#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 Brand equity rises and falls all the time; some just go out of date and are left behind, while some try to reassert themselves to speed up the cycle – see Jaguar / jaGuar’s recent hoo-hah and “Copy Nothing” brand rehab…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…

#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.

#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…

#42: Making Gestures in & out of Windows

Posted on August 30, 2024 by ewand

Windows, you may or may not know, has a lot of gestures built in. Not the kind that Mr Clarkson observes while driving a flash car, thinking oncoming motorists may be drying their hands, but more useful. Windows 8 pioneered gestures on touch-screen machines, where you’d swipe around the edges of the screen to perform certain tasks.

If you’re unfamiliar with modern-day gestures, they inhabit a number of rooms in the house. They are perhaps less on the critical path to making stuff work than the Win8 things that confused regular end users; gestures these days are there to provide a quicker or snazzier way of doing something for those in the know but if you don’t use them, you don’t know what you’re missing.

Touch

Firstly, there are touch gestures – if you have a touchscreen machine, obvs. These are relatively simple actions you can do on-screen using multiple fingers, which control the way you interact with Windows. You might have them turned off, but they should be on by default – look under Bluetooth & devices in Settings, and under Touch you can switch them on.

If you see the “Touch screen to wake” option, you’re using an up-to-date machine which supports Wake-on-Touch, allowing you to poke the screen with a single digit to wake from standby.

If you have a touch screen, you’re probably familiar with selecting stuff by tapping it or scrolling the screen by dragging it around, but there are other moves you might be less familiar with. What about showing the Notifications Center by dragging one finger – Win8 stylee – from the outside right edge of the screen, or the Widgets by doing the same from the left?

How about using THREE fingers to swipe up, down, left and right?

Pad

If you don’t have a touch screen but do have a laptop with a touchpad, there are loads of gestures you can enable and configure there… somewhat similar to the on-screen versions.

Did you know that tapping two fingers (close to one another – eg two fingers on one hand) on the touchpad has the same effect as right-clicking? See more on Touch gestures for Windows.

Browsing gestures

Finally, even if you don’t have the delights of touch on screen or pad, there are gestures you can set up on Edge for using your mouse while browsing – in fact, they’re possibly best done with an actual, physical mouse rather than faffing about with a touchpad.

To enable, make sure your browser is up to date then check Settings / Appearance and scroll a long way down to Customise browser. Or just search gesture in the settings and look for the enable/configure Mouse Gesture buttons.

Gestures in the browser let you do stuff by holding the right^* button on your mouse in combo with an action like swiping the mouse in a direction or using a pattern:

While you hold the right mouse button down and make an appropriate mouse movement, you’ll see it being drawn on the screen with a banner telling you what it means…

If you don’t like the default gestures in Edge, or you’re using Chrome, then you could try a 3^rd party gesturing addon: Chrome Web Store – Search Results.

* for a while, Microsoft tried to call the right mouse button – one of the big differentiators between Windows and Mac (whose users could only deal with a single button) – the “secondary mouse button”, in recognition that left-handers who swap the buttons around are not using the actual button on the right. Or right-handed deviants who like using the wrong button.

#29: The power of CTRL

Posted on June 3, 2024 by ewand

The familiar computer keyboard has evolved over decades, even though some languages have obstinately different layouts; Germans have QWERTZ and French users have AZERTY, while Brits used to their usual keyboard might struggle to find the backslash on an American machine, and accidentally hit Enter when looking for the hash key.

Most keyboards feature control keys on the bottom corners; designed as a “modifier” to be used in conjunction with other keys to activate certain commands, there are some well-known combos like CTRL+C and CTRL+V for copy and paste. There are outliers – German keyboards have Strg instead of Ctrl, and even an obsolete ISO standard says the key could be marked “⎈”.

There are some occasions when the Control key is not just a straightforward modifier; aside from using Sticky Keys to keep it pressed, one somewhat hidden feature in the Edge browser turns Ctrl to good effect, for opening an image in a zoomable overlay window.

Many images embedded in web pages are much bigger than you might think; the source picture could be something like 2000×1500 pixels in size, but when displayed on the site, it’s reduced to 640×480. In such cases, you can use the CTRL key to magnify the original image without having to navigate away from the current page.

If the Edge window is in focus, move your mouse cursor over an image and try tapping CTRL twice; if the site can support it, you’ll see the image displayed in a pop-up window that lets you zoom in out (with the mouse scroll wheel or by stroking your laptop touchpad).

If you have the PowerToys addon pack installed, you may also have Find My Mouse enabled, and that too uses one of the Control keys as its activator. Happily, if a little confusingly perhaps, both can co-exist so you’ll expand the highlighted image while temporarily spotlighting where your pointer is.

