If you’re planning on taking your Windows Phone to sunnier climes over the autumn/winter, this tip might help. One side-effect of going abroad is that the numbers you may have saved in your contacts, won’t be able to dial – 07802 etc won’t make any sense if you’re in the US….
One elegant solution to this problem would be to fix up all your contact numbers in Outlook, using a technique discussed way back in previous posts (here and here) to sort out the formatting of contacts’ phone numbers (the E.164 format – such as +44 118 etc – again, something I’ve dealt with before).
Now, Windows Phone 7 has some built-in intelligence to try to figure out what you’re attempting to dial when you’re overseas. It should be switched on by default – to check, go into Settings, then swipe right to applications and look under phone, and check International Assist is on.
Allen, being a fiduciarily responsible sort of chap, was concerned that he didn’t want to rack up lots of data charges whilst abroad, and so was keen to make sure data roaming was switched off. This is also the default setting: if you’d like to verify the fact, or if you’d like to switch roaming back on so you can use (at astronomical expense, mind) the phone’s data services whilst overseas, go into Settings, swipe down to mobile network and check to see if roam or don’t roam is set.
When you’re abroad, you might find that you can connect on free WiFi networks instead – go into Settings / WiFi and look for suitable networks. There are various apps which purport to tell you if you’re connecting via GSM/3G or WiFi, however if you switch off Data Connection and/or roaming from the mobile network settings, you can be certain you’re only using WiFi.
There are even tools which promise to do all the “yes, I accept your terms and conditions, yadda, yadda” stuff that you might have to complete in the browser after connecting to Starbucks etc WiFi, before you can use the rest of the internet. As they say, YMMV.
We covered using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise OneNote files between computers in ToW #52, but overlooked one really simple but useful check-box capability – the ability to sync your IE favourites between PCs, and to sync your Office settings too. Jamie Burgess suggested this would be worth covering.
In essence, this gives you a one-click (on each PC) means to keep your favourites up to date across multiple home and work PCs, as well as keep your Office spelling dictionaries, templates and email signatures up to date too.
If you have multiple PCs and one of the first things you need to do when building a new machine is to recover your Outlook signature and IE favourites, then this is just for you.
To switch on, install Live Mesh (as part of Live Essentials) if you haven’t already, then switch on by entering “mesh” into your start menu and then click on Windows Live Mesh to open up the settings. More detail here.
Turn on and off with a single click and you’re done. For the more advanced users, you could set up a Sync Folder to copy your Favourites (generally found in c:\users\<alias>\Favorires) etc to SkyDrive, and that way they’d be available from any PC (via http://skydrive.live.com), or a useful way of backing up your settings if you only use one PC.
An earlier Tip o’ the Week featured “5 Golden Rules” for OCS and Lync conferencing, and those tips still stand.
If you host or participate in a Lync conference, you can dial-in to the meeting from a phone as well as joining from your PC – eg for Microsoft-hosted Lync conferences, attendees can find numbers here when joining from elsewhere. The same URL can be used to set your conferencing host PIN, so if you dial the access number, you can sign in as the meeting leader.
Enter the conference ID that’s listed in the appointment, or which can be gleaned from the Lync client in the conference itself – so the leader could potentially pass on the joining instructions to other users who are not online.
Lync has some touch-tone commands that can be used to control the phone call – as an attendee, the most important is possibly *6, which mutes/unmutes your phone. Do everyone a favour if you are dialling in to a conference call, and mute your phone when you don’t need to talk. You’ll hear confirmation that “you are now muted” or the reverse, so it should be pretty clear what your current status is. Hopefully no embarassment of you starting to talk while still on mute and wondering why no-one’s listening, or the even less desirable inadvertent heavy breathing that can distract everyone else on the call.
Other touch-tone commands can help to provide the kind of info you can see when you join a conference call using the Lync client directly. Examples:
*1 – plays a list of conferencing commands you can use *3 – plays a list of other attendees’ names *4 – Toggle “audience mute” *6 – Mute yourself *7 – Lock/unlock the conference *8 – Admit all participants currently in the lobby *9 – Enable/disable announcements while entering/exiting
Clearly, some of these are only applicable if you’re a conference leader: it is worth remembering that you can still dial in and control a conference, even if you aren’t able to join from a PC.
There are many advantages to SharePoint 2010 if you’re coming from 2007, especially from a usability perspective, and there are a few nice tips to get the best out of it. SharePoint guru Jessica Meats provides a couple and will have more in weeks to come…
Head over to the new MySite (simply enter “my” in IE9’s address bar†) The default view gives you information about what’s been going on with people you work with. You can an activity feed which displays things your colleagues have been doing, such as adding new colleagues, joining groups, updating their status, leaving people notes, harvesting their Farmville crops and other interactions. So you can keep up to speed on the actions of people you’ve listed as your colleagues.
As well as seeing what your friends and co-workers are up to, you can add some information about yourself. If you click on profile, you see information about yourself that’s on your profile. Some of this stuff, like your job title, is filled in for you. There are other fields though that are all yours.
Click on the edit profile button and add your skills, interests, external blog link, even projects you’ve worked on. By adding a bit of information here, you can make it easier for people to know what you do, both inside Microsoft and outside.
If there’s a bit of information you don’t want to broadcast too loudly, you can choose to show it only to your manager, team, colleagues, or even just to yourself.
† Last week’s IE9 tips ToW spawned a micro-tip, courtesy of Neil Cockerham. You can set IE9 to assume that any single word you enter in the address bar is the name of an intranet site – that way it will always try first to go to the website, and if it fails, it will fall back to searching Bing for that word… rather than the default, which searches Bing and asks you if you’d like to go to the website instead.
