60: The problem with coupons

Posted on January 17, 2025 (Updated January 16, 2025) by ewand

Lots of online shops have promo codes that can be entered as part of the checkout process, to get a discount, free shipping or similar. Sign up to their newsletter and get 5% off your first/next order, they might say. It’s usually a reward for or enticement to repeat custom, or if you believe in more sinister motives, a ploy to get you to hand over your data and expose your very living soul.

Use one of the many “coupon lookup” sites and you could easily find codes that can save significant amounts of money, especially if you’re buying expensive stuff. To the end user, it looks like free money but there’s a deeper and darker subtext. As we’ll learn, there’s never really such a thing as free money.

Don’t click the bottom one…

Sites like Coupert, Vouchercodes and more sometimes tell you what special offer codes are currently active; be wary of any which offer to “automatically apply all codes” or you’ll end up installing a browser extension, which you almost certainly don’t want to do.

1^st party coupons

Microsoft has shoehorned “shopping” into Edge (similar to what Google does with Chrome, though Edge’s is a bit more internationally inclusive and somewhat easier to use), and has a Bing shopping site that’s similar to Google Shopping too.

If the feature is enabled in Edge, you’ll see a little shopping label icon in the address bar when you’re browsing something that the browser might have more insights on, and possibly be able to keep a track on the price too.

Both browser tools are convenient way to find coupons and codes, alongside price comparisons, price history etc, even if you could probably find keener deals and info by looking around yourself.

For vouchers and deals, the browser is basically scraping other sites which purport to offer them, though anyone who has tried such sites previously will probably find out many of the codes don’t work anymore.

Margins to share

Retailers typically have a high markup on stuff they sell, expressed often as a margin – if a clothing outlet sells a shirt for $100 and they are buying it from their supplier at $40, then they have a 60% gross margin. That seems a lot relative to the cost of the actual goods, but then the retailer has to run premises, pay staff, deal with returns and annoying customers – all of which will eat into that margin and give them a much lower %age of profit. So far, so good.

When dealing with online transactions, especially if the delivery cost is charged additionally, the overheads will be a lot lower and therefore the margin could afford to be less – that’s why many online-only retailers can sell the same things at a lower price than you’d find in the shops. But at least in trad. retail, customers might be browsing – they could be wandering through a mall and decide to drop in to a store and end up seeing something they didn’t know they wanted. In online retail, that’s so much less likely, therefore they try to attract buyers in other ways.

Online retailers find it sometimes helps to share the margin they make; hence the deals with cashback sites or credit cards, and by issuing voucher codes to incentivise customers to buy now while the deal is there. They may also have referral codes or links that give a small discount to the end purchaser and a kickback to the referring source as well.

Influencers and other “content creators” can earn money by talking about stuff and linking to places where you can buy it, potentially earning $thousands for driving extra buyers into the waiting arms of the online sellers. Sometimes they’ll have a voucher code that gets money off (and which the retailer can track so they know how much extra business is coming from that source). Sometimes the code is built into links on the blog or website, that when you click through (and subsequently buy), will share some margin back to the referrer.

Honey: The sweetest deal?

Along with the features browsers have built-in, there are loads of addins which can be used to help the shopping experience. Honey was a pioneer, so much so that PayPal shelled out a cool $4B a few year back.

Recent investigations have shown Honey’s business model to be on thin ice, though – ostensibly telling users that they can find the best deals with Honey, while getting retailers to pay them to offer only a limited set of the deals which might otherwise exist… so instead of Honey telling you of a sweet 10% deal you could get, they might be taking 2% off the retailer and showing you a 5% code.

Addins like Honey also sometimes pay to have their offering promoted – including paying money to influencers to have the Honey extension featured. To the chagrin of some – even leading to legal action – it appears that Honey has also been rewriting the referral links from other sites too.

So, Honey pays Spongebob Influencerpants to say nice things about them and feature on his site; all Sponge’s users run off and install Honey and are happy they’re getting something for little effort.

Later, when a user clicks on a link to buy some tat in the description text of Spongy’s latest video, instead of him getting the kickback from the retailer, the Honey addin is intercepting and rewriting the URL and pocketing the referral fee for itself.

Even if you think most influencers are gopping eejits, do check out Marques Brownlee – who is one of the smartest and most balanced of the oeuvre – and see what he says about the “Honey Scam”. Unsurprisingly, he recommends uninstalling the Honey addin with all speed.

Whatever the reality of this situation is, it’s certainly not cricket.

#59: Emulation of things past

Posted on January 10, 2025 by ewand

Many people of a certain age (men, mostly?) may have spent a good amount of time over the holiday season indulging in a recherche du temps perdu, harking back to their own childhood or teenage years. Late in 2024, a company called Retro Games brought out a faithful-looking £90 / $100 replica of the 1982 Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The “Speccy” was the first home computer in the UK to really take off; worldwide and across several iterations, it went on to sell 5 million units, way before the advent of home PCs or modern gaming consoles (apart from the earlier cartridge types like the Atari 2600). More importantly, the Spectrum was hugely influential in launching careers of thousands of technologists who got their first taste of the computing world at the hands of its dead-flesh rubbery keyboard. They even made a film about it.

