#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.

#50: Object Oriented browsing notes

Posted on October 25, 2024 by ewand

Obscure Computer Science theory had an obsession with “object orientation” some years ago; both a technique in how applications are written but also design thinking on how they might be used. Sensei Steve Jobs, while walking the earth before coming back to save Apple, had a famed obsessions for design and rooted his NeXT computer on an object-oriented approach. The NeXT Cube itself was arguably ahead of its time, but in 1990 cost a cool $10K (that’s about $25K in today’s money). There were few takers, though the odd geek still gets excited to pick them up 2^nd hand.

An example of object orientation in user interaction is that you go to a thing you want to work with, rather than a tool with which you want to work. Elements of this are all over UX in Windows, like going to a document in Explorer, and it lets you open, edit, print, etc. Most people will still go to Word and open a file from there; that’s why the Most Recently Used list and Search features exist.

To start something new, you’ll likely open your app of choice then use it to create a file or open an existing one. When did you last go to SharePoint and use the New -> menu option to create a document in situ, much less a OneNote notebook? Exactly.

There are other places where things are less cut and dried: you might open a notebook like OneNote, Evernote, Notion etc, and start taking notes on a thing you’re working on. Or you might want to be in the flow – in a Teams meeting, or viewing a document on which you want to make some side notes – and it makes more sense to bring the notepad to the side and ideally keep the context so when you revisit that document or that webpage, you’ll (optionally) see the notes you had previously.

Progress is not forthcoming

Sadly, as apps evolve some features are sacrificed perhaps because telemetry tells the developer that they’re not much used, or they just decide that newer things are more important. One key villain in this regard is the “new” (Chromium) Edge browser, which left behind many of the features of the old(“Spartan”) Edge, which might not have been much used but then neither was the old Edge. The dev roadmap appears to focus on more ways to inject adverts and to jam Bing services and Copilot into everything, than to actually make the browser as useful as the one it replaced.

Linked Notes

As covered 18 months ago on old testament ToW 683, OneNote has the capability to be docked to the side of whatever other window is being used, and in some cases, maintains a link to the document that is in the main window.

You’d create the page you want to make notes on in OneNote, and when Linked Notes are enabled, it will tie back to the Word etc doc you were using in the other window. That way, if you re-open the notes in OneNote you’re only a click away from pulling up the document they relate to.

If you later go to back to it in Word, however, or open the doc directly from Explorer, there’s no obvious way to bring up the notes you were taking, without going to OneNote, finding the page you took the notes on, and perhaps docking the window again. Even the Linked Notes option on the Review menu doesn’t quite work as expected – it’s for establishing a new link, not reanimating an old one.

This is an example where true object orientation would work well – you’d open the Word doc which you had linked to OneNote, and you’d automatically see the notes in a sidebar.

Remember Internet Explorer?

Even ye old IE had an option of being linked in OneNote so you could take notes on a page you were viewing. Sadly, Edge has torched this feature – along with Reading List and one of the more helpful and semi-OO feature, which didn’t use OneNote but was still potentially handy…

Web Notes RIP

Web Notes was a feature of Old Edge, for jotting down simple notes on whatever page you were viewing, and the next time you visited that same page, the notes would be shown alongside.

Imagine if you were looking to buy a house or pretty much any other major piece of shopping; whilst conducting research, you might browse to several properties of interest and could make some notes about each one – near a good school but close to a busy road, nice rear garden, high crime area down the road, neighbour has planning permission to build a house in their back yard…

It could be so useful to jot the notes as you go and have them presented again if you happen to revisit the same page in future (so you remember you’ve already looked into it). If you could later see a list of every note you took, with a link back to its source, so much the better.

Sadly, there is no way to do this in Edge, without relying on extensions. There are many out there but none really hit the brief well – if you find a better one, please do mention in the comments below.

The OneNote Clipper is worth a look if you want to keep a list of notes with links back to pages, but is old school in that you’d go to OneNote to find that list and then see which pages you had commented on, rather than the more Object Oriented approach of viewing a page and having the notes offered to you.

Perhaps the extension which comes closest to the functional requirement (even if it doesn’t win many prizes for looks) is Note AnyWhere, available from the Chrome store (and can therefore be installed on both Chrome and “new” Edge).

