only) so the next decision is whether to move off Xbox Music and take the plunge to a more expensive Spotify service...
As winter bites, as roadworks cause pandemonium, there may be a trend for staff to work at home more. Microsofties all know Lync powers the ability to effectively work and be contactable when you’re sitting in your shreddies in your home office.
If you have a less than perfect broadband connection, though, Lync may be a cause of frustration as it reverts to warning of a “pretty bad” connection, and remote participants might complain about not being able to hear you, even if you can more-or-less hear them.
This is a symptom of a poor internet connection at home – very likely nothing to do with whether you’re on WIFI or wired, as the connection to the internet is likely the bottleneck in both cases. If in any doubt, there are a few tests you can run to see if your network is under pressure, and maybe even figure out why.
It’s always difficult to get an accurate idea of your own broadband speed – it’s quite variable so from one minute to the next, you can get wildly different results. If there is a bottleneck, it could be anywhere between you and the resource you’re trying to connect to – and any *** in the chain could be causing the issue.
Speedtest.net is a popular site for testing your connection speed over a minute or two (making sure you don’t click on any of the adverts to speed up your PC, clean the Registry, install Google Chrome etc).
It will first test your “PING” (the time in milliseconds it takes to send a request and get a response, ideally in single or low double figures), then tries a download followed by a short upload test. Typical ADSL speeds could be 2-6mbps (megabits/sec, so 6mbps would equate to 0.75 Mb per second) download, and a few hundred kbps upload (kilobits/sec, so a 250kbps rating equates to only 31.25 Kb per second). Fancy-pants cable or fibre broadband types need not worry – generally – though sometimes may see varying spikes and troughs in the connection fidelity. The very rural who insist on living miles from the nearest telephone exchange may be stuck with 1mbps down though your upload speed may still be in the few hundred kbps.
If you imagine being on a Lync call, the upload speed is the bottleneck to decent quality - where you might be made sound like a fast/slow/quick-quick/slow Dalek to other participants if you have too low bandwidth, or too high latency, or PING results (a symptom of the latency in the network being too high to effectively support real-time communications such as a voice call or an Xbox Live game).
To find out what your theoretical maximum speeds should be, you might be able to check in the configuration of your router, or else (assuming you’re on BT provided broadband), try using the BT Wholesale Speed Tester. Run the first test, then click on Further Diagnostics, provide your landline phone number and you’ll get more info.
Pingtest.net needs Java (oooh, how quaint) installed on your PC to get the most out of it, but still kinda-works without it. It will test the quality of your connection (as opposed to the speed of it) and can be a useful barometer of troubles elsewhere. One issue that can cause very high reported latency could be that your connection is being maxed out by something else – kids in the house streaming movies, downloading large files etc.
Uploads can kill the capacity of your connection, however – if you’re uploading files to a SharePoint site over DirectAccess, for example, you’ll see a drop in perceived download speed too and your reported latency will likely shoot up.
There’s a nice utility called WinMTR which can be used to track the latency between you and the internet (or in fact, of your broadband supplier’s network – who knows, maybe the problem is upstream and in the telephone exchange?). Drop in a URL or IP address and you’ll get the equivalent of a TRACERT performed repeatedly, showing average, best & worst response times for each hop between you and the eventual resource – if you’re seeing averages that are reasonable but the odd very high spike, then you’ve got a problem.
If you’ve managed to rule out errant family members as possible causes of your poor connection, it’s worth checking your own PC before chewing out the broadband supplier – you never know, it could be a background process on your own machine that’s doing the damage.
With Windows 8.1 and the deep SkyDrive integration, as well as SkyDrive Pro and the ability to take files offline with SharePoint 2013, it’s quite possible that your own PC is busy uploading Gbs worth of content back to the office, all the time hammering your home network uplink, and causing massive latency for Lync and other applications. To perform a quick check on what is using the network on your machine, then Resource Monitor is your friend.
To start the tool, go to Task Manager (right click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager, or else press CTRL-SHIFT-ESC, a simple three-finger gesture all along the left on your keyboard). Once in Task Manager, you can get some basic info on what’s hogging your machine’s resources, both now and (for Modern Apps) historically, and you can also see some pretty detailed stats on how the machine is performing all-up.
In the Performance tab, there’s an Open Resource Monitor button. If you know you want to go straight there, you could just type resmon at the Start menu to jump straight to the app.
Once you have the Resource Monitor up and running, a simple check is to look in the Network tab – click to sort by Send B/sec and you can see if something is bogging down the machine’s performance trhough upload…
If you tick one of the check boxes next to a particular process, you’ll see (under Network Activity, TCP Connections and Listening Ports) what activity that particular application is doing. Watch out for GROOVE.EXE and SKYDRIVE.EXE as potential file synchronisation villains…
You could try right-clicking on the SkyDrive Pro applet in the system tray, and choose to Pause syncing. That’s GROOVE taken care of (you thought you’d seen the last of that application? Think again…). If you’ve other processes causing problems, try right-clicking on the process name and Search Online to find out what it might be, and get you one step closer to figuring out how to return normality.