This new machine dubbed “The Spectrum” differs from the original in a number of key ways – powered through a USB-C port and with HDMI output to a modern display in place of the old RF out to a portable telly, and it comes with 48 built-in, licensed original Spectrum games to enjoy. But it looks and feels very similar to the original – making erstwhile fans somewhat weak at the knees.

Pump the garish, blocky colours and frankly horrific opening-screen soundtrack to Manic Miner through a big TV and you might wonder what the fuss was all about, but persevere and you might recall just how fiendishly addictive and difficult some of these games were. There’s even a “CRT mode” to make the graphics a bit more blurry for extra vintage feel.

A video game with a red background

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You can add other games via the huge archive at World Of Spectrum, by copying them to a USB stick. Thankfully, most of the programs will start in a blink of an eye rather than the several tedious minutes of loading from a finicky tape player. It’s amazing what clever programmers could do in 48K of RAM; that the image of Eugene’s Lair above is 4 times the size of the whole of the Manic Miner game.

The Spectrum starts up in a kind of home screen allowing for easy selection of what you want to run, though for true Old Skool vibes, you can revert to the original blank screen / BASIC programming UI..

A screen shot of a computer

Hardware

The original ZX Spectrum had a total of 64K of memory (16K reserved for the system, hence why 48K was available for use) and used an 8-bit Zilog Z80A processor running at 3.5MHz. The Spectrum is based around an ARM chip (isn’t everything?) and emulates the original Z80 and the custom silicon chip (the ULA) which hung it all together.

An emulator basically translates – in real time – between the environment the software thinks it should be running in, and the hardware which is actually available today. It’s not unlike reading a book in a foreign language, translating each word into English by looking it up in the dictionary then figuring out if the phrasing of the sentence needs to be rearranged… all in real time.

Emulation used to be seen as a poor way of building compatibility as it is quite expensive in compute terms, as the resulting programs will be slower than they would be otherwise. When Apple moved the Mac from its original Motorola 68000 architecture to PowerPC, a built-in emulator made sure that most old programs would still run, and even though they were slower than if they had been developed for PowerPC, the fact that the new machine was more powerful than the old, made up the difference. In this kind of instance, it is translating one radically different hardware architecture to another.

Another good example is how Microsoft allowed the Xbox One to be able to run Xbox 360 games, even though Xbox One was based on an Intel chip and Xbox 360 on PowerPC. Since the Xbox basically runs each game in a custom version of its own operating system, every “backward compatible” game needs to have a package built specifically to emulate not just the 360 hardware but the version of the OS that it would normally expect.

There are a list of Xbox 360 and even Xbox Original games (the OG ones are mostly Star Wars ones, tbf), and in some cases they have been enhanced to take advantage of later hardware; the game thinks it’s talking to an Xbox 360 and asking it to draw graphics at HD resolution, but on a Series X it could be up-frame-rated and upscaled to 4K.

A video game screen with an object and a couple of buses

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Run on your existing device

The romance of “The Spectrum” is really all in the classic package; in reality, you can run a free Spectrum emulator and all of its software on your phone, PC, Mac, build your own on a Raspberry Pi or even run in a browser.

A screenshot of a video game

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Since most of the games for early consoles and computers were either ripping off an arcade game (see Hungry Horace vs Pac-Man) or were licensed versions which were nothing like as capable, what about emulating the original arcade machines on modern hardware?

MAME

Originally “Multi-Arcade Machine Emulator”, the MAME project set out to build an emulator platform that could take on any number of arcade machines from the 1970s – 90s and maybe beyond. Since arcade games were essentially bespoke hardware in the early days, there’s a lot to do to emulate whatever processor and other chips each one might have come with, but again, modern computing is way beyond what a mid-1980s arcade machine could muster. MAME is an open-source emulator platform which aims to be able to preserve any kind of old computer and its software.

Find out more about MAME; there are even ports to run in a browser too, so you can relive the original Space Invaders in your morning coffee break.

A screenshot of a video game

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#58: Tales of Yuletide cheer

Posted on December 20, 2024 (Updated December 19, 2024) by ewand

A tradition of Tip o’ // of the Week at the end of each year, has been to post some completely non-tech related stuff to help transition from “work” mode into the general lethargy of the festive season. Here’s something of a greatest hits, along with some new nonsense. Top tip if you’re reading this on LinkedIn: hold the CTRL key as you click on links, to pop them into a new tab rather than lose your place on this post.

Drink!

As if the festive season doesn’t present enough opportunities to over-indulge, making some cocktails to ease into the evening can be an effective way of doing it. Clearly, drinking responsibly is to be advised or you never know where that might lead.

One of the most popular of all Tips arrived 2 years back; it was certainly the most fun to write.

A martini glass with a drink in it

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662 – How to make the perfect martini

Some of the ingredients to the ideal martini might take a bit of sourcing, so you may need to stop reading this immediately and go shopping. Recommended gins include Berry Bros no 3 or Tanqueray 10, vodka is Grey Goose or Belvedere, use Dolin for vermouth or Lillet Blanc is you’re Vesper-ing (with a few drop of Angostura bitters too).