To enable this option, go to the Options in IE9 by clicking on the little Cog icon in the top left, then go into Advanced, scroll down and look for the appropriate option
.
Got a document stored in a SharePoint team site you want to work on? Got a long train ride where you won’t have an internet connection?
If you go to a SharePoint 2010 document library, there’s a button in the Library tab called Sync to SharePoint Workspace (as above).
Note that the new UI of SharePoint 2010, akin to the Ribbon that’s been in the last couple of versions of Office, needs to be switched on for every site that’s been upgraded. If you’re using an existing site and the administrator hasn’t yet switched it over, then the option to sync to SharePoint Workspace is in the Actions menu – if you select either of these options and you haven’t already configured the new SharePoint Workspace software that’s part of Office 2010, you’ll go through a wizard which will recover your account and email you a temporary password to get things moving.
SharePoint Workspace, as well as being the new name for Groove, allows you to pull SharePoint content offline, work on it locally and then synchronise up your changes later. By clicking on this button, you will launch SharePoint Workspace and it will start saving a local copy of the documents in the library.
You don’t have to lock the document first. SharePoint Workspace is clever enough to only synchronise up changes. So someone can work on the document from the library while you’re offline working on the local copy. When you get back to the office, your version will merge with the updated version in the SharePoint site.
So now no internet connection is no excuse to take it easy. Sorry…
This tip was originally written shortly after the release of Internet Explorer 9, however it’s still valid today. IE9 is the fastest, most modern and most secure browser we’ve ever made (some would say, that anyone has made – recent independent analysis from NSS Labs shows IE9 blocking the vast majority of malware, versus all other tested browsers which fared less well – less than 20% effective, in fact).
If you haven’t installed IE9 yet, just head to http://microsoft.com/ie9 and click the “Download Now” – it’s as simple as that. Reasons to install are here, if you need convincing.
There’s a good overview of the new features in IE9, here. Far too many to cover in one Tip o’ the Week – so it’s a subject we will be returning to.
One key usability improvement is the ability to Pin sites to your taskbar, so you can launch them (or return to them) with a single click: just open the site, click on the tab it’s located in, then drag & drop the tab to the taskbar in order to pin it. Another is the simple display of recent & popular sites you’ve visited, when you create a new tab in IE9 by clicking on the end of the tabs list, or by pressing CTRL-T.
The overall UI is much sleeker and simpler, doing away with lots of icons and even the separate search bar – if you want to search for something, just start typing it into the Address Bar and if it doesn’t get returned via your favourites or your recent history, then it will query your defrault search engine directly from there.
There’s even a “suggestions” option that can be turned on with one click, to suggest search results as you type. This is the off by default, as it would also send keystrokes of URLs you might type in… so the user has to opt in.
If you enter an intranet URL in the address bar, it will generally try to search online for that “word” – but in the background, IE9 can check if there is a web site available with just that name, and will offer you (displayed at the bottom of the screen) the option of going to that site. Try it with a site you haven’t visited since upgrading – eg hrweb…
Once you’ve said “Yes” once to the offer, if you next enter the same phrase, IE9 will check from your history and see that you really did want to go to http://hrweb, rather than search Bing for it…
If you want to force IE9 to take you straight to the intranet site (and miss out the whole “search Bing, then confirm that you do want to go to the intranet..”), simple put a “/” at the end of the term. So you enter “itweb/” into the address bar (not bothering with http:// etc) and IE9 will take you straight to the designated site. Thanks to MSIT’s John Owen for this tip.
Another tip from Bing’s Tony Young this week. Remember kids, Bing Maps is not just for mapping.
Tony wants to show you how you can use Bing maps to help you plan your day on the road…
If you are travelling to a new destination (as long as you’re in London, Manchester, Aberdeen or Glasgow) and require a taxi, but don’t want to get ripped off by the local cab driver, then there is a neat Taxi Fare Calculator available on Bing Map App’s which is very accurate. Trust me, I use it a lot. To use the application…
· Go to the Bing Maps Silverlight experience at (www.bing.com/maps/explore) and look for the Map App icon on the bottom left of your screen
· Once you are in the Map App gallery look for the Taxi Fare Calculator; . Once you have clicked on the icon it will open up the application…
Enter your route and then hit ‘Calculate Fare’ & hey presto…
You can access the booking system via catch a cab. And if, like Tony, you make a habit of catching £90 cab rides, maybe you can search for a 2nd job whilst you’re in Bing…
Actually, the Bing Maps Silverlight client is a very slick & smooth experience, and has many interesting Apps available – some are a bit US-specific but it’s worth having a play if you find yourself with a few minutes to spare.
Try out a few in your favourite US city to get an idea for what’s available – particularly interesting is Streetside Photos in Seattle, or Weatherbug that shows reported current weather conditions.
At least it isn’t raining in Seattle at the moment.
This week, a couple of smart tips concerning Windows Phone 7. Both revolve around finding something – in one case, how to find your phone if you’re not sure where you left it, and the other, how to remind yourself where you’re going.
Dude, where’s my phone...? This tip uses the location services built in to Windows Phone 7 – services which you may want to switch off if you’re having battery life issues, but which can help you out by geotagging photos (so the GPS location of the photo you take is recorded in the photo, and it’s supported in Windows Live Photo Gallery too) or by finding where you are on the map.
· If you do want to switch off Location Services, go into settings | system and under location, switch off
If you habitually leave your phone and don’t know where, there is a facility to find out where the phone was last seen, but you need to switch it on (it’s off by default), in settings | system and under find my phone.