Hot on the heels of last week’s “How 2 rite English proper” tip, and the previous extensive Outlook appointment duration code-a-thon, here comes a simple yet entertainingly effective idea to think about whilst you’re digesting all the over-indulgence of the Christmas period (Merry Christmas, by the way) – if you need to meet in person, why not hold shorter, more engaged and more effective meetings?
OneNote program manager Nicole Steinbok delivered an award-winning internal Microsoft presentation, blaming inefficient meetings (in part) on the 30-minute blocks that Outlook defaults to.
Apart from the usual stuff like starting on time, having an agenda, etc etc, there are some great bits of advice for having better meetings – some which everyone knows but nobody follows…
· Stay standing up
· Close all laptops
· Silence all phones
One director in MS UK had a Lync status message, “I try not to IM in meetings, preferring to focus on the people in the room - if really urgent please do text me”.
Perhaps not as fundamentalist a stance as the 22 Minute Meeting method, but definitely a step further in the right direction than most people take.
Proud Canadian Nicole also spoke at an external event called Ignite – improving productivity 5 minutes at a time. It’s well worth watching both this and the internal one.
For more info, there’s a Facebook group now, at http://22minutemeeting.info/.
Grammar and punctuation fundamentalists (the Basterds!) will almost certainly have read Lynn Truss’ (or should that be Truss’s... discuss…) seminal book on why punctuation is so important.
The title highlights the difference adding simple punctuation makes to a term said of a Giant Panda, that it “eats shoots & leaves”. Add a comma after the first word, and the same bear becomes a postprandial, gun-toting evacuee.
Misuse of most punctuation doesn’t have quite the same dramatic effect, but it may signal (to some people, at least) a lack of attention to detail, therefore invites ridicule. None more so than using the prolific Grocer’s Apostrophe.
Kingsley Amis, on being challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with:
There’s a simple rule when wondering whether you need to add an apostrophe or not – if in any doubt, just leave it out. Jess Meats circulated a now-dead website a while ago – www.canipluralizethatwithanapostrophe.com. Visiting the site displayed a blank page carrying just the word NO. In 96pt Arial Bold.
If you’re not really sure of the rules or if you find you forget them a bit too easily, check out The Oatmeal’s brilliant graphical guide for when to – and perhaps more importantly, when not to – use an apostrophe. There are other wordsmithery wonders too – how to use a semicolon, some words you need to stop misspelling, who vs whom and more. Genius. And really, really funny too.
It’s seemingly an irrefutable law that when you book a meeting for an hour, it takes an hour. Or what might happen is some people are still rocking up at 3 or 4 minutes after the start, and others start packing up 5 minutes before the end because they have another meeting to go to. Others yet will start a whole new discussion (“oh, just one more thing…”) with 2 minutes to go.
One comedian even made a fortune trying to teach us how to make meetings work. Here’s one video that’s 20 years old – yet still holds entirely true today. It was updated last year, and the original version is almost 40 years old. Clearly we don’t learn.
Now this week’s tip has been a long time coming – since the very beginning of Tip o’ the Week, approaching 3 years ago on this blog (and a year before that internally at Microsoft), it’s something that has been in the back of mind as a productivity tip. Thanks to discovering a blog post that provided suitable inspiration for the idea, and for the majority of the code, here it finally is. Praise be! Huzzah! Etc.
Frustratingly, Outlook has never offered the option to set how long a new meeting should be, or what time it should start. There are a few workarounds – you can set the timescale the calendar shows (so each line is 60, 30, 15 etc minutes, and if you double click on a section of your calendar to create an appointment, then it is set to that time slice). Try it out by going into Calendar, selecting the View tab, then View Settings. Select Other Settings on the pop up dialog, and change the view from there.
Today’s tip will let you set both the default duration and the start time of new appointments – so if you want to make all meetings 20 minutes long, starting 5 minutes past the hour or half hour, then you simply set it up as such when you install the code. Don’t be afraid – there is code involved here, but it’s fairly straightforward.
Here it is, step by step:
Private objMeeting As clsMeeting Private Sub Application_Quit() Set objMeeting = Nothing End Sub Private Sub Application_Startup() Set objMeeting = New clsMeeting End Sub
Next, right-click on ThisOutlookSession on the left hand pane, and choose Insert then Class Module.