A group of bottles on a table

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The two brothers who took over the Angostura bitters company decided it was time to rebrand; one designed the bottle, the other the label. They didn’t think to consult each other and the label was too big. 150 years later, it still is.

For espresso martinis, fill a cocktail shaker of glass with ice cubes and add one measure of vodka (even cheaper stuff – save the Grey Goose for better cocktails), one measure of coffee liqueur (Kahlua is OK, if a bit sweet; make your own if you have time, or Mr Black’s if you can find it). Just before serving, add the same measure again of hot, strong espresso and shake it like crazy. Pour into waiting glasses to get a nice crema. Top with a few coffee beans (three: definitely not an even number).

For more cocktail related fun and games, check out Richard Godwin on Substack.

Eat!

For delicious snacks to go with your cocktails above, try roasting some spiced pecans – in fact, they make a great accompaniment to a small salad with pear and blue cheese.

Spiced pecans

Pre-heat oven to 200C / 400F / Gas Mark 6
In a bowl, mix up 1.5 tsp of salt, 3 decent pinches of cayenne pepper, 3 tsp of Worcestershire [pr. Wooster] sauce and a good slug or 3 of Tabasco.
Add 225g of pecans and toss them well with the mixed goo.
Pour onto a baking tray and arrange in a single layer
Bake for 5 or 6 minutes, turning halfway through so they don’t get burnt on one side
Try to not to eat them all before they’re cooled. Put what’s left in an airtight tub and they’ll keep until the New Year (hah).

The above also works well with almonds or a mixture of the two. That way, you can save the pecans for…

Maple roasted pecans

Pre-heat the oven to 160C / Gas 3 / 325F
Mix 170g pecans with 2 tablespoons of maple syrup and 1 tsp of almond essence
Pour onto a tray and arrange in a single layer
Bake for 12 minutes, turning halfway

Green soup

For something more healthy, perhaps a starter on a big-meal day or a quick turkey-free lunch before the port and cheese of betwixtmas, how about a simple 3-ingredient green soup from a blue-mouthed celebrity?

A bowl of green soup

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658 – Sweary 3-ingredient soup

Chef Gordon Ramsay covered this simple recipe back on a show called F-Word (F for Flash…?) but the online videos showing you how to make it in 5 minutes have been taken down. He published it in the book, Gordon Ramsay Makes it Easy too. Or just follow the approach above; combine with a bit of goat’s or blue cheese for unctuousness and a couple of bits of walnut or pecan for extra texture.

Steak

The most popular (by some margin) post on an old TechNet blog called “The Electric Wand”, was how to cook a perfect fillet streak (and applies to other types too), later repurposed to the ToW hosting site – How to cook the perfect fillet steak.

In short, get the meat to room temperature, dry it with kitchen paper, apply oil and seasoning to the steak directly then cook it quicky on a searing hot pan for a short time on each side. Let it rest on a warm plate for at least as long as it cooked.

Rest

That’s it for Tip of the Week in 2024 – have a Merry / Happy whatever-you-call-it, and see you in the New Year!

#57: Excel-lent Conditional Formatting

Posted on December 13, 2024 (Updated December 11, 2024) by ewand

A theme of previous ToWs has been that applications often have lots more functionality than users either know or care about enough to utilise. Two of the simplest yet most impactful ways of handling data in Excel (and in Google Sheets, LibreOffice / OpenOffice etc, which basically copied the functionality) is to create tables from data, and to use conditional formatting to help them stand out.

Select a block of data – and for the purposes of these examples, we’re going to use some sample sales data – and on the home tab, it’s a few clicks to Format as Table. Even if you don’t intend to use more advanced formulae and get into naming tables and ranges, just doing the simple formatting and declaring the top row as headers gives you great ability to sort and filter the data quickly.

If you’re lucky, the table may automatically interpret the contents of your data, too – like understanding date fields. As we’ll get to later, you can even sort and filter by the appearance and not just the actual contents.

Users working on data in Excel which is clearly tabular but has not been defined as a Table, should almost be considered criminals.

Conditional Formatting made easy

Back on the Ribbon, the neighbouring Conditional Formatting control lets you add more pop to an existing Table or any other data. Select whatever cells, columns or rows you want to apply it to, and on the flyout menu you’ll have access to hundreds of options to visually distinguish certain data.

For simple “how to” and a cheesy video, check out the help on Use conditional formatting to highlight information in Excel.

If you need to do stuff that’s more complex, there’s also the option to write a formula but it’s quite different to regular Excel formulae – and can take a bit of working out, especially if it’s more complex. See the “Use a formula…” further down that previous help page.

Fortunately, there’s an easier way if you’re a Copilot user (and if you’re not, Microsoft has started pushing a free 1-month trial – just make sure you put a reminder in your diary or you’ll fall into the trap of subscribing to stuff you might not want). Rather than trying to write a formula and figure out the logic of it, you can just ask Copilot and it will comply…

After it has been applied, you could edit the rule to change its range, tweak the formula or adjust the formatting by going to the Manage Rules option under the Conditional Formatting menu. Make sure the “Show formatting rules for:” filter is set to the right area so you’ll see this and any other rules which may apply.