#27: Lookup Image Reverse Using

Posted on May 17, 2024 by ewand

With all the fuss about AI in recent months (the latest being OpenAI teasing some futures with GPT-4o, and potentially raining on Google’s I/O parade that followed the next day), it’d be easy to overlook that elements of artificial intelligence have been infusing the software and services we all use every day, for years. Google are even revisiting an old Microsoft brand too…

Text, handwriting and speech recognition, language translation, cognitive understanding – they’re all milestones to what people might think represents true AI, and using elements in conjunction with massive amounts of data has given us some incredibly useful capabilities.

One such is being able to do a reverse image search – the idea that if I have a thing, or a picture of it, how can I find out more about it, or where it’s being used elsewhere online? Copyright holders might want to search for unauthorised use of their materials, or we can even use the technique to tell us more about what our phone camera is looking at.

Visual Search

The Bing search engine has had a visual search feature for many years – that’s right, some people do still use it, even by choice rather than because it’s the default or due to a nag screen.

The simplest way to use Visual Search (if you’re using Edge browser and Bing is your search default) is to right-click on an image and choose the Search the web for image option, which feeds the picture into the visual search page.

This will show you other places on the web that feature the exact same image (and in different sizes, too) as well as displaying other, similar images.

If the pic you started with is a recognizable place or person, it may offer a suggestion of what/who it is, with links to further info..

If you’re not using Edge and/or Bing isn’t your default, you can use it by copying the image you want to the clipboard (or grabbing a portion with the Snipping Tool), the go to the Bing homepage and click on the Image search icon.

Just paste your image in from the clipboard (press CTRL-V, or if you’ve switched on Clipboard history, WindowsKey-V will let you choose from previous ones too) to run it through image search. You can, if need be, adjust the area being searched for, by clicking the Visual Search icon towards the bottom of the main image, then dragging the handles to crop the area you want – picking out a single person in a group photo, for example.

Google offers the same kind of functionality, too – from Chrome with Google search as the default, choose Search image with Google,

… or try search by image from the homepage…

… and paste the selected image in there.

You’ll see slightly different results from the different search engines, so it’s definitely worth trying both out. The Bing user interface is arguably nicer than Google’s but in the end, it’s the results that count.

Mobile apps

When it comes to dealing with the real world rather than online photos, smartphones clearly provide a great starting point. The main Google app has the same initial image search UI as the web site but lets you point your phone camera at something and extract text from it, identify what it is and find out more. The Bing mobile app (and Microsoft launcher on Android, if you use that) does similar things but nowhere near as effectively, judging by the results it returns.

There are many specialist mobile apps for identifying specific things, like differentiating between a plant or a weed, but it’s worth trying the Google app first.

The Bing mobile app purports to do similar things, too…

Nul points

Coming back to looking for pictures, if you don’t get any meaningful results from search engines when trying to match an image, there are specialist services like TinEye, which offer deeper reverse image search.

Take this image from a blog post many years ago, before mobile video calls were really a thing*. Searching Bing/Google for it brings nothing of note, but TinEye found various sites which took part of the image and repurposed it – various nutjobs used the image in “news” that the next gen iPhone was going to have video conferencing capabilities, neatly overlooking the fact that the main subject of the photo had a curly-wired handset to his ear…

* in fact, Orange launched the SPV M5000 smartphone – aka HTC Universal – in 2005,

and it was the first 3G “phone” which had a front-facing camera for doing video calls. It wasn’t very good.

#14: Meetings are a drag

Posted on February 16, 2024 by ewand

Last week’s rant on New Outlook’s stupefying licensing enforcement was quickly and neatly responded to by Microsoft Outlook Product Manager, Allen Filush, in a comment and more publicly on a blog post which had neatly been written the week before. Chapeau, Allen… Anyway, a new release of New Outlook also neatly deals with the issue and now allows you to add certain M365 subscriptions that were previously blocked, and should be available now.

The scourge of feature parity

One of the problems inherent in widely used software which has been around a long time, is that of technical debt. Microsoft saddled itself hugely with the effort of backwards compatibility in old versions of Windows; occasionally companies will take the other approach and sacrifice short term user pain for the benefit of moving forward quickly.

It’s never easy building a new application which is intended to take the place of the old, without necessarily replicating all the features of its predecessor. Cutting some obscure shortcut key sequence that application telemetry tells you 0.1% of the userbase ever invokes, will still annoy the 0.02% of those who do it every day. One such deprecation – if you want to call it that – is to be found in New Outlook.

A bit of Drag and Drop history

The metaphors of drag & drop were present at the outset of the Graphical User Interface, as an easy way of moving files around. Other forms of drag & drop have evolved since – like clicking on a tab in your browser, and dragging it off the window to launch a new window with just that tab in, or dragging browser tabs between open windows.

Edge even has an experimental new feature called Super Drag and Drop which lets you open a link in a new tab by dragging it as you click on it.