Const DEFAULT_LENGTH = 45 Const START_OFFSET = 5 Private WithEvents olkIns As Outlook.Inspectors, _ WithEvents olkApt As Outlook.AppointmentItem Private Sub Class_Initialize() Set olkIns = Application.Inspectors End Sub Private Sub Class_Terminate() Set olkIns = Nothing End Sub Private Sub olkApt_PropertyChange(ByVal Name As String) If Name = "AllDayEvent" Then With olkApt If .AllDayEvent = False Then .Duration = DEFAULT_LENGTH .Start = DateAdd("n", START_OFFSET, .Start) End If End With End If End Sub Private Sub olkApt_Unload() Set olkApt = Nothing End Sub Private Sub olkIns_NewInspector(ByVal Inspector As Inspector) If Inspector.CurrentItem.Class = olAppointment Then Set olkApt = Inspector.CurrentItem With olkApt If .CreationTime = #1/1/4501# Then .Start = DateAdd("n", START_OFFSET, .Start) .Duration = DEFAULT_LENGTH End If End With End If End Sub
Const DEFAULT_LENGTH = 45 Const START_OFFSET = 5
Private WithEvents olkIns As Outlook.Inspectors, _ WithEvents olkApt As Outlook.AppointmentItem
Private Sub Class_Initialize() Set olkIns = Application.Inspectors End Sub
Private Sub Class_Terminate() Set olkIns = Nothing End Sub
Private Sub olkApt_PropertyChange(ByVal Name As String) If Name = "AllDayEvent" Then With olkApt If .AllDayEvent = False Then .Duration = DEFAULT_LENGTH .Start = DateAdd("n", START_OFFSET, .Start) End If End With End If End Sub
Private Sub olkApt_Unload() Set olkApt = Nothing End Sub
Private Sub olkIns_NewInspector(ByVal Inspector As Inspector) If Inspector.CurrentItem.Class = olAppointment Then Set olkApt = Inspector.CurrentItem With olkApt If .CreationTime = #1/1/4501# Then .Start = DateAdd("n", START_OFFSET, .Start) .Duration = DEFAULT_LENGTH End If End With End If End Sub
OK, now you have your code imported. To change the defaults for meeting duration or offset time, simply change either or both of the Const values at the top of the code. You’ll need to restart Outlook for these changes to take effect.
There are a few steps to go through now:
Now close Outlook entirely, and restart it – you’ll get a prompt to Enable Macros – this is unavoidable, sadly, but it will only happen when you first launch Outlook. Assuming you actually want this code to run, choose Enable Macros.
Now, what happens is whenever you create a new appointment, the Macro you’ve just installed will jump on it and set the start and duration times as appropriate. If you need to change the defaults, simply go back into the VB code as above, edit the values in clsMeeting, save the whole shebang and restart Outlook again. If you don’t want the code to run any more, go back into Trust Center and change the Macro settings back to the previous value.
Windows 8.1 is now available free for existing users of Windows 8, and in a break with tradition, will not be sold as an upgrade to existing installed Windows versions – it’ll just be the full version, and that’s it.
Upgrading from Windows 8.1 Preview isn’t officially supported – though it can be done (you do need to match the language version exactly – if you installed the Preview as English US, you’ll need the English US ISO from the MSDN etc site, to upgrade).
There are plenty new features in Windows 8.1, as well as the much-documented return of the Start button (after all the fuss about the removal of the Start button from Windows 8, and the subsequent rush from application vendors to restore it, there’s already a Start Killer app for Win8.1 which removes the reinstated Start button… you can’t win, sometimes…)
There are a bunch of new apps with Windows 8.1, and major improvements to existing ones. One new app of some interest is the Reading List: the idea being that if you’re looking at web sites in the IE11 browser (the Modern UI version) or possibly reading content in other apps (like the Store), if you flick the Charms out and choose Share, then you can add the site/content link to you Reading List.
Start the Reading List app up, and it will show you the list of sites you’ve bookmarked, and also make use of Windows 8.1’s improved side/side view, to show the content shown alongside.
If you are in the tech industry and dealing with a customer or partner on pretty much any aspect of their relationship with you, it can often be valuable to have a bit of forewarning about what technology they’re using. In larger managed environments, that knowledge might come from other resources (account manager, technical pre-sales, support contact etc), it may be tucked away in your email from an old thread.
Who knows, it might even be in CRM.
Even if you’re working with a well-engaged entity, it can still be helpful to do a little background research, and that’s near-mandatory if the org in question is new to us all. Here are some thoughts on how to get ahead of the game without needing to spend hours at the task.
LinkedIn
This is now an essential business tool for a lot of people, as it both projects their CV into the world so a potential next employer can see it, and it helps them connect with people in other organisations they’re trying to reach. Before you meet your customer, it’s worth looking up the company and seeing who else works there, what skills the individuals have (eg do they position themselves as an Open Source or Linux expert? Are they certified to the hilt in your stuff already, and therefore maybe a friendly face?). Who did they work for previously?
One tip for the practiced LinkedIn stalker is that it’s possible to switch off the breadcrumbs that let people see who’s looked at their profile, so if you check someone out and decide to have nothing more to do with them, you won’t end up getting a connection request in return as they’ll never know it was you.