To check where you left your phone, you’ll need to have already set up a Windows Live address on the phone (giving access to SkyDrive etc), and then visit http://windowsphone.live.com/ on your PC - under the “FIND MY PHONE” link, you can see your phone’s approximate location on a map, erase its contents if it’s hopelessly lost, lock the device so it can’t be used (and include a “please return to… “message on the home screen) or even make the phone ring, regardless of whether it’s on mute or not… so if it’s in a hidden pocket, you’ve got a chance of giving it a poke to make some noise.
If and when you find the phone, to stop the special ring-tone, just press the power button once (the same trick that you can use to silence any ringing phone, even when locked).
One reader started using a great trick for remembering where he’s going – by pinning the map location to the home screen. Start by searching for a location, address, facility etc in the Maps app, then press and hold on the flag to see a detailed view of that location offering “about” (including address details, phone numbers), possibly some restaurant reviews etc, and “nearby” (other places in the vicinity).
If you look to the bottom left of the screen, you’ll see a pin shape that lets you pin a tile to the home screen; tap on the tile to return to the “about” page, and tap on the map image in the about page to go straight to the map in the Bing Maps app.
Tap and hold on the map tile on the home screen to remove it when you’re done.
Nice. Really nice. For more map tips, check here.
The “Tag” initiative has been around for a little while, in beta guise initially, then general release. The idea is that anyone can generate a 2D “barcode” that can could be a link to a website for more information, could be contact information, some plain text or even a “dialer” that would redirect a mobile device to call your number. If you’re printing posters or any other ad material, it’s easy to include a tag, and it can be customised so it’s not such an eye-sore as other, similar tagging approaches.
The ideal consumption device for tags is a mobile phone with a camera, and the team behind this technology have been profligate with their support for phone platforms – send anyone to http://gettag.mobi and they can get software for Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile & Windows Phone 7 (also available from the Zune Marketplace on your PC if you’re using WP7).
To use a tag, just fire up the app, point your phone at the physical – or on-screen – instance of the tag, and within the app, “scan” it by taking a picture. It’s as simple as that. The phone will then take you to the website, call the number, display the text or give you the option of saving the contact details.
If you want to generate your own tags, it’s a piece of cake – head over to http://tag.microsoft.com and sign in with your Windows Live ID. You can then create tags and download in a variety of formats, and even track how often the tags you create have been opened.
For stories of how Microsoft Tag is being used – including a photo of a guy with a Tag tattoo on his head – check out the team’s blog. Here’s another example of tag customisation that blends in a bit more than the relatively ugly QR Codes that some ads contain.
After the first year of ToWs, let’s start the 2nd with a short celebration of a cool feature in OneNote – not revolutionary, but the kind of thing that makes one smile when encountering it – somebody really thought about how OneNote was likely being used.
Try typing a sum – like 52x1045= (that’s the number of ToW emails times the current readership) and when you press Enter, Space, TAB etc, you’ll see that OneNote does you the service of calculating the answer. It even works with brackets and everything… try out different operators (*, x, /, ^2 etc).
Not everything in OneNote’s garden is rosy. Try copying a table (with formatting) from Excel and pasting into a OneNote notebook and you’ll maybe feel a little short changed. You could try grabbing the screen area (by looking for the Screen Clipping tool on the Insert tab), or by pressing WindowsKey-S, which will immediately grab a screen area of your choice and paste it either into a OneNote book, or put it in the Clipboard.
Share and Share alike OneNote is such a useful way of sharing info, using SharePoint to host shared OneNote documents for work purposes, or synching personal info around – there was a way of sharing a notebook between work & home PCs, using the now-superceded Live Mesh (which was replaced by Windows Live Mesh as part of Windows Live Essentials).
A potentially simpler way of achieving the same thing is to use the newly-upgraded SkyDrive & OneNote in concert with one another, using SkyDrive to create a notebook that lives in the cloud and then, having opened the Notebook in the OneNote Web App, it’s a snap to open it in OneNote and to synchronise it onto multiple PCs.
If you have a Windows Phone 7, check out the Office Hub and look in there at OneNote – if you set the WP7 up to use your Windows Live address and choose to sync OneNote with SkyDrive, it will (by default) create a notebook called Personal (Web) in the Documents / My Documents folder. You can keep it to yourself or share it with others – click the “Shared with:” link on SkyDrive to assign permissions.
If you use this OneNote notebook to keep your scraps of personal stuff, it will synch to the cloud (accessible via a browser and OneNote Web App), via any number of PCs that you choose to synchronise it to, and it’ll also be accessible from – and updateable with – your phone.
A tip this week concerning best practices for using Enterprise Voice in OCS or Lync for making and receiving voice calls…
Participating in OCS/Lync Calls:
Hosting a OCS/Lync Meeting:
There is also some best practice for hosting a OCS/Lync meeting – the 5 golden rules. In summary:
If you are hosting the meeting, always set-up 5-10 minutes in advance, to upload presentation(s) and to complete the following steps..
**Also remember to Mute yourself if you are not speaking
*the reason for using a wired connection is partly due to a behaviour that Windows Vista and Windows 7 introduced – where a PC has both a wired and wireless connection, the PC assumes you are using a laptop and needs to be prepared to be disconnected, so it uses the wireless in preference to wired network.
You you can set your PC to always favour the wired network, if one is available…
The downside of doing this is that if you do unplug your laptop from the wired network, it might disconnect you from OCS/Lync and any file copying etc might get dropped.
If you want to check what your network is doing, and in particular, which connection is being used, check the Network tab in Task Manager (start it quickly by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-ESC).