For ease of use, after installation, click the Extensions icon on the toolbar and Pin the Note Anywhere icon to the toolbar, after which taking notes on a new page is only a couple of clicks away. When you next visit a page, previous notes will be displayed (or you can choose to just show a number on the toolbar by the icon, to show how many notes you’ve made).

It would be nice to have some simple formatting, and searching previous notes is a little clumsy (requiring you to sign up and sync with the developer’s web front end), but for a free app that doesn’t (yet) nag you to subscribe for extra functions, it’s not half bad.

PS – Remember, this weekend is when Europe (mostly) ends Daylight Saving Time, meaning next week could see clashing of meetings arranged with international attendees, before North America catches up on 3^rd Nov. New Zealand and some of Australia has already made the leap.

This topic has been covered ad nauseam on previous ToWs … spring forward, fall back…

#49: Managing Multiple Messaging

Posted on October 18, 2024 (Updated October 17, 2024) by ewand

It used to be easy: you had an inbox (real or electronic) and new mail arrived. You’d check the inbox for anything that needed your attention, otherwise just get on with whatever it is that you were doing otherwise. Now, there are so many messaging apps that it can be a headache to not only keep on top of all the inbound contact, but to recall in which app you were having a conversation you want to go back to.

It might be easy if your professional comms is all done via email, but if you’re an itinerant consultant working with several companies, you might even have numerous professional email addresses too so keeping an eye on them all can be a chore.

There’s always a chance you’ll be dealing with LinkedIn or SMS messages with work connections as well, and with friends and colleagues there might be Facebook, WhatsApp and many more.

Two quick tips this week might help to get on top of things, if only a little.

Finding work-related messages in M365

If you use Teams and Outlook for work, with Microsoft 365, then you might already experience discombobulation when looking for something a colleague sent, or some comment discussed in the context of a project… was it in the status email, or in the chat of a meeting? Or a direct message in Teams?

Fortunately, the “Work” search options might be able to help. If your organization has it enabled, go to either Bing.com/work or look at the search option in Office.com while you’re signed in, and you’ll be able to search documents and other sources of data within your M365 environment.

One such is Messages – and the handy shortcut to jump there is aka.ms/messages. Type a search term in there and it will look across both your Outlook mailbox, but also in any Teams messages you might have been part of. Once you get used to checking it – and using the Work search for documents and other stuff – it’s a game changer.

Another trick, for finding documents in your work context, is to search from Windows Search directly by pressing the WindowsKey and typing work: followed by something you’re looking for.

Search across OneNote

Though it’s not strictly messaging, you might have taken notes during a meeting (or even had your friendly Copilot overlord do it for you), potentially spread across several OneNote notebooks.

The search box in OneNote lets you choose if you want to perform a query across the current page, section, notebook etc – but the results you get back can be a bit clumsy to interpret as it doesn’t give any details on which are really old pages and which might have been written recently.

If you haven’t discovered the obscure ALT+O to pin search results, try it out – it lets you group by section, page title or date, and you can expand and collapse the groupings to help locate the most likely page more quickly.

Now, where did you put your glasses?

#46: Cool for CALC

Posted on September 27, 2024 (Updated September 24, 2024) by ewand

Subtle changes and refinements to regularly-used applications can often slip by unnoticed. The Windows Calculator can trace its parentage all the back to Windows 1.0, and has seen numerous revisions over the years. It has featured in previous ToWs, too, most recently in what would have been number six hundred threescore and six, before the Great Reset meant ToW numbering went back to 1.

Electronic desktop calculators were a hotbed of technological innovation in the 1960s and 1970s. If you’re of a certain age, you might recall using a pocket calculator as part of your educational journey. When the first scientific pocket calculators appeared in 1972, they had a similar impact to the global slide rule market as quartz wristwatches had on the mechanical watches a decade later.

c1985 Casio fx-451M

When Personal Computers were a relatively new thing, having things like a digital notepad and a calculator built-in were seen as key productivity features; even if an IBM PC capable of running Windows 1.0 at the time would have cost you more than a year’s average salary. And yet with calculators on phones and smart watches, the poor old CALC.EXE probably doesn’t get much love these days.