Go to the Privacy & Settings option by clicking your mugshot in the top right then Select what others see when you’ve viewed their profile, whereupon you can choose full disclosure, partial anonymity (so they’ll see it was someone at Microsoft, for example – might freak them out if they are LAMP fiends) or the full kahuna of diplomatic immunity.
You might also want to think about who gets to see your connections – if you get lots of requests from people you don’t know, they may just be trying to harvest your own connections (as they’d see more details of those users, since they’d now be 2nd degree connections to the recruitment consultant connection spammer). We’ll come back to using LinkedIn in a future ToW.
Mxtoolbox – www.mxtoolbox.com
This one is useful for checking what your customer is using for their email, or at least which service they’re using to clean and filter their in- and out-bound email. Simply enter the customer’s email domain name (the bit after the @) and you’ll find out how they send and receive mail. Sometimes, it’ll be their own address (meaning, they operate their own relay) but often, it’ll be one of a variety of 3rd party “hygiene” services from the likes of Microsoft (Frontbridge, Outlook), Google (Postini), Symantec (MessageLabs) and more.
Netcraft – www.netcraft.com Their “What’s that site running?” tool and web site survey made Netcraft well known years ago – ostensibly telling you what operating system the web site in question is running on. A useful side effect in these cloudy days is that it can tell you not just what the site is, but where it is running. Handy to know if your customer’s site (or maybe a subset of it which is presenting a web application to their customers?) is running on Azure, AWS, Rackspace etc. Just head over to netcraft.com and paste the URL into their “what’s that site running” box in the lower right – no need to strip it of http:// or any other superfluous guff; the site takes care of all that for you.
Is it really on Azure? – http://www.kloth.net/services/nslookup.php Here’s a neat service which lets you check for CNAMEs of a particular URL – in other words, when you enter a URL into your browser, that name may just be an alias for another name, which you’ll never see. Knowing that such a thing exists can be handy, though – it might let you figure out that one part of the website is hosted in one place, but another part is somewhere else.
In this case, you do need to trim any leading or trainling gubbins off the URL, so you’re left with simply the main part. Sometimes the real meat of what a website is offering – the bit of the site you need to log into, for example – might be on a different URL (like login.company.com). If you plug that URL into this handy name lookup tool, and set the option to be looking for ANY or CNAME, then you may see that login.company.com is just an alias for something.cloudapp.net – the clouapp.net bit meaning that it’s a service running on Windows Azure. Not a very efficient way of looking for Azure users en masse, but if you think your customer is already on Azure, it is a handy way of confirming that fact.
Lots of people (including Office365 users) should have been moved to Lync 2013 by now, though the impact may not be all that obvious, since some of us have been using Lync 2013 client for a while, even if the back-end wasn’t running the latest and greatest.
Some of the changes will only be apparent when you join a Lync 2013 meeting - for example, when an application is being shared, one view will show you a line of photos of active participants in the meeting, and when each is talking, a green bar is shown under their mugshot, so you know who’s making all that noise, heavy breathing into their microphone, sniffling etc. Subtle.
[NB: in the photo below, the only highlighted person was actually talking at the time, and if fact, was the only one showing real video rather than a static photo]
There are a bunch of incremental improvements which the server upgrade provides, and some which subsequent updates to the client light up – one of which is the “Meetings” section which appears under the your status section at the top of the main Lync window (and somewhat confusingly, is depicted like a pie chart). The meetings tab shows you the remainder of your diary for the day (refreshed every 10 mins), and helpfully highlights any Lync meetings in blue, so you can right-click to Join. No need to go back to Outlook, open the calendar appointment, click on the link etc.
Other tweaks include the ability to set whether the IM and participant list shows up when you join a meeting (both of which were previously hidden by default until you clicked around inside the meeting). And if you’re the meeting organiser, you could decide to stop IMs or video in a meeting/call altogether.
The behaviour of the Lync client when you join a meeting is set under the Options icon (towards the top right, or you can press the ALT key to show the menu bar and go in throught Tools / Options if you’re old skool). There’s also the new ability to choose which Lync client to use for joining meetings – handy if you also have the Lync Modern app installed and would rather use it, for example.
Oh, and don’t forget to install and configure the fab Lync 2013 for Windows Phone, too. As before, but with more panache and pizzaz, the Lync client allows you to join conference calls with a single click (no typing in participant numbers and the like), as well as adding some cool new functionality – like using Wifi for VoIP calls if you set it to.
Everyone in the developed world seems to have been subjected to PowerPoint at some stage. PowerPoint is an unusual tool – one that is immensely popular by the people who use it, and one which invokes shudders amongst some of the victims of bad presentations down the years. One even coined the term “Death by PowerPoint” in 2001.