As well as serving us up a daily delight by way of its home page image, Bing continues to add and innovate other interesting and useful ways to help us find information. There are many examples of where a 10-second Bing search could save time or provide a little more information that could alter the way we do something.
Put in the flight number, for example, and you’ll get real time tracking or departure/arrival information. Enter a post code and you’ll get a map.
Search for a product name and maybe you’ll get price estimates, links to reviews, even specifications lists. Put in currency (like £ and $) and you’ll get current exchange rates, all without needing to go into another site.
Visual Search If you haven’t seen or used Bing Visual Search before, give it a go – it really is very good when you’re doing comparison searching – eg top Windows Phone 7 applications. Using Bing to search and filter for Windows Phone 7 apps is (surprisingly) miles better, quicker and more controllable than using either the desktop Zune software or the App Marketplace on the phone itself.
Bing before you email A good bit of advice would be to quickly search before sending an email asking a question (it might take you much longer to write the email than it would to type in a search) and you’d get to enquire of the mass knowledge & ignorance on the internet. An example from the other day was an email warning of a scam – a parcel company was supposedly dropping a “sorry we missed you” card through the door, but the number you’d call back to get more information was a premium rate one. A quick search on Bing revealed that this was an urban myth based on some real events that happened 5 years ago. And still, the email is doing the rounds…
Search History Did you know that Bing keeps a record of your search history? Look to the left after you’ve done a search for anything and it will show you recent searches you’ve done. You can go further back in time (28 days) by looking on the Search History page (accessible via “More” from the top left of the page), and you can remove individual entries if you find yourself searching off piste. Apparently. The truly paranoid can switch the whole thing off and clear their history.
We’ve all had unwanted emails from external sources – so-called “Spam”, after the famous Python sketch that featured a café with Spam in every dish on the menu.
A further menace is “Corporate Spam”, or stuff that you don’t want, but which originates from within the corporate network. Usually, C-Spam is simply being cc’ed on a long email that you really won’t ever read, but Distribution Groups provide many other opportunities to send large volumes of email to people who don’t want it.
There are, however, several weapons in Outlook 2010 to help the C-Spam burden be reduced, eg…
Ignore Conversation – find yourself on an email trail with lots of people saying “me too”, “+1”, “please stop hitting reply-all” etc? Simply right-click on any message in that thread, and choose “Ignore…” and the whole lot will be moved to the Deleted Items folder. Any future message in the same thread will be automatically deleted too. See a Demo.
This feature was semi-inspired by a legendary incident that occurred within Microsoft some years ago, known simply as “Bedlam DL3”. Someone in Microsoft IT had been testing automatic creation of very large distribution lists and adding people – alphabetically – to the DL. There were a whole series of Bedlam DLs, but one person spotted they were a member of DL3 one day, by looking at their own entry in the GAL, in the “Member of” tab.They emailed Bedlam DL3 asking “why am I on this DL, please take me off”. The other 20,000+ people on the DL received that message,many of who also said “me too”, followed by many “STOP SENDING EMAILS TO THIS LIST” type messages.
In the 24 hours after the Bedlam DL3 touch-paper was lit, the Microsoft internal email system sent more messages than was normal for a whole year. Needless to say, the quality of service was less than optimal.
Do Not Reply All – Information Rights Management (something we’ll cover in a future ToW) gives us lots of control over what can happen to an email, but it’s a little heavy handed if all you want to do is stop people replying. IRM is now supported on some mobile devices and within Outlook Web Access, but it’s not quite ubiquitous, and can be a little intrusive for the recipient.
Well, Gavin Smyth of MS Research sent in details of a great Outlook addin he’s written, which exposes a little-known tweak that will stop Outlook from the “Reply-All” syndrome – the root of the Bedlam DL3 problem.
Simply click on the appropriate Ribbon icon, and when you send an email, you can prevent internal recipients from passing it on. The No Reply All and No Forward functions aren’t rigidly enforced like in IRM, and they only work within the organisation – but they’re quick and easy to use, and have no negative impact for the recipients – it just looks like a normal email, but in Outlook, the “Reply All” or “Forward” buttons are grayed out. Simple.
More details are here. Download the ZIP file for the NoReplyAll addin’s setup here.
This tip came about after one reader asked if there was any way to highlight email, in Outlook, that came from a set of external addresses [in short, it kind-of is, but it’s not so straightforward]. There’s a more universally useful tip lurking beneath, though – how can I hide all the internal stuff/organisational spam that I get sent via email, and show just the mail that came from customers, partners or others from the outside world?
This is a long tip but very worthwhile… One solution here is to use Outlook Search Folders.
These are special folders that can be created in Outlook, which show results of a query across multiple folders – like “show all flagged messages” (anywhere in the mailbox). Super-useful and a topic to return to in a later ToW…
This process will take a few minutes to set up, but it will live forever in your Exchange mailbox (ie you don’t have to repeat all this if you move to another machine).
Step 1 – Let Outlook figure out which emails originated from the outside world
If you’re using Exchange Server, then (generally) any email which comes from the outside world passes through an anti-spam layer which looks for how likely that message is to be “spam”, by analysing not only its content but where it came from – and the message is stamped with a Spam Confidence Level, or SCL. A message with a very high SCL (like 7) is probably going to be dropped on the floor by the filtering process, but emails with an SCL of 4 or 5 might look a bit spammy but could in fact be genuine. So chances are, they’ll get let through but might be dropped into your Junk Items folder. We can use the SCL value to figure out if an email came from the outside or not – internal emails just won’t have an SCL or it will be value of -1, but all external emails will have an SCL of 0 or higher.