These rules are very useful for highlighting things that stick out – like due date on a pipeline report which have now passed, or a number that’s radically out of kilter with all the others in an export from a credit card account. If you’re dealing with very large sheets of data, you could filter the view not just by the values but by the colours that your formatting has set:

… thus temporarily hiding any of the rows which are not of interest.

Finally, you can interrogate data within Copilot without having to mess about with filters and the like, for example:

To validate that this is actually true, a pivot table can show the data by different dimensions and allow totalling, sorting and filtering: in this case, sorting (descending) by the sum of all orders:

Pivot Tables are some of the best magic that Excel delivers; it’s been a while since they’ve featured in ToW – leave a comment if you think that needs addressing. See here for more examples of Copilot prompts in Excel.

#56: Hey kids, look who’s back!

Posted on December 6, 2024 (Updated December 5, 2024) by ewand

When does old become retro, and how does fashion decide when something uncool becomes drip? Brand equity rises and falls all the time; some just go out of date and are left behind, while some try to reassert themselves to speed up the cycle – see Jaguar / jaGuar’s recent hoo-hah and “Copy Nothing” brand rehab…

[Richard Ayoade in IT Crowd c 2006, Jaguar deleting ordinary in 2024, Reeves & Mortimer c1993]

(Eddie Izzard has some mildly sweary thoughts about the whole “Looking cool…” cycle).

Retro tech

It’s amusing when old tech becomes cool again – from hipsters rocking LCD digital watches, to GenZers toting feature phones like it was the 1990s. Some brands were never fashionable, like AOL: using an aol.com email address even 20 years ago was a marker of technological unsophistication. Amazingly, you can still sign up for an aol.com address today if you feel like sending email from the past.

Many other products and services were all the rage, then just weren’t – and one good example is Microsoft’s MSN, which now seems to be coming back from life support. Well, certain elements (which are not yet part of the revamp) were very pervasive and cool back in the day … remember MSN Messenger, before Microsoft bungled it into Skype? It was so down with the kids, even a youthful Stormzy was using it (and that’s how he got his name).

The Microsoft Network

MSN first arrived 30 years ago as part of the Windows 95 (“Chicago”) beta program; it was a “walled garden” network service providing proprietary content through a dial up network. Market leaders AOL and CompuServe had similarly restricted services – using them wasn’t really “being on the internet” other than you could browse pages written for those services, use email and later, instant messaging. Win95 initially didn’t even have a TCP/IP stack built-in, so without 3^rd party software, you couldn’t be directly connected to the ’net.

MSN’s late 90s paid-for dial-up service became a regular ISP and there was a Premium subscription available to netizens who wanted additional security and the likes.

From that closed offering, the MSN brand morphed into something applied to lots of Microsoft’s consumer-oriented web experiences – from the Yahoo!-like attempt to establish a homepage, to in 2001 rebranding the first mass free email service which Microsoft acquired 5 years earlier, as MSN Hotmail.

Legacy users of the Win95 MSN service were ported over to Hotmail and given short @msn.com mail accounts. Other users could at one point choose a variety of domain names when signing up for a Live ID / Hotmail account, including @msn.com and @msn.co.uk. These have long since gone away and the only options now are outlook.com and Hotmail.com.

At one point, there were numerous “MSN …” apps for Windows and mobile devices, from MSN Travel to MSN Money. Most of these were subsequently killed off or renamed to something else, like Microsoft News.

Amazingly, you can still buy MSN Premium today – for £7 a month you get, er, lots of stuff that’s available, better and/or for free from other places, including other bits of Microsoft itself.

Today, many of the buttons on the MSN Explorer app either don’t work, or redirect to a page about how Internet Explorer isn’t supported anymore. One of the purported benefits of MSN Premium is that it’s possible to sign up an additional 9 users for an @msn.com email address; given the number of users complaining that it no longer works (and getting radio silence from support), it seems that loophole has now closed.

Microsoft Stop Start

At one point, Microsoft appeared to want “Start” to become the new MSN brand; the homepage for Edge browser (unless you do yourself a favour and set it to something else) was “Start” and the single mobile app which merged MSN News, MSN Money and more was just “Microsoft Start”.

Now the Start apps have been renamed to just “MSN” on mobiles, alongside MSN Weather and MSN Money which avoided the previous cull; PC users don’t have an “MSN” app but might expect to see the same content on Edge homescreen or on the Widgets on their taskbar.

Sadly, renaming the app and service doesn’t appear to have done much for the quality of advertising or the myriad click-bait “news” providers, though it does appear to have gotten less insidious and you can at least hide sources you don’t want to hear from again.

The daily email newsletters are not bad – see https://www.msn.com/en-gb/personalize/newslettersignup to manage your subscriptions. Let’s see if Microsoft starts to re-launch other MSN services in due course…

#55: Quick access to fave notes

Posted on November 29, 2024 (Updated November 29, 2024) by ewand

A few themes have re-appeared on Tip of the Week over the years … saving time by using keyboard shortcuts, finding useful but somewhat hidden bits of Windows or Office apps, etc. One of the most prominent seams to mine, however, has been an undying for Onay-no-tay.