The presentation tool of choice (be it PPT slides, old IBMers’ acetate “foils”, or any other prop) can form as a useful aide mémoire for competent presenters, however it’s all too easy to put everything you want to say onto a slide, thereby negating the audience’s need to listen to you saying it, as they strain to read it in 14pt Arial Bold behind your head.
Great presenters often show slides with few words but great visuals – if you're on the Microsoft network, search for the Microsoft Story deck by Steve Clayton and his team, as an example of well-crafted slides that reinforce a story rather than telling it for you. Or look at this illustration of “Flat Design” as published on SlideShare.
PowerPoint 2013 added a really nice function to the little icons that appear in the bottom left of a presented slide, if you put your mouse in that general direction. As well as navigating back and forth between slides, you can annotate the currently presented slide, zoom into it (great for highlighting something to your audience), the new “Slide Navigator” icon is of particular interest.
Have you ever sat in a presentation where the speaker drops out of presentation view, so they can ferret around inside PowerPoint to get to a different slide…? Normally a great deal of scrolling up and down, exposing speaker notes (if they are ever written up – and who does?) – it just doesn’t look good.
You should never expose the workings of your presentation, and ideally, never refer to it – don’t talk about “on this slide…”, don’t refer to the clicker being problematic, don’t ever say “this is an eye test, but…” (just don’t show it). Referring to the presentation mechanism is PaNAMBiC. Like this.
Talk as if you don’t need whatever is behind you, unless you’re showing screen shots or diagrams that you have to refer to in order to make sense.
The new Slide Navigator icon is available either in Presenter View (see here) or in the standard duplicate-everything view (which can be easily re-activated if you find yourself in Presenter View against your will).
Clicking on the icon itself will show a nicely ordered overview of all the slides in your presentation, so if you need to jump to a particular slide you can do so, without opening your kimono and showing your goods to the expectant audience. In Presenter View, the section-by-section thumbnails are shown on your own private screen, so you can easily find your slide and jump to it without even letting the viewers realise it wasn’t contiguous in the original flow of your slides.
If you’re in duplicate screen view, it shows the Slide Navigator on the main view, but that’s much preferable to exiting the presentation altogether, navigating to the slide you want, then fishing about with the mouse to find the “Slide Show” button on the lower toolbar to restart the show.
TIP: to start a PowerPoint slide show with the currently-selected slide, just press SHIFT-F5.
Outlook 2013 introduced some changes to the way the standard inbox view is presented. It’s basically a good thing, though if you have a lot of email and a small screen, it will certainly reduce the number of items on your default view. This means that once an email is (say) 15 from the top on your mailbox, then it’s off the screen and, for some people, it might as well be dead.
You could adopt an Inbox Zero policy and keep your inbox to as few items as possible, or you could admit defeat and become a piler like most people. We have computers to search stuff for us, so why does it matter if we delete or file things away? Meh.
Anyway, there are a few tweaks you can make to your Outlook view if you don’t much like the new version. Let’s look at a comparison between Outlook 2010 and 2013:
Outlook 2010
Outlook 2013
It’s easy to see the screen real-estate effect – though 2013 is clearer, it’s a little larger.
If you’d like to restore the view to more like 2010:
Now this will apply to all messages and will reset the default view to have smaller “From” lines.
If you’d like to change the way unread messages are displayed (where, in Outlook 2010, they were just emboldened and with an appropriate message icon), repeat the exercise above but instead of creating a new rule, just edit the “Unread Messages” rule – set the font and colour, and party on!
There are many other inbox formatting tips which will take the views back into the mists of time – if there’s demand to find out more, maybe I’ll cover them in future ToWs.
Owners of the HP Revolve 810 laptops (as many in Microsoft recently received through the new laptop refresh) can get hold of an HP Executive Pen as an option, to enable on-screen scribbling and the likes. Before everyone starts celebrating by dancing in the streets, it’s worth noting that the Executive Pen is more like an Executive Crayon. It’s not really all that accurate.
The problem with any kind of tablet/slate that offers on-screen handwriting is that the method for sensing the pen makes a huge difference to the quality of its output – capacitive screens like Surface RT don’t lend themselves to handwriting, such as supported by the digitiser of Surface Pro. Here’s what writing on the HP screen with the Executive Crayon looks like:
Watch out for leaning your hand on the screen while writing, as the sensor on capacitive screens doesn’t really recognise the different between palm, finger or pen point. If you find your writing is a bit spidery, then, in OneNote, it’s worth trying out the very heavy pens, as the output looks to be stronger and smoother.
Revolve 810 users would be well advised to check out the HP driver web site (for Windows 8 x64) and make sure there are a few key updates installed – there are two specifically for the touchscreen and pen, and a Glidepoint driver may solve keyboard freezing issues. This driver also enables a feature where if you double-tap on the top-left corner of the touchpad, a little light will come on, indicating that the touchpad has been disabled (double-tap again to re-enable it). Handy if you’re using an external mouse, and don’t want to accidentally move the cursor whilst typing.