So the first thing we need to do is “expose” the SCL to Outlook – you could add it to a standard view if you like, so you could view external emails’ date, sender, size etc, and their likelihood to be spam. This process can be a tad involved but if you follow the steps exactly, it should be fine – you might want to print this message out since it involves fiddling about in various parts of Outlook that will make it less easy to refer to the tip.
OK, here goes…
OK, you could now add SCL to your default view if you really want … otherwise skip to step 2…
(this example was in Junk Items, incidentally)
Step 2 – Set up a Search Folder to filter out anything that isn’t external
Now that Outlook can see the SCL value, it’s relatively straightforward to set up a suitable Search Folder. To begin, navigate to your Search Folders in the folder tree within Outlook, , right-click and choose New Search Folder (or press CTRL-SHIFT-P).
Everyone can see their PC slow down inexplicably, but getting to the bottom of why can be tricky. It could be an occasional task that’s running (like an update being applied to Anti-Virus software), or perhaps something more sinister is going on – a badly constructed web page causing IE to use up system resources, even a virus doing its dirty work. Or maybe it’s just Outlook deciding that it needs to do some lengthy maintenance to large data files.
There are plenty of tools built into Windows 7 that will help tell you what is happening – such as the “CPU Meter” desktop Gadget (right-click on desktop, choose Gadgets, and drag it onto the desktop to see a realtime view of how your computer’s processor – CPU- is performing, and how much memory is currently in use).
If you want to get deeper under the hood, there’s always Performance Monitor or its new friend, Resource Monitor (just go to start menu, type “Resource” and you’ll find it).
A quick and relatively simple way of checking what’s hogging your PC’s performance, is the Task Manager tool – you can start it by pressing CTRL-ALT-DEL and choosing Start Task Manager from the list, or right-click on the taskbar and see the same option, or (the quickest and easiest way), simply press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC.
Task Manager gives you the ability to see which applications or processes are using the main resources on the machine, and if necessary, gives you the ability to close them down. It’s possible to add other columns to the list, so you could see how much disk I/O each process is generating (so if your laptop’s hard disk is thrashing the whole time, you might see which app is causing it). Resource Monitor adds another layer of detail, and can be started from within Task Manager’s “Performance” tab.
The Über-Monitor If you’re feeling like all these namby-pamby built-in monitoring tools are too high level, you need ProcessExplorer. This tool came from a company (called Winternals) which Microsoft bought a few years ago, ostensibly to bring on board some nice free tools (and some that now sit in MDOP) and to get the brain of its chief technologist, one Mark Russinovich, who is now a “Technical Fellow” in Microsoft. A Jolly Technical Fellow, no less.
“Technical Fellow” is the highest technical level in Microsoft, equivalent to Corporate VP, and is bestowed on a few legendary folk. The guy who invented Vax/VMS and designed Windows NT? Check. The guys who developed (with a few friends) the graphical UI, distributed computing, ethernet, the laser printer and the mouse? Take a bow, Butler, Chuck.
If you ever get to see Mark give a talk at TechEd, you’ll realise just how deep his knowledge goes. Here are recordings of some of his talks - there’s also a TechEd introduction to some of the tools, here.
Process Explorer lets you see not only what services/processes are hogging the machine, but what is causing them to do it – as with any such tools, you could do a great deal of harm by killing off the wrong thing… but if you fire it up and simply have a look, it’s quite interesting…
For the true die-hards, it’s possible (through the Options menu) to “Replace Task Manager” so that ProcExp is fired up by the same means (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC etc) that Task Manager was.
This could be the new measure of the true geek – only Process Explorer users would qualify.
If you sit at a shared desk with a monitor on it, but are content to just use your laptop screen, then this tip is for you. Also, if you use your laptop and display the same image on both its internal panel and an attached external screen, listen up.
Multi-mon in Windows 7 – the ability to extend your desktop to cover multiple screens – is quite possibly its killer feature. Seriously. I bought a 2nd widescreen monitor for my home PC, just because it’s so useful.
Using multiple monitors couldn’t be simpler – plug in to your laptop (or plug a 2nd monitor into your desktop if you have one – many desktop PCs now have a VGA and a DVI connector, so you could drive one of each), and press WindowsKey-P to bring up the display selector, if necessary (since windows 7 does a good job of remembering your previous settings, you should only have to do this once).
(If you’re running a laptop with Windows 7, you do not need to do Fn-F7 or whatever to send the display to a projector. Same thing goes with managing an external display – Win-P does most of what you’ll need).
Shortcut keys are indispensible when managing multiple monitors – here are a few:
*actually, it’s possible to have an array of screens – these key combinations merely move the window one along the array. Here’s someone taking things to extreme, I feel…
Now, sometimes you won’t have monitors side-by-side – but that’s OK. Right-click on your desktop and choose Screen Resolution and you can move things around a bit…
In the example above, the 2nd display is offset to the top left and has a different resolution (1440x900 vs 1400x1050) and aspect ratio (16:9 widescreen vs 4:3 standard) to the main laptop screen. This happens to be my 2nd monitor when working at home. You can drag & drop the position of the 2nd monitor in relation to the primary one, and it gets saved for future – so your mouse moves appropriately between the two, or you can drag windows between (and even span) the two screens.
In the office, I use a 4:3 monitor (pictured below). The screen size/resolution can make for some interesting effects in comparison with the laptop panel, but here I have it set to stack the two screens vertically. Really handy when working on a couple of different things at once, or even when showing something to another user – far easier for them to see it on the big screen than squint at the laptop.