The Hamburger Menu

Fire up the app (WindowsKey+R Calc [ENTER]) and it looks like any simple desktop calculator device, except that the History (top right) is much more extensive and usable than the stupid M+ / MR buttons on the old physical ones. Few of us knew what all those buttons festooning scientific calculators actually did, let alone ever used most of them.

Fortunately, Windows Calc has put lots of genuinely handy things in that three-line menu on the top left – and you can switch between them using the ALT key, if desired.

In normal use, simply pressing ALT+1, ALT+2, ALT+3 etc will switch between the different modes; open the hamburger menu (click it or press ALT+H), and scrolling down will show more than a dozen different conversion features too. Just press the ALT key when the menu is showing if you’d like to be reminded of the ALT+ … shortcut keys that can be used to invoke any of them without the need to show the menu in future.

Before Microsoft killed its long-serving line of external keyboards, some used to have a hardware button for invoking calculator. Supposedly, they’re coming back – just under a different name.

If you’re more mouse- or touch-driven then you can also jump to the primary modes using a right-click/long-tap on the taskbar when Calculator is running.

If you think there’s some great feature missing from Calculator, check out the Github page on the project and submit your own ideas. It seems to be on a slow-burn though; the Roadmap page talks about what the team is focussed on in 2021, and makes no mention of Windows 11…

#44: What’s on your (system) tray?

Posted on September 13, 2024 (Updated September 12, 2024) by ewand

The System Tray is that little collection of icons typically found next to the clock, in the lower corner of a Windows desktop. It’s been part of the UI since Windows 95, and serves to highlight what is happening with the system and the apps that are running on it. At times, Microsoft has tried to call this the “Notification Area”, not be confused with the thing that appears when you press WindowsKey+N (that’s the Notification Center or Action Center).

In common with other bits of Windows (the right-click menu in Explorer being another), it was easy for 3^rd party software and hardware drivers to add their own icons into the “systray”, which might make things convenient for the user until they have 30 or 40 such things cluttering the whole place up. Why wouldn’t you want to quickly control your video modes or tweak Bluetooth settings, after all?

So in sweep-under-the-carpet style, Microsoft added a way of hiding less useful system tray icons so you don’t see them all the time, but they can be exposed by clicking the little arrow to the side.

As you’d expect, Microsoft has defaulted only the more obviously-useful icons to be visible, like battery or Wi-Fi (for laptops), sound/volume etc. OneDrive is jammed in there too, if you have it set up to sync.

To tweak which icons show by default, look in Settings > Personalisation > Taskbar (try right-clicking on a blank bit of the main taskbar and choose Taskbar settings)

Many of the icons you’ll see don’t necessarily do much when you click (left or right) on them, other than jump to the app itself, but some afford the ability to right-click and do something in that app directly. One useful tweak not there by default might be to include Teams, so you can quickly set your status.

To hide or change the clock and date in the System Tray, dive a little further into the Date & time settings…

… and you could have the clock show seconds as well, if you really wanted.

This week’s Copilot-drawn banner image is – clearly – inspired by Eddie/Suzy Izzard’s iconic and lightly sweary “Death Star Canteen” sketch, and the minifig animation of it. Happy Friday – but you’ll still need a tray.

#41: New ≠ better

Posted on August 30, 2024 (Updated August 30, 2024) by ewand

Tip o' the Week

Last week’s tip talked about product Roadmaps and the search for new features; this week’s focuses on two evolving applications that readers may have a fondness for or perhaps an aversion to.

As previewed in Tip o’ the Week #678, both Outlook and Teams have been getting some New-ness by having completely re-written applications with the goal of taking the baton from the old one. This model doesn’t always turn out to be successful – see the confusion that was OneNote supposedly transitioning from a classic Windows app to a Store / UWP app, then giving up and moving back. Or the slow-motion car crash that is Sonos’ new app rollout.

As an aside: LinkedIn really doesn’t make it easy to search previous newsletter articles; that’s one reason why these are also published at www.tipoweek.com, providing a nicely tagged way of re-locating stuff that you might have seen before.

Sometimes, the effort that goes into keeping an old application fresh, secure and performing well can be more than just re-writing it from scratch and phasing the old one out. But Better does not always come with New, at least not in the early stages.