Keith “Frazer” Burns recommends trying a different approach to writing on-screen with Windows 8. If you show the on-screen keyboard (either in Modern Apps, or standard desktop mode – by tapping on the keyboard icon typically shown on the task bar), then select the bottom-right icon to switch between layouts, tap on the one which shows a pen over the screen… you’ll replace the keyboard with a couple of lines, ready to receive handwriting.
Now, you can input text by writing on-screen with an Executive Crayon, a cheapo-Ebay-10-for-£2 capacitive pen, or even your finger… and it’s surprisingly accurate, even on Surface RT. Keith counsels that it learns your own handwriting over time and gets good enough to be more than just usable. In fact, you might even find it more accurate than using full-flow writing on a screen with a proper digitiser and everything…
Once upon a time, a company called NextBase wrote some software to help people plan routes across the road network, using a computer. It was expensive in the day (£130 in 1988 works out about £300 in today’s money), but if your job was to schedule travelling reps or delivery drivers, then time was money. Or money was time saved.
Anyway, Microsoft bought the company and brought out Microsoft AutoRoute in the UK (eventually renamed Streets and Trips in the US) and did a modestly brisk trade selling annual versions of the software for a more reasonable (£40 or so) amount, with updates to keep the maps fresh and to add improving functionality.
All of this pre-dates the arrival of Multimap, Bing Maps, Google Maps etc. Nowadays the man in the street can make routing decisions on browsers or phones, free of charge and even taking account of prevailing traffic conditions, generally free of charge.
Nevertheless, the AutoRoute and S&T products soldier on, surprisingly. AutoRoute 2013 can be bought for £39 naked or £85 if you want a plug-in USB GPS module. MapPoint and Streets and Trips are still available for American users. Just don’t try and stick the PC to your windscreen.
The zooming in & out is a big agricultural compared to the Deep Zoom style navigation in and out of Bing or Google Maps these days, but there’s a lot of data behind the app and it’s very usable when it comes to searching and setting particular options – showing how much your journey will cost in fuel as well as how long it will take, for example…
Why?
There are a few key reasons why it makes sense to have AutoRoute instead of relying on online mapping – it’s all available offline for one, it responds comparatively quickly (especially when rerouting via specific places) and it also can show you easily what’s in the neighbourhood of a given point – though some of the data may not be as up to date as online sites.
You can export *.axe routing files to *.gpx using AutoRoute 2013 (or use free 3rd party software ITN Converter to turn out a version for most popular satnavs – so you could spend a while poring over a pan-European route in AutoRoute then squirt it down to your TomTom so you end up following the exact route you want, rather than sticking to the motorways, as the device might insist)… though as yet no route mapping is exportable to Nokia’s Here Drive software so you can let your phone guide you.
Interestingly, you can also overlay further data onto AutoRoute maps – maybe Excel spreadsheets full of postcode-oriented data, or even the simple mechanism of plotting all your Outlook Contacts on a map – maybe useful for seeing which of your customers or partners are based nearby a place you’re going. Or where to wind up the windows and keep driving…
Previous ToW entries have covered the need to sometimes tell Outlook to pipe down and let you get on with what your job is supposed to be. Where, after all, does it say on your job description, “Sits in front of a screen reading & writing email all day”?
The Pomodoro time management method is one potential solution to the problem, where the user forces themselves to focus for a period of time by avoiding distraction. The continuously excellent series of Photo Tips from Robert Deupree (JR) featured a simpler solution…
Robert also recommends a shortcut for the keyboard junkies so dedicated to extreme productivity that they can’t afford to lift their hands away to touch a mouse – to toggle Online and Offline modes in Outlook, simply press ALT+S then W.
When Outlook is offline it obviously won’t receive any new email, but it will let you work on existing mail, calendar etc and you’ll still be online for Lync distractions, and able to while away time browsing the web.
Whilst on the subject of Outlook and distractions, do yourself a favour and switch off the new mail alert – it’s even more intrusive in Outlook 2013 than previously. We all get enough email that we don’t need to know when another one has arrived, so try it now and you can always switch it back on if you feel that nobody loves you anymore.
Simply go to File / Options / Mail within the main Outlook window, and tweak the settings as required:
Various people have commented on issues they’ve had whilst setting up new PCs, especially after the upgrade to Windows 8.1 Preview. The upgrade process is a lot like a reinstall which happens to remember a bunch of settings, and one of the side effects is that it sets up the Mail (and associated Calendar) client as if it was a new PC connecting to your mailbox.
Now, one gotcha you might not be aware of is that Exchange Server can impose a limitation on how many ActiveSync devices are connected – it’s part of the numerous controls IT departments could place on synchronising with mobile devices, such as not allowing certain types of device (eg inherently insecure Android phones) to connect and sync, or by forcing a certain password policy on the phone so it locks when not used for a while.