Most obscure tip of the week - WndKey+SHIFT+Up arrow –stretches a window’s height to span both monitors if they’re stacked vertically as shown above. Nope, I can’t think of too many uses for it either.
If you’re super-efficient and use Outlook’s tasks functionality a lot, here’s a tip that might help you create a new task in double-quick time.
Obviously, you can create tasks directly from Outlook itself (clicking on the New Items ribbon menu option, by pressing CTRL-N when you’re in the Tasks view itself, or by pressing CTRL-SHIFT-K if you’re anywhere else in Outlook).
If you’re in OneNote, position the cursor next to the action item or other text that you want to make a task from, and either click the giant Tasks flag on the Ribbon, or else use the keyboard shortcuts that are displayed on the menu.
Pretty useful so far, eh?
Well, here’s a final method for creating new Outlook tasks that is accessible from anywhere – if you’re reading a web page or a Word doc, it can help you immediately fire up a new Outlook task without having to navigate into Outlook to do it.
The tip uses a Shortcut for an application – a technology that was introduced with Windows 95 and even has its roots in the old Win3.x “Program Manager”.
The simplest way to create a shortcut is to look at your desktop (WinKey+D will instantly minimise all windows). Actually you might want to minimise everything, then ALT-TAB back to this email, then use WindowsKey+LeftArrow to dock it to one side, leaving an area of exposed desktop.
Now, right-click on the desktop and select New -> Shortcut then start typing in \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\Outlook.exe (you’ll see as you type, that the full names of each directory get auto-completed for you, so you could just use the up/down keys to select the right one, and by pressing “\” again, you’ll be able to carry on typing the name of the next folder…).
Once you’ve got OUTLOOK.EXE, hit Next, then give the shortcut a meaningful name (like New Task). Now, right-click on the shortcut, change the icon if you like (to be less generic Outlook and more Task-oriented), and add /c ipm.task to the end of the command line. This tells Outlook that you want to start directly in a new item window – you could later create other shortcuts with other types if you like (ipm.note for email, ipm.contact, ipm.appointment, ipm.stickynotes etc…).
Now click on the “Shortcut Key” box in the properties dialog and press whatever combination of shortcut keys you can remember: CTRL-ALT-T might be a good place to start. Press OK to finish, and Robert’s your father’s brother. Now press that key combo from anywhere and it should fire up a new Task window to the fore.
Other Outlook command line switches are available… if you’re feeling brave.
“The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.” ~Thomas Jefferson
Brevity. That’s one, important, word. Better to write a short, thorough email, than to overwhelm with info no-one will ever read (something a few folks in Redmond have yet to appreciate, perhaps). As Blaise Pascal noted, it takes longer to create a short letter than to write a long one.
If, however, you find you do need to write lenghty emails, especially ones with lots of information, you might find it worthwhile looking into Bookmarks. Just like in long documents in Word, it’s possible to create reference points within an email, then provide links to jump directly to those places.
brevity | join & leave | history
Simply select the text you want to link from, go to Insert | Hyperlink and instead of linking to a URL, choose the “Place in this Document” option, then pick the appropriate bookmark.
As has been mentioned in a couple of earlier ToW’s, it’s often quicker to use the keyboard to do things, than to take your hands off the keyboard and fish about for a mouse or other means of pointer manipulation. In the vast majority of cases, for example, whenever there’s a box that lets you type some text and an “OK” button to accept it, pressing ENTER will have the same effect as finding your pointer and clicking on the button, and will save you precious seconds in so doing.
An easy way of shaving more seconds from the daily grind is to remember the old names of executable files, rather than relying on finding an icon in the Start menu and clicking on it. Remember the days of DOS-style “8.3” filenames, where programs would have a .EXE (or even a .COM) extension? If you entered the bit preceding the “.” in a command prompt, then DOS or Windows would just run the program (without needing to add the .EXE bit).
Well, some things never change. Windows preserves the same ability to run an executable by entering its name, and in many cases, the “path” to where that executable lives (in the file system) will be included in the locations that Windows will look for appropriate files.
Maybe this is easier to “do” than to explain – try pressing WndKey-R, which will bring up the “Run” prompt that used to be on the Start menu but is no longer. At this point, you can ENTER the names of any of your favourite programs…
All of the above are mainstream productivity apps, but there are hunders of Windows system applications that could be occasionally useful, too:
In fact, you can launch all of these by just pressing the WindowsKey to bring up the start menu, and type in the name of the program and hit enter… but you don’t get the history of previous commands entered, which can be handy (eg to open a Remote Desktop session to another machine, you could enter “MSTSC /V <machinename>” and all of the recent entries will be recalled in the Most Recently Used list, and can be selected with a deft down-arrow or two, followed by ENTER.
Following on from ToW #9, regarding delaying sending email, this week’s episode was asked for by another reader, since he eagle-eyed-ly spotted that the email was send on one date but didn’t arrive in his inbox until a week later.
Aha! Now, it’s possible in Outlook to set that a message should not be delivered until a specific time but there are two distinct behaviours to this function.
Nowadays (since Outlook 2003, in fact), the default behaviour of Outlook is to be in “cached mode” – ie. mostly everything you do within Outlook happens to a cached copy of your Exchange mailbox, meaning the performance of Outlook in not dependent on the availability or speed of network access to the Exchange server.
In most cases, this is a great solution, however one downside is that that “Outbox” folder where email is held before being sent, doesn’t synchronise with the server, and is unique to the Outlook cached mode “profile” – so if you choose to send email at a later time and you’re in cached mode, it will only be sent if your PC is online.