The UX Paradox of Office Apps

Usability research into Office applications once found that 87%* of the new features users asked for, were already in the product – they just didn’t know how to find them. As more and more features were added to apps – Excel particularly, it seems – end-users just didn’t know how to “discover” them. By Office 2000, dynamic “intelli-menus” basically hid options which were more obscure or which an individual just didn’t use, and while it made things look simpler and less cluttered, it made the problem worse.

A wholescale UX rethink in Office begat the “Ribbon”, which is now pervasive in other apps; if you’re interested in such things, check out Jensen Harris’ 2008 presentation on what led to the Ribbon being conceived. The talk offers a great historical perspective but also goes over the thought processes on how these things come about.

* statistic is made up but the story holds true. Who cares if facts and figures are correct as long as the lies are well presented? How do you think Excel charts and PowerBI got so successful?

Not Just Another Toolbar

Even with the Ribbon to make things more ordered, sometimes it’s good to be able to jump straight to a feature you use commonly; the customizable Quick Access Toolbar on the top left of many apps gives you the ability to pin certain commands, and can be an invaluable way of getting to functions you like without delving into Ribbon tabs and menus.

Click the down-arrow to the right of the toolbar and you can pick from a set of suggested functions, or by customizing it, you can delve into any part of the extensive menus and pin just that one feature there. There are commands which are not even on the Ribbon, but you could pin them to the QAT if you like them…

The QAT is present in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook (classic) – but not New Outlook, to some users’ chagrin. It’s not uncommon to find a similar UI feature in 3^rd party apps from the mid-2010s.

OneNote Favo(u)rites (again)

New Testament Tip of the Week #39 covered saving Favourites in OneNote: #39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins. Despite some of the guff being taken up with browser and mobile favourites, the good stuff in that tip was in (once again) recommending the fantastic OneTastic.

As well as providing an extensive macro capability, the OneTastic addin lets you pin a page or section to “Favorites”, and you can later go back to the same menu used to manage the pining, in order to access your previously pinned pages.

For extra goodness, try customizing the QAT and looking for Pin to Favorites…

Select it, click Add >> and hit OK. Now you’ll be able to access the drop-down for Favorites right there from the top left corner…

Happy Friday!

#54: New Outlook is coming, ready or not!

Posted on November 29, 2024 by ewand

Windows Mail or Outlook users might have already noticed that a “New Outlook” is coming. If you’ve already made the switch, you’ll be familiar with the new app’s look and maybe some of its shortcomings. For many people, it will be an improvement once they get used to it. Well, “some” rather than “many”, at least initially.

New Outlook is going to become the default mail client from January 2025. A blog post from this week’s Ignite outlines some of the new and “coming soon” features in New Outlook…

Copilot integrations. Lots of them. Organise meetings better, prepare, follow up, take better notes, have Copilot draft messages for you etc. Copilot for M365 is getting lots of new stuff too.
Erm… The only actual mention of “Outlook” in the Ignite session catalog is in the session, “Boost productivity with Copilot in Microsoft 365 apps”

There are lots of new features being built for New Outlook; some are filling in gaps compared to older experiences, though many are integrating new online services and apps (like Microsoft Places).

And there are plenty of things already in Outlook Web App (and therefore also in New Outlook) which are a step forward from dusty old Outlook (or Outlook (classic) as Microsoft is renaming it) – Snoozing email, pinning individual messages in the inbox, soon-to-arrive sorting by Copilot-deemed level of importance. If you’re responsible for delivering New Outlook to your users, check out the adoption site for more details of how to get the best out of it.

The timeline for Microsoft 365 users moving to New Outlook as a replacement for the old Outlook application has also been highlighted – from 2025, the current “Opt In” will become “Opt Out” – ie. Users will default to having the new client but can choose to revert to the old one. This will be delayed until mid-2026 for Enterprise subscribers. One glaring omission is the date when this Opt Out phase will be removed …

A quick history lesson

Outlook has been the primary email client for Windows & Office, since Office 97 appeared 28 years ago. Outlook evolved over numerous versions and was joined by a variety of other, different apps using the same name, even if they didn’t share anything else – mobile apps, based on software from acquisitions, and a web client that came from email server teams in Exchange. Even the old Hotmail service adopted much the same UI and was renamed Outlook.com.

Another similarly named app was Outlook Express, a rebranding of the previous free “Internet Mail & News”, used primarily to connect to ISP-provided services using internet standards (IMAP, POP, NNTP). Outlook Express eventually went away and was ultimately succeeded by Windows Mail, or Mail and Calendar.

Both of these – the heavyweight mail & calendar app for Office users, and the “lightweight” one that came with Windows 10/11, are on the verge of collision. It will be a long time before Microsoft can completely yank the carpet from underneath Outlook, but if you’re a Mail and Calendar user then your time is running out.

What will happen on 1^st January 2025? Will Mail users be forced to move to Outlook – seems likely. Will there still be a way to revert to Mail even if they don’t care about “support”? Expect there to be unsupported back doors for a while, but eventually resistance will prove futile.

If you find yourself using New Outlook and feel like reverting back for a few more weeks, there’s still time to go to Settings | General | About and hit the button to Open mail instead.