Windows 8 and 8.1’s inbuilt Mail client uses the ActiveSync protocol to connect to the server, rather than the “Outlook Anywhere” method that the regular Outlook mail client uses. This means that if you reinstall/upgrade your Win8 PC, it could start to chalk off entries on the list of ActiveSync clients associated with your mailbox – and if you think how many phones you might have had in recent years, that number may be close to the limit. You may receive a notification email that there was an “error with your new mobile phone partnership” – strange stuff given than you may be just installing Windows…
To solve the problem (if it affects you) or to prevent it from happening at some future and doubtless inconvenient moment, simply:
Selectively delete some WindowsMail (or old phone) entries that haven’t synched for a while – they’re presumably old and dead. If in any doubt, select a device and click on Details to see the OS type and name of the machine, amongst others.
If you’ve taken the plunge and updated to Windows 8.1, you may have spotted a mix of improvements (like the updated Search pane behaviour which needs a little getting used to, but works well), and some funnies (compatibility issues with IE11, internal tools like GMOBI or CRM not working so well, etc). All in, a happier upgrade but one which is quite clearly still a preview.
Now, one of the first downers some people have spotted is the fact that the Search charm has nabbed the WindowsKey+S combination – it makes more sense than Win+Q, so what’s the rub? Well, OneNote uses WindowsKey+S to grab portions of the screen, either for pasting into notebooks or just sticking the screen grab into the clipboard for later use.
There are alternatives to the handy OneNote process; like using the Snipping Tool, though like many other such utilities, it can’t grab portions of the Modern UI apps. Never fear, a solution is at hand…
If you’re a fan of Win+S, you can re-establish a way of screen grabbing by following the steps below…
· Fire up a PowerShell windows with admin privilege – press WindowsKey+X, and select Windows PowerShell (Admin) from the list. (note that in Windows 8, this option was “Command Prompt (with admin)” – is the shift to PowerShell in Win8.1 the death knell for the black-background command line?
· Copy and Paste the following command into the command line and hit Enter: REG ADD "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\15.0\OneNote\Options\Other" /v ScreenClippingShortcutKey /t REG_DWORD /d 65 /f
· Either reboot your PC, or… … kill off the Send to OneNote Tool (32 bit) application from Task Manager (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC), then restart the application by pressing WindowsKey+R and entering ONENOTEM.
Now, you should be able to catch a screen grab by pressing WindowsKey + A. Not as obvious as Win+S, but it’s better than nothing.
This week’s tip comes courtesy of Phil Cross, who discovered it one day whilst trying to tell his colleagues where he was going to be. In Outlook, as you know, you can set the “Show As” status of an appointment or a meeting (and ToW readers of long standing may recall the difference – an appointment is in your calendar only, whereas a meeting is when other people are also invited).
The new “Working Elsewhere” status adds a welcome dose of granularity: what if you’re working at home, you’re available, but you want to make it clear that you’re not sitting at an office desk? “Out of Office” might not cut it, as that could signal that you’re OOF and therefore unavailable…
You could, of course, combine the appointment status with an appropriate Lync status too – you can tell people where you are/what you’re up to through your Location and even your “What’s happening today?” status.
There’s a new status in Lync too – “Off Work”. For all those times when you’re online – using your laptop at the weekend or on a day off, for example, but when you want people to know you’re not actually available to work. Just remember to set it back when you return, or else you’ll just look like a skiver.
Finally, a reminder for everyone planning a summer holiday and who would like to make sure their boss/colleagues/occasional collaborators know that they’re not going to be in the office. Don’t send people a meeting request to remind them you’re on holiday, without setting the status to be Free, the Reminder to be switched off, and the Request Responses to be blank. [Sorry for the shouting, but so many times I’ve tried to book someone for a meeting only to find their free/busy status is obliterated by some other numpty politely informing that they’re away].
This topic was covered 2½ years ago in Tip o’ the Week #4 …
As more and more of us continue to enjoy new laptops courtesy of the Windows 8 Refresh program, the fact that most of them are touch-enabled is causing delight and surprise. The best things about touch on traditional laptop devices may be the less obvious uses – scrolling up and down a web page with a lazy flick, or highlighting something to a colleague by pinching to zoom.
Tim Hall suggested a couple of cool tips, namely the new icon that’s appeared on the Office Quick Access Toolbar, to enable Touch Mode – a feature covered in the Office Preview, in ToW 142, but it’s changed the UI and become a good bit more functional. Tim also points out on his Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch, if you double-tap on the screen it will zoom in.
Meanwhile, Darren Strange has also become a huge fan of the Touch Mode in Outlook – not only does it space out the menu options and folders, but it introduces a new shortcut icon list on the far right (beyond the Reading Pane). Darren advocates triaging email by holding the sides of the super thin screen on his shiny Asus Zenbook, then tapping with his right thumb. It’s especially easy to flick up and down through the mailbox, then tap on Reply, then drop your hands to the keyboard for when you need to type.