The 2nd behaviour is if you’re using Outlook in “online mode” where the Outbox is a special folder that lives on the server, and mail sitting in it will be processed by the Exchange server at the appropriate time, regardless of whether you’ve got a client PC online or not.
If you need to regularly send mail at a time when you’re offline, the trick is to set up a second Outlook profile and use to actually do the sending… prepare in advance, hit send, and then amaze your colleagues by not only sending mail through a time vortex, but at a time when you’re known to be in the air/on a beach/asleep etc.
To set up a 2nd Profile
Et voila! The only challenge now is, how to get Outlook to actually use this profile?
Back at the Mail configuration applet, you can choose to have Outlook prompt you for which profile to use every time it starts, and set which one will appear by default – in this case “Outlook” is the standard profile in Cached Mode, and a simple hit of the enter key will select that option when Outlook starts up.
If this is a once-in-a-blue-moon requirement, you could simply leave the setting to always use the Cached Mode profile, and then when you want to go into Online Mode, simply close Outlook, go into Control Panel, change this setting to prompt you, then start Outlook again (and maybe reverse that procedure when you’re finished)
Now when you start Outlook up in “online” mode, you might see that it’s a bit more sluggish, since everything you do (open an email, open an attachment in an already-opened-email, sort a folder etc) requires that the client and the server send potentially large amounts of data back & forth. So it’s best to limit your “online” mode bit to as short as possible. You may notice that the status bar now says “Online with…” rather than “Connected to Microsoft Exchange”.
Sending mail from the past
The best way to do this is to draft the email you want to send when you’re in Cached Mode, and make sure a copy of it is in your Drafts folder.
You won’t see the pending email in your Outbox when you return to cached mode, since that Outbox folder is coming from your PC and not the server. You will see the email sitting in the Outbox folder if you log in again using Outlook & the Online profile.
*on closing Outlook, you may need to close other applications that use Outlook, or wait a little for all the addins that Outlook could be running (like GSX), to shut down - if when attempting to start Outlook in online mode, and you don’t get prompted for a profile as you might be expecting, that means Outlook is still running.
If this happens, try closing Outlook again and check in Task Manager to make sure OUTLOOK.EXE isn’t still there. Top tip for getting Task Manager running quickly, even if Windows Explorer has hung… CTRL+SHIFT+ESC. There you go, multiple tips for the price of one…
Anyone who gets lots of email will appreciate the importance of Outlook rules. Most rules run on the Exchange server, but some (like rules which move messages to a PST folder on your PC) will run client-side.
In Outlook 2010, the Rules settings are available from the File menu (or Backstage).
Over the last few versions, Outlook has made it easier to create rules – if you right-click on an email, you can now create rules to move email sent by the orginator or mail sent to the destination (such as a Distribution List). This can help you filter out the noisier DL’s (like Ltd Social) into a sub folder so they don’t clutter up your inbox.
If it’s Not Direct to Me -> take it away for now This tip might take a few minutes to set up – you’d be well advised to print this message out, since you might not be able to refer back to it whilst you’re editing your rules.
A great use of Rules is to filter out any email which isn’t sent directly to you, or isn’t handled by another rule to move it to a specific place. Does that sound confusiing? If so, the logic is: If <this new email> is sent to a DL that I want to move to a specific folder, then
Move it to the folder, and stop doing anything more with it.
Otherwise,
Move the email to the “not direct to me” folder unless it’s sent directly to me or to a DL (in which case leave it alone, in my Inbox)
The key part here is the “Stop processing more rules” action within the Outlook rules wizard. After you’ve created the rule (through the one-click option above, perhaps), you can go back in and edit it, adding other actions or conditions. On the same part of the wizard that says to move the message to a folder, you can also stipulate that Outlook stops doing anything further with that message after it gets moved (otherwise, it could be moved to one place, then moved again to a different one).
If you arrange your rules so that each “move to a folder” type rule also stops processing any more (indicated in the rules list by the hammer/spanner icon on the right), then set the final rule in the list to be the one that dictates whether a message will stay in your inbox, or whether it gets moved to one other folder.
This way, you can keep the most important emails coming into your inbox, and the “FYI” type DLs that aren’t noisy enough to earn their own sub-folder, will all get swept up into one place.
Happy rule tweaking!
Some people love keyboard shortcuts – producivity guru David Allen (not to be confused with the the late comedian) recommends, as part of his Getting Things Done methodology, that learning a few keyboard shortcuts will make everyone more productive in doing routine things more quickly. ToW #10 highlighted some Outlook shortcuts that can make everyone’s life better, but there are many that apply to Windows and other applications that are worth remembering.
Using the clipboard Let’s start simply – copy (CTRL-C), cut (CTRL-X) and paste (CTRL-V) apply to pretty much every application in Windows. There’s no need to take your hand off the keyboard and go for the mouse right-click if you’re looking to manipulate text. These key combinations can trace their lineage all the way back to Xerox PARC, where pretty much everything we understand as the modern computer was invented or perfected and implemented (graphical UI, mouse, network, laser printer…)
Did you know you can also use CTRL-Insert for copy, SHIFT-Insert to paste and SHIFT-Del for cut? The handy thing there is that most keyboards have a shift and control key on the right hand side, near INS and DEL keys… so you can cut, copy & paste with your right hand only… add to that the standard commands to select text – CTRL <– and CTRL –> moves the cursor one word backwards and forwards, and holding shift down at the same time selects the text from where you were starting from. So, holding shift, and selecting a few words, followed by CTRL-C or SHIFT-Insert, and you’ve copied them to the clipboard. SHIFT-Home selects everything to the left of the cursor on the current row, & SHIFT-End selects everything to the right.