What’s what with New Outlook

The New Outlook application isn’t really a Windows app in the same vein as the old Mail app (which is/was a UWP app, whose raison d’être disappeared when Microsoft’s mobile ambitions died) or the classic Outlook (a regular Win32 app). New OLK is a wrapper on the Outlook Web App which is provided by Outlook.com/M365, so most of the functionality is really happening in a browser that is embedded in the application. This is part of a long-planned move of unifying the PC, Mac and web versions of Outlook and probably, in time, mobile ones too.

Some licensing changes were snuck in with New Outlook, then clarified as the restriction was lifted somewhat. [In a nutshell; if you only have an M365 Basic license, you cannot use New Outlook on your mailbox, even though you could use Outlook (classic)… think of it like closing a loophole which may or may not have existed previously]

What’s wrong with New Outlook

OK, there may be a few gotchas and glitches and some things aren’t quite finished, but so what?

If performs well enough – which it kinda-does – then who cares? Well, for Windows users at least, there are some pretty sizeable gotchas which are going to be hard to fix, if not impossible:

Offline. Every other email app that’s been written for Windows for years has had the ability to store an offline copy of your mailbox. Outlook 2003 and later even defaulted to using that local copy when running against an Exchange mailbox. Some offline capabilities have been / are being added to New Outlook, to help make it useable when you temporarily lose a connection, but so far, it’s a long way from having a full offline copy of your mailbox.
Gmail / iCloud / Yahoo! etc mail. Old Outlook and Windows Mail could both connect to Google Mail (and a variety of others, including IMAP mailboxes from old ISPs), by essentially downloading the email and doing everything locally, most likely synched with the original mailbox. New Outlook doesn’t have the offline spuds to do that yet, so it needs to sync all your Gmail into “the Microsoft Cloud” first – see here for “details”.
There’s no obvious way to see how much storage you’re using (or where the data is being held) though at least for now, there’s no additional charge. Some people might get a bit worried about Microsoft hoovering up all the email from a 3^rd party inbox and storing the data in its cloud… even if their responsible AI and privacy pledges say they won’t do anything with your email, it’s now not under your control.

Cross mailbox functionality is non-existent.

Search. Though you can add multiple mailboxes into a single New Outlook window, in effect you’re just pointing to nn number of M365/Outlook.com instances, one-at-a-time. Oh, and you can’t re-order them once they’ve been added.

This means that if you have – say – a work M365 mailbox, a private Hotmail/Outlook.com mailbox and maybe an old Gmail account, all synced and running in New Outlook, you can’t search for something across all of them. Ironically, the Outlook mobile client (at least on Android) does a great job, not only searching across account but presenting a single Inbox view composed from all of them.

Since each account is a separate thing on the back end, there is no way that cross-mailbox search will work unless there’s either a way of orchestrating it on the service (very non-trivial) or until all mail data is downloaded locally and the search carried out there. See item 1 in this list – not going to happen at all, or at least not in the foreseeable future.

Calendar. Other small gotchas get in the way here, too. Though the Calendar view tries to present a single view of a schedule composed from multiple mailboxes, when you create a new calendar entry, it starts from whatever your default account is.
Start adding details – subject, changing meeting times, etc – and if you realize you meant to use a secondary account, then it’s simple enough to click the drop-down box at the top of the calendar item and choose the account you wanted.
And everything you’ve just edited will be lost, with a blank entry now created in your other calendar.

Drag & drop. There’s no way of dragging stuff from one mailbox to another and there’s no way of importing from or exporting to a PST file either, yet. If you’re leaving a company and want to make sure you have all your private calendar entries and contacts, along with any personal mail you have stored in your work mailbox, better use Old Outlook to do that move.
Also, if someone sends you an attachment, in Old Outlook, you could drag and drop it into a folder elsewhere on your PC; no longer. You need to save it to OneDrive or download it to your computer first.

Zoom is horrible. Especially on smaller laptop screens, it might be necessary to zoom in and out of the preview pane in mail. In Old Outlook – just as in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Edge, Chrome and however many other applications, if you use a mouse scroll wheel while holding down the Control key, the content in the application window will smoothly zoom in and out. Ditto zooming in and out using a pinch motion on a trackpad, or pressing CTRL +/-.
In New Outlook, some zoom motions don’t work (pinching on the trackpad) or if they do (mouse wheel + CTRL), it’s far from smooth and also zooms everything around the content too – including all the UI surrounding the content like the Reply buttons etc. It’s jarring evidence of the fact that everything in the preview pane is just the OWA browser view, and you’re zooming into everything, buttons and all, not just the content of the message

Example – here’s an email at 100% magnification:

Increase Zoom to 200%:

Yuck.

There are plenty of other things which grind the gears of online commentators, though some people quite like it (even if they later conclude that it’s still got room to improve).

If you’re using New Outlook, keep sharing your views on https://aka.ms/newOutlookFeedback and hopefully Microsoft will fix the stuff that’s not insurmountable, in addition to the quest to “Copilot all the things!”

#53: Right tool for the job

Posted on November 20, 2024 by ewand

Anyone who has worked in IT for long enough will likely have seen cases where unwitting users are wielding completely the wrong utility or application to get stuff done. Perhaps the entire company finance system is running on an old Access database, or the accountants were using a spreadsheet for holding something other than numbers? It’s one thing having lots of tools, but knowing which one to use when is sometimes a lost art.