Here he is, poised to delete some nonsense email that’s cluttering up his inbox:
Long-term readers of ToW may recall tip 101, which featured the “Copy as Path” command in Windows 7. In a nutshell; hold the Shift key as you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer, and you’ll see the Copy as Path option, which copies the entire path to that file (eg c:\blah\blah\file.doc) into the clipboard. Handy for when you want to point a dialog box from an application at a file you’ve been working on.
Well, Windows 8 goes one better. The Explorer desktop application features an option on the Home tab – simply select a file or folder, then click on the Home menu option to show the tabs (assuming they’re not already visible), and you’ll see Copy path.
If you like to have one-click access to these kinds of super-user functions, there is an even quicker way.
Look above the File menu in the Explorer window, and you’ll see a Quick Access Toolbar – something that’s been in Office for a while, as a place to dock common commands. If you click on the down arrow at the end of the QAT, you can enable and disable the commands which are already on it, but not add new ones. If you want to add the Copy Path command, for example, simply right-click on the command on the Ribbon tab, then Add to Quick Access Toolbar.
This week’s tip might seem a little obvious to some, yet partially unknown to others. Internet Explorer has offered the capability to display a page in full-screen mode, since IE4. Just like the “content, not chrome” ethos of the “Metro” Modern UI design language, reducing the various window borders and controls, menus, toolbars etc (aka the “chrome”), leaves more room on screen for the web page or other application/document content.
Now, we all know there are two versions of Internet Explorer 10 – the Modern UI version (full-screen, hiding all controls unless you swipe from the top or bottom of the screen or press WindowsKey-Z to display the address bar, tabs list etc), and the more traditional browser with tabs, icons to control the browser behaviour, menus etc. If you’re using the desktop version of IE, try flicking to and from full screen mode by hitting the F11 key – the same shortcut that’s been in IE for 15 years.
Other applications have full screen modes too, and some, like OneNote, also use the same familiar F11 – making your current OneNote page fill the entire screen (apart from the taskbar, unless you’re hiding that too), so useful when you’re note-taking in a meeting and want to make it clear to anyone peering over your shoulder that you’re not just doing email or wasting time.
Office 2013 applications let you switch to/from a full screen view too, by clicking on the Auto Hide option at the top right of the “Ribbon” – like the browser or OneNote applications above, it’s a handy way of making the most of screen real estate, especially if your laptop has a physically small screen. Like a Surface, for example.
Regular ToW readers might recall a previous mention of an add-in to OneNote which provides useful additional functionality, perhaps most notably OneCalendar – which gives you a calendar view, with the titles of OneNote pages which were edited on that day… hover over the title to see a preview of the page, click on it to jump to that page.
OneCalendar can be installed as a separate app, then pinned to the Task bar or Start menu if you want to fire it up quickly, without first being in OneNote.
If you have multiple notebooks and if you have hundreds of pages, this is a great add-in, since it quickly lets you see pages you’ve updated, regardless of where they are.
The bigger OneTastic add-in does a load more, too – the newest addition to its arsenal of features being the ability to write and play back OneNote Macros. Even if you have no interest in creating your own, Omer has a whole slew of macros installed by default or available to download from Macroland. Sometimes simple things like being able to quickly insert a horizontal line, or add capabilities common to other Office apps, like auto-fill of tables.
Check out this brilliant – and free – add-in, on http://omeratay.com/onetastic/.
This week’s tip comes after another successful “Tech.Days Online” session in late April, delivered by a host of specialists covering a range of developer and IT Pro topics. The Tech.Days Online programme of events is interesting in that it’s delivered “live” to thousands of virtual attendees: in other words, you could visit the Chicago auditorium and see the whole thing being presented to an empty room, except for the camera and audio crew and perhaps a few interested supporters.
Andrew Fryer suggested this update of an old feature of the somewhat-maligned Windows Vista. Pressing WindowsKey+X on a Veesta machine would display the Mobility Center, a collection of tools that are relevant to laptop use. In Windows 8, the Win+X combination has grown somewhat, and throws up a list of potentially useful utilities and quick access to the more commonly used (by technical types, anyway) aspects of the Control Panel. On a laptop, Mobility Center also features here.
If you like it particularly and a few more clicks is too much to ask, you could even start the Mobility Center then pin it to Taskbar for future one-hit execution.
The Presentation Settings applet in Mobility Center will allow you to configure how your machine looks and feels whilst you’re presenting – maybe change the background image of your desktop from a leering photo of your dog/child/spouse, to something a little more corporate and dry. Or don’t let the screen go blank, even if you’re running on battery… To set the options up, click on the projector icon within the Mobility Center.
It doesn’t set your Lync status to tell people you’re presenting, and it won’t configure PowerPoint to send things to the right screen, though… more on that in a future tip.