One Teams to Rule Them All

Three years before its pandemic-fueled usage explosion, Teams was launched as a kind of amalgam of Skype for Business and the technologically separate and consumer-oriented Skype (which still exists, to some degree). Teams came along with added collaborative stuff that had been brewing for some years, to try to offer an alternative to Slack.

To help the development cycle, and to keep a degree of parity between Windows, Mac and web apps, the original Teams app used a variety of technologies which caused a pretty high memory overhead on Windows. Later acknowledge by Microsoft, the decision was taken to rearchitect completely with the goal of reducing memory usage by half whilst doubling performance.

After releasing “New Teams” in October 2023, that left Microsoft with 3 separate Teams clients – the original, resource hog one, then the New Teams one which did more-or-less the same things, and the inexplicable “Teams for Home” which was a different version that could only use a Microsoft Account to sign in.

Fortunately, Microsoft has updated New Teams (now just “Microsoft Teams”) to fold in the “Teams (free)” / “Teams for Home” functionality, so there’s only really a single version of note. If you still want to make sure all your PC’s memory gets a good workout, the original Teams app is still available as “Teams classic (work or school)”, at least for now. Phew.

The Old Dog and the New Pup

Outlook has a much longer legacy, dating 20 years before Teams and with some of its innards back to the early 1990s and the original Exchange “Capone” client (and Exchange was dubbed “The Big Dog of BackOffice“).

Microsoft has a long-held desire to move away from the old design and architecture, to something more “Modern” and webby. Just as Teams was built using technology that could span different client architectures, the intent is to create a new Outlook family centered around the same Web UX as seen in Outlook Web App.

Having been in preview for a while, the now-released “New Outlook” was being developed to replace Windows’ built-in Mail & Calendar app(s) in the near future, though not to universal approval. Plus ça change and all that.

Some reviewers want to hold on to the Mail & Calendar apps

Building an app which is effectively a web experience but looks like a desktop one, has its own challenges that Microsoft is trying to address before the inevitable full retirement of Old Outlook in favour of the new one.

If you’re an existing Outlook (classic) user, do not be tantalized by the Try the new Outlook option on the top right – press the button only if you’re already prepared for the consequences.

Actually, you can run classic Outlook and New Outlook side by side if you like; selecting the “Try the new…” button just means that trying to start Old Outlook will just bring up the new one instead; if you go through the routine of Trying the new, it will set up your profile and when done, you can switch it off and have both clients set up to connect to the same accounts.

There are some downsides. Web Applications aren’t typically very good at being offline, and email is one of those things that you might like to use when on a plane or even being on a slow network. New Outlook is getting some offline capabilities but don’t expect it to be the same as the old one.

And don’t even think about using local archives, not for a while…

Most users of Teams would see the New version as an improvement, even if it doesn’t match all the functionality of the original. It’s certainly easier when switching around between tenants, such as when you’re working with several different companies. Almost everyone will automatically get the new version in place of the old, with a few diehards holding out before eventually being subsumed.

New Outlook is going to take a bit more time to get used to. There is a feature comparison which gives some idea of the differences; if you don’t get vast amounts of email, then New Outlook is OK. If you have multiple email accounts to deal with, it makes a reasonable fist of showing them in one place rather than needing a separate browser window for each, but then Old Outlook did that too. Somewhat annoyingly, New Outlook can’t combine mailboxes into a single Inbox view, like the mobile Outlook client does, and it won’t let you search across different mailboxes either.

It looks like Old Outlook will still be with us for at least 5 years – maybe it’ll live on while email has not yet been replaced by other messaging apps like WhatsApp and Teams.

#39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins

Posted on August 9, 2024 by ewand

Regular ToW readers may share in a collective for OneNote – and there have been plenty Tips over the years to celebrate. There are other note-taking apps out there, of course, but if you have invested time and years of notes in one, it’s hard to shift.

OneNote comes in a variety of versions spanning web, mobile, Mac & PC, and you have the ability to organise pages of notes in sections, groups and whole separate Notebooks, should you wish. Notebooks can be shared with other people and could be used to contain stuff that’s specifically for one particular project or role.