Windows Key in Windows 7
But Windows 7’s got a whole host of shortcut keys that can make life easy, from WndKey-L to lock your keyboard or Wnd-“+” and Wnd-“-“ to zoom in and out. What about:
· Wnd - rightarrow, which docks the current window to the right of the screen
· Wnd - leftarrow, which docks to the left
· Wnd - uparrow, maximises the current window…
… and the reverse, Wnd-downarrow, restores it again, or minimises it to the taskbar)
· SHIFT-Wnd-rightarrow and SHIFT-Wnd-leftarrow moves the current window between two monitors (if you have them) or between your laptop and the projector (if you have it set to “Extend” rather than “Duplicate”, a choice you get when you use Wnd-P to switch screens).
With a bit of practice on some of these, you can take several minutes off repeated processes like editing a document or an email – just think how much more you could Get Things Done with nothing but some keyboard shortcuttery?
There are many, many other shortcuts – more details here.
Sometimes you need to create appointments that will make sense when you’re in a different time zone - it helps to use Outlook, Exchange and its phone integration to put relevant stuff in the calendar, so you can make sure you’re in the right place and at the right time.
Now there are a couple of ways to make Outlook more timezone-friendly – if you right-click on the time bar to the left of the calendar detail, then a fly-out menu will let you Change Time Zone. An alternative, can be found in the “Time Scale” option on the View tab when looking at the Calendar. As with many things, there are several ways to skin the proverbial cat…
If you choose to change the time zone, Outlook displays its options dialog, which lets you select the current time zone (and also sets the whole PC into that time zone so you needn’t change the PC clock separately), but helpfully also lets you display a second zone, and give both a label so you can see which is which…
If you edit an appointment, it’s also possible to show multiple time zones, and to set the destination time zone for an appointment to take place. In other words, if I’m arranging to meet someone at 7pm in Washington DC, I don’t need to manually figure out what time that is in the UK, I just set the time zone of the appointment to be Eastern Daylight Time.
As it happens, Outlook always converts an appointment back to “UTC”* – what we still know as GMT in the UK, is actually the base for all appointments, and then a time offset is applied depending on whether the time zone(s) in question have Daylight Saving Time in effect, etc. So an appointment is never 7pm in Washington DC, it’s actually at 00:00 then -5 is offset, since their time zone is UTC-5.
It’s even possible to have an appointment which starts and finishes in a different time zone. The only example I can think of this is a flight, but there may be others. Suggestions on a postcard please…
* UTC doesn’t actually stand for anything – the ITU standards body wanted a single worldwide abbreviation; English speakers wanted “Coordinated Universal Time” or CUT. French speakers wanted “temps universel coordonné” or TUC. Unable to separate the two factions, they compromised and chose UTC.
Have you ever heard that a meeting is happening, that you feel you should be attending, but weren't invited to? Have you ever asked someone "could you forward me that meeting?" so that it appears in your calendar?
Well, there's no need to place the action on the other person - with Outlook's side/side calendar view, you can do it yourself.
In the example here, Andrew has a meeting I want to attend. If I view his calendar side/side, and simply drag & drop the meeting to the left, it will add it to my own calendar.
At the point of "dropping" the meeting, Outlook will prompt if you want to send an Acceptance (just like if you'd opened a meeting request you'd been sent), and you're added to the list of attendees so the originator of the meeting will see that you're now joining them.
So no surprises when you walk into the room.
Toni Kent from Microsoft UK’s partner group once again provides the inspiration for this week’s tip.
Everyone loves the side-by-side windows feature of Windows 7, where you can dock windows to the sides of your monitor by dragging them (or pressing ÿ+→ or ÿ+←). But sometimes it doesn’t appear to work if you have several documents open, and want to compare them side by side, particularly if they are spreadsheets.
It’s all to do with how applications open multiple windows. Microsoft Word, for example, opens each document in a separate instance of Word, so if you have two docs open, it’s a snap to show them side/side. Excel, by contrast, prefers to open each new worksheet within a single “Excel” application.
So, whilst Windows 7 will show previews of multiple windows, they’re actually just multiple documents opened within Excel.
If you want to see Excel windows side by side, try going into the View menu in Excel, and click on the View Side by Side option on the Ribbon, then choose which of the additional open worksheets you’d like to compare the current one with.
There’s also the option in Excel to “tile” open worksheet windows, so you could have more than 2 arranged side by side or one above the other.
This week’s tip comes from a reader: over to Microsoft UK’s Rob Orwin…
In order to help my forecasting, I synchronise the appropriate documents to my Outlook so that when I send and receive they are automatically updated.
To do this I simply:
1) Go to the SharePoint site where the documents are held
2) Click, “Actions”
3) Click Connect To Outlook – As per screenshot
4) The spreadsheets magically appear in my outlook folder, cunningly named TPAM ISV as per screenshot
5) Whenever I hit “Send & Receive” I get the latest version
Net result: This means that when I’ve no access to SharePoint, I can quickly get the latest, synchronized copy of the forecast spreadsheet and have up to date info at my fingertips giving my notably more time to work on my excuses …
Rob’s highlighted a great way of taking SharePoint files offline, which not only makes them available when you’re not connected, but also speeds up opening them if they’re big files… since you’ve already got them on your machine, in Outlook’s data files. The one downside is that they’re read only if using SharePoint 2007 – thought SharePoint 2010 gives the ability to do bi-directional…
There are other areas of integration that you might be aware of, too… like taking a SharePoint calendar or contacts list, and exposing it in Outlook – but this time, you can can edit the data in Outlook and it flows back to the SharePoint 2007 site…