Sometimes, organizational culture is to blame – if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail (as how Microsoft leaders once felt about Oracle’s Larry Ellison saying that “database” was the answer to every question). Some companies use email for everything, others have moved all their internal comms to Teams or Slack, and occasionally use email only for customers.

The advent of Electronic Forms

One early measure of effectiveness of newly-installed IT systems, was the inefficiencies it managed to replace – and reducing paper forms was one often paraded benefit. Literally cutting red tape, not only speeding everything up and reducing wasted paper, moving to electronic forms was and is an easy case to make. Nowadays, you’d use a web form onto some kind of cloudy data store without even thinking about it, but it wasn’t always so simple.

In the late 1990s, forms were a key component of “Groupware”, with Lotus Notes being the early market leader (and which spurred Microsoft into competitive action in trying to build an alternative).

Microsoft had a separate E-Forms product as far back as the early 1990s, running on top of the old MSMail system, later being migrated into Exchange. The idea was that companies could easily make forms to send around in email, capturing data fields and making smart routing and workflow decisions along the way. It’s safe to say, they never really took off…

Outlook picked up forms duty (see here, in the cutting edge “Developing a workflow application” Exchange 5.5 whitepaper). There are still vestiges of Forms Designer in Outlook today (if you’re on Outlook (classic) rather than the upstart New Outlook, that is).

Forms in the 2020s

It’s so easy to use forms now – quickly building a web front end to a set of data is par for the course with Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, to name just two examples. Both are available in free versions (using a consumer Gmail/Outlook type login) or are part of corporate packages which bring extra functions and access to other data.

It is easy to create a form with some simple validation, and then collect responses from people – anonymously or (if they’re in your organization) capturing the logged-in username of the person who submitted it. Results are easily summarized and viewed with charts, word clouds~~wordclouds~~ and the like.

Each form is basically a series of questions, with different types used to validate data – like getting a rating, picking a date, choosing from set options or even entering specific types of text or numbers.

There are lots of scenarios where a simple form could take the place of sending an email – like registering for an event and collecting dietary requirements, or asking a group of people for a time and place that works best to meet; instead of trying to juggle lots of responses, a form could be the ideal way to present options and get their selections.

For meeting arranging scenarios there are numerous ways of trying to make this simpler – from websites like Doodle, the various Calendly/Bookings options for 1:1 meetings, or the former add-in utility FindTime for finding group availability in Outlook, which has now been replaced with a built-in Scheduling poll feature.

2020s meet 2000s

There are some things which should be easy, using Microsoft Forms, that are just not. Even though Forms can be run inside a M365 organization’s own tenant, and therefore we know who everyone is as they’ve already signed in, there’s no way of adding a “Person” to a form, such that they could be picked from the directory.

To do that needs to revert to an altogether older form technology – the SharePoint List. Originating from 2001, SharePoint really hit its stride by 2007, offering lots of web-based collaboration functionality that almost equalled what Lotus was doing a decade earlier. Microsoft did have another forms/data toolset, InfoPath, with SharePoint integrations – but that’s gone away now, not replaced with any single thing. We don’t really talk about InfoPath any more.

Using SharePoint and with~~With~~ a bit of nous, you can~~could~~ quickly build a detailed list – think of it like a simple database – and generate a form with data validation, branching logic and so on.

But a much easier way is to look at the newer Lists web app, which combines simple forms stuff with a SharePoint based back-end, meaning there’s more integration with M365, including directory integration …

… which looks a lot better than having to type someone’s name in.

Lists is part of M365 (look in the app grid on the top left if you go to Office.com and sign in, then peek under the More Apps section). )

In true Microsoft fashion, there are many ways to skin this feline – there’s also Loop, which could be used to do all kinds of groovy things in browsers, Teams, Outlook and more. Oh, and PowerApps. Mash all these tools together and you can build a spidery app legacy to keep your successors entertained for years.

#52: The Power of the Cloud

Posted on November 8, 2024 by ewand

Being shown around a modern datacenter is a pretty awesome experience. The huge rooms full of servers, networking gear and storage can be reminiscent of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s the power systems that are truly jaw-dropping; how much power the DC uses when it’s running and what to do if the power supply goes away is a big part of building these operations.

At one point, Microsoft used huge Caterpillar diesel generators, each of which could generate several megawatts and was kept ready and waiting by continually pumping hot oil inside, so the machine could be started and running at full tilt in a fraction of a second in the event of power failure. Moves are afoot to use hydrogen fuel cells or other means of storing and generating backup power.

AI and Datacenter boom

As much traditional computing has moved into the cloud over the last decade or two, and faster and more mobile internet access drives end-user demand, datacenters have been getting bigger and more numerous. They almost can’t build them fast enough. About 1/3 of all worldwide DCs are in the US, and together they soak up about 6% of all electricity.

Datacentres worldwide used about 460 TWh of electricity in 2022; that’s 460 billion KWh, or enough to run 35 trillion lightbulbs continuously – about 4,300, 24×7, for each person on the planet. That’s quite a lot of power. Expect that amount to double by 2026. Google and Microsoft reportedly consumed 24TWh each in 2023.