Personal vs Work

If using OneNote on the web (which needs you to be online to access it), you could have different browser profiles for work and home, and therefore all your work notebooks would be in one and your home-related ones in another. The PC version of OneNote lets you mix notebooks from different accounts, so you could have them all open in one app – handy for some, though it can lead to lots of notebooks being open and searching right across them can be bothersome (see Classic ToW #646 for help with that).

If you keep going back to a few pages for shopping lists or the likes, it’s quite easy to grab a link directly so you can find it again quickly. Go to a section or page in the web version and you can right-click to copy a link to it, forming a simple https:// URL to wherever the source is stored (on OneDrive if you’re using a personal Microsoft Account or in SharePoint if using a M365 login).

Save that URL to wherever makes sense for you and it will launch directly to that page in a new browser upon activation.

Desktop vs Web

If you’re using the PC OneNote app, however, you’d want to have the page open in that app rather than in the browser. In the old days, you could drag a OneNote page to your desktop or some other Explorer folder, and it would create a shortcut to it – but not any more.

If you repeat the above process of right clicking / copying a link when in the app, then paste the resulting link into Notepad or similar, you’ll see there are actually two links – firstly, a https:// formatted URL and a second beginning onenote:https:// and finishing &end.

Select and copy the line(s) beginning onenote: to the end, then you can create a shortcut elsewhere – it’s a bit of a palaver, but…

· right-click on desktop or in your chosen folder,

· choose New > Shortcut and paste the onenote: link in there… hit Next,

· give it a meaningful name and save it

· now you could launch OneNote directly to your chosen page, with a simple tap or double click on that icon.

OneTastic to the rescue

A simpler way is to use the Pin to Favorites (sic) feature in the most excellent addon, OneTastic; this lets you create and pin links to a variety of locations, perhaps most usefully within the “Favorites” section of that menu itself – and to recall a Fav in future, just go to that menu to quickly navigate to several pinned OneNote pages and sections.

The “Favorites” location can be accessed in the file system if you like, too – just press WindowsKey+R to get the Run command up, then enter %appdata%\OneTastic and you’ll find the folder in there.

Pin it on the move

Mobile users have a simpler way, at least Android users do. Within OneNote, select the 3-dot menu on the top right of a page, and you can Add to Home screen; this will try to pin a shortcut to whatever kind of homescreen / launcher you have.

iOS users might need to rely on a Widgety solution instead.

#38: Get ahead: get a proper monitor

Posted on August 2, 2024 (Updated August 2, 2024) by ewand

As WFH became normalised during the pandemic, a lot of people went from having access to a reasonable working environment in an office, to sitting on the sofa or camping on a kitchen table. A trend of working from a laptop in coffee shops had already been underway and got additional legitimacy when things opened up again.

For the lucky ones with space at home, the increasing trend for WF there sometimes means they have a better environment than in the office – no desk sharing, putting up with co-workers’ smelly/noisy/annoying habits, perhaps even a faster internet connection. This doubtless contributes to the reported reluctance to return to the rat-race in the office.

Make the most of your screen

One huge downside of working off a laptop is that the screen – even for the biggest ones – is small.

There’s little doubt that productivity gains can be had by having larger monitors or more of them. Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch from gave a seminal talk on time management in 2007 – prescient, since he was dying of pancreatic cancer at the time and had only months left to live (his Last Lecture is also worth watching). In that session, he advised that maximizing screen real estate is one of the best things you can do.

The simplest way to improve screen area for a home office desk is to buy a decent monitor. Find one with adjustable height (so you can be looking straight at it, not down at a laptop screen) and position the laptop in front of you, below the monitor.

Extend the desktop to the big screen and make that your main display (so new windows, the task bar, Start menu etc will appear there rather than on your laptop).

Side-to-side

It’d be even better if you can use a proper keyboard and mouse, maybe with a suitable docking station, then park the laptop to the side. Ideally you should prop it up so that its display and your monitor are similar in height – there are plenty laptops stands available, or you could even just put it on a pile of books…

Big screen x little screens

If you’ve had a home office setup for a while, it’s possible you’ll have one or two old monitors that won’t be worth much at resale so you could always bring them into action in a true “multi-monitor” setup (without delving into additional hardware to allow more, Windows 11 supports up to 6 displays).