[source – Electricity 2024 – Analysis and forecast to 2026]
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

Generative AI is VERY power hungry: estimates vary but research showed that generating one image used as much power as over 500 smartphone charges, averaging around 3KWh per image. Better make sure your ChatGPT / Copilot / Microsoft Designer usage is worthwhile and not just creating stupid images of cats and dogs.

To put the commensurate CO2 output into context, however, 1,000 of such images would be the equivalent emissions of driving a car for 4.1 miles. It’s thought that Generative AI on its own could well consume 100TWh or more by 2027.

DC providers are also looking for ways to ensure they can get enough power into the datacenter – Microsoft has even committed to restarting one of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors and buying all of its power for 20 years. A nod to the old commitment of being carbon negative by 2030, perhaps, but the massive DC expansion to fuel demand for AI makes achieving that target seem increasingly unlikely.

Maybe new governmental administrations will incentivize clean power and reward efficiency?

Local PC power usage

There is something of a dichotomy in power usage on a local computer, especially if it’s powered from the wall rather than using a battery. You want to buy the highest performing, most feature-laden machine you can afford, so (apart from preserving battery life) why would you deliberately knobble its performance to save power? Like buying a Ferrari and driving everywhere at 20mph.

Some quick wins, especially on laptops, could be to reduce the brightness of the screen and use Dark Mode. Check the Power settings on your PC for recommendations on how to lower its energy use. Reduce the number of background apps and trim the ones which start automatically.

If you have an Intel-powered computer (PC, Mac or Linux), they have a free power usage gadget which might give you some idea about the total power consumption of your system, though doesn’t really shed much light as to what’s making it do what it’s doing…

You could try firing up Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and adding a couple of columns to its default view (right-click on the column headings); useful to know which apps or processes are causing the power usage to shoot up, but devoid of actual numbers for the more data-obsessed.

Edge browser has an Efficiency mode – click the … settings menu in the top right and look under Browser essentials.

If you need more data on overall system performance, try GPU-Z – it gives detailed stats on the Graphics Processing Unit and other main components of your system, including current, maximum / minimum / average power consumption …

In the screenshot above, the Power Consumption (%) shows how much of the graphics board’s maximum power consumption is currently being used. A similar utility, CPU-Z, can give data about the TDP of the main CPU and how it’s doing too.

#51: Windowing Arrangements

Posted on November 1, 2024 (Updated November 1, 2024) by ewand

The idea of running applications in overlapping, resizable windows has been around since the early 1970s. Pioneered at Xerox PARC, along with pretty much everything else, the idea of having windows arranged side-by-side or in a variety of other ways was revolutionary. Everybody copied it.

Smartphones have mostly avoided trying to put stuff into windows, but computer users will be familiar with the motifs involved, even if you often run windows at full screen size and switch between them when necessary.

Add multiple screens or great big monitors, and how you lay your windows out might become a bit more relevant, especially when you’re referencing different documents or websites at the same time.

ToW has talked in the past about using OneNote on the side (even last week)…

… or putting windows into different sections of the screen using Windows’ own Snap Layouts feature, making it easier to show them next to each other. The biggest and higher resolution the screen, the more layout options you are given.

There are other utilities, too – Fancy Zones in PowerToys, or Dell’s Display Manager.

Split Screen viewing

Of course, sometimes you don’t want to arrange multiple apps, but to see things side by side from within the same application. Windows has done a pretty good job of managing apps where there are several documents open at the same time, even if there’s only one “instance” of the application and it happens to have several files open. In Excel and Word, for example, though there’s only one app on the taskbar, multiple open files show as separate windows which can be snapped to different areas of the screen for easy cross-reference. You can tweak the “combined icon” behaviour if so desired.

Sometimes you might want to have several windows open from the same document; maybe you’re copying and pasting content from one part of a Word doc to another, or working on different tabs in the same Excel workbook.

In such cases, look under the View menu and create a new window, which can be snapped and arranged as desired.

The same menu lets you arrange multiple open documents in a variety of ways too; try Split or Arrange All to see the output.

Edge by Edge

If you followed the advice from the recent ToW #38 and bought yourself a gigantic, curved monitor, you might want to check out another feature in Edge that is there to make thing a bit more usable – Split Screen mode (whose icon looks a bit like the Immersive Reader, so it’s easy to overlook).

Since most people have lots of browser tabs open at the same time, Edge (and Chrome) tend to lump all the open tabs under one browser window, so you don’t clutter things up too much. You can move tabs between browser windows or even create a new window with just a specific tab (right click the tab and you’ll see the Move tab to > option), so could arrange separate browser windows using the normal snapping etc.

The Split screen view lets you quickly show 2 tabs side-by-side, and can prove very useful. While in split mode, you’ll see two URLs in the address bar…

Exit split screen or tweak some of the behaviours using the X and the “…” options buttons on the top right…

Finally, in Windows 11 and using Edge, you can make it show separate tabs in the ALT+TAB view of open applications, so they appear like they were separate windows even if they aren’t.

The wording of this setting makes it sounds like many apps would be able to support this (since “tabs” are appearing in other places like Notepad or Explorer), but for now, it’s only Edge.

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