Then again, a single large monitor might be a bit more feng shui, and there are plenty of good displays out there. A single, widescreen, curved monitor could give you the same kind of functionality as having two side-by regular widescreen ones, with less cabling and fuss.

Modern displays often have USB hubs and lots of other features such as display modes where two inputs are shown side-by-side (so you have two different PCs on display, or a PC on one side and an Xbox on the other half, or take two inputs from one PC into one physical screen – the computer would see it as two side-by-side monitors, which might have benefits when it comes to app layouts).

Managing the placement of windows is a lot easier with the groovy window snapping stuff introduced in Windows 11 (hover over the maximize icon on the top right of your window, and you’ll see options for where to snap it onto the screen… it’s more than just left/right since if you have a mahoosive screen, you’ll likely have several windows side-by-side). If you need more control, or you’re running Windows 10, try the Fancy Zones utility as part of PowerToys.

Dell Ultrasharp and Display Manager

Dell have long made some of the best PC monitors; particularly their more expensive Ultrasharp range. If you’re shopping for a new screen, there are various ways to save money too – they have a Dell Advantage program where you can get specific vouchers (eg Microsoft employees can get theirs by entering their work email here), and they have an Outlet store for refurbished goods.

If you have a Dell monitor already, there’s an app for Windows and Mac which could make your life a little better, especially if you routinely switch between inputs / PiP modes etc – the Dell Display Manager. Connect your PC and the monitor with a USB cable, and you can use the software on the PC to control how the monitor works, rather than monkeying around trying to press tiny buttons to drive the On-Screen Display menu. You can even set up shortcut keys to make it easier to dive in.

Tidy.

#36: Navigating Windows by keyboard

Posted on July 19, 2024 by ewand

Now and again, it’s useful to be able to use Windows without mouse or touch, especially should the unexpected happen. Accessibility needs aside, it’s been possible to move around and control Windows since the very early days, just by using combinations of keystrokes.

ALT+F4 is maybe the most memorable (for closing a window), apart from CTRL+ALT+DEL.

A few other window management keystrokes worthy of mention:

WindowsKey+up/down/right/left arrows – maximize the current window to fullscreen (up), back from fullscreen to previous size or minimizes it (down), and snaps the window to one side of the screen or back (left/right).

ALT+TAB / SHIFT+ALT+TAB – cycles through the current open windows (and add SHIFT to go backwards). Releasing the ALT+TAB combo then jumps to whichever window is highlighted; press CTRL+ALT+TAB to just display the open windows, let you move between them and jump to one by clicking on it or pressing ENTER.

ALT+left/right arrow – moves back and forward, as in clicking the back/forward arrow icons in a browser

WindowsKey + number – jumps to the nth application on your taskbar; if you pin an app/window to the taskbar and it stays in the same place so you could use WindowsKey+1 to jump to Explorer, Win+2 to go to the browser etc.

See more here. Many more.

Powered Up

As previous ToWs have mentioned (here, here, here etc), the collection of utilities called PowerToys is well worth installing; one of its default apps is a shortcut guide showing some key WindowsKey + nnn options. (Press WindowsKey+SHIFT+/ to display temporarily).

On the topic of PowerToys, one of the utilities is a special “Run” app which does a good bit more than the standard WindowsKey+R command which displays the old fashioned Run dialog;

PowerToys Run has a load of special characters to make special searches; enter ?? something will search the web using your default, or (optionally) put o: something searches your OneNote notebooks for that term.

Somewhat controversially, the default activation keystroke for PowerToys Run is ALT+Space, which has been a Windows shortcut to display the context menu of the current window. Pressing that combo followed by M or R would be used to move / resize (using the arrow keys) or N and X would minimize / maximize that window.

In a curmudgeonly article, El Reg complained that old school keyboard warriors would be most upset. The also suggest that the pre-Win95 icon for that corner of the window was a Spacebar, supposedly to illustrate that you press ALT+SPACE to open it.

Never fear, keyboard fans – you can simply remap the activation key to something else (like WindowsKey+Space) and the ALT+SPACE combo will continue to work like it’s 1987.