If you like opening other stuff while reading online articles, but want them to open in a new tab, just hold Control key down as you click on them, or enable Super Drag and do it with a deft flick of the wrist.

To the chagrin of some Windows 10 users, one of the side-effects of the redevelopment / simplification of the taskbar in Windows 11 was the lack of drag & drop support; previously it was possible to drag a file from Explorer and by hovering it over an icon in the taskbar, that app would open up and let you open that file by dropping it in. That was no longer possible in initial versions of Windows 11 but was hurriedly re-implemented.

Outlook Droppings

One handy trick in Old Outlook, was when you wanted to turn an email into a calendar appointment. Some people like to use their calendar as a task list, so if they intend to reserve time for something, they might start from the email they need to work on. In the Outlook Heritage Edition™️ you could simply drag an email from your Inbox to the Calendar icon on the Wunderbar to generate an appointment in your diary with the contents of the email. It might throw away some of the formatting and the attachments etc, but at least it was a start.

Try doing that in New Outlook and you’ll get less success. You’ll get a little “denied” icon if you try to drop your email onto the calendar node, so what to do? Copy all the contents to the clipboard, switch to calendar, create an appointment and paste the contents in… ?

Quick Steps to the Rescue

The old Outlook app had a Quick Steps capability where users could define easily-repeatable tasks, like moving an email to a specific subfolder, categorizing it or creating related tasks.

The New Step wizard lets you select from a list of pre-defined templates, including picking up the content of your email and creating a new meeting or appointment with it.

But that’s old Outlook, the one that might one day be replaced by New Outlook. Though some of the decades’ worth of Outlook functionality has been left behind, Quick Steps are not one of them.

That said, not all of the Quick Steps templates carry over – including that thing with the Appointments seen in Dusty Old Outlook. But there is a workaround.

When you put something in your calendar, that’s an appointment. As soon as you invite other people or resources to it, then it’s now a meeting. They are handled differently even though they’re closely related – you save an appointment, you send a meeting request, for example. New Outlook can has a quick step that could be useful.

Create a new quick step (by going into Manage quick steps) and near the bottom of the list, you’ll see the option to Reply with meeting. You can add other stuff like assigning categories, putting in a description which will show in a tool tip if you hover over the quick step or give it a shortcut key if you want to use it all the time.

When you click on the new quick step, it will add a new draft meeting to your calendar, insert the recipients of that email to the invitation, and copies the body text of the source message into the main part of the new meeting). It does a better job of formatting than the old Outlook version, but still dumps any attachments, sadly. (A useful scenario could be adding an email about an event with attached PDF tickets to your calendar, but you could always put the attachment in manually, later).

If you remove the attendees (and change the “Teams Meeting” toggle if that’s on by default), you can then simply save the appointment in your own calendar.

There are other ways of doing the same thing, though the UI is somewhat inconsistent. In the preview pane, if you click the “…” ellipsis at the top right of a message, you’ll see the option to reply with a meeting or forward as an attachment.

Open the message up in its own window and the ellipsis gives a single-click Respond with meeting option:

686 – What’s that #:~:text?

Posted on June 16, 2023 (Updated June 6, 2023) by ewand

Hypertext was a concept first coined in the 1960s, inspired by an idea in the early 1940s as a way of thinking about organising information. The first practical implementations of Hypertext let a document or application reference a link to some other content, just as we now know web hyperlinks to do. It’s no wonder that when Sir Tim was conceiving the means of writing what came to be pages on the web, he envisaged hypertext – or even hypermedia – as the glue that holds it all together.

True hypertext documents or applications don’t just link pages to each other, but specific contents – it could be a fly-out or a pop-up with a definition of what a specific term was, or it might be a link that jumps into a particular part of a longer document.

Many web pages have bookmarks defined within – eg Wikipedia typically has links on the left side which jump to parts later in the document, and the bookmark is added to the end of the URL – like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlink#HTML

Office docs offer similar things – Word and Outlook have Bookmarks, PowerPoint can have hyperlinks inside slides that jump to a different slide etc.

If you look at documents stored on OneDrive or SharePoint, it’s often possible to create a link directly from within the full fat Office application, to a part of that document – eg in PowerPoint, right-click on a slide in the sorter view and it will display a URL to that specific slide, that you could share or link from elsewhere.

When dealing with web pages, there are some other tricks you can do to jump straight to a part in the page, even if that page itself has not defined the bookmarks for you to reference like the Wikipedia one above. The WWW Consortium fairly recently defined a standard for handling “Text Fragments”, which means you could link to a specific phrase on a page. Clicking the link will navigate to that point on the page and highlight the text. This is done with a strange looking tag at the end of the URL: #:~:text=whatever.

Example: one of the most-visited articles in the TipoWeek archive, Killing me Softly, part I (a wistful post looking back at some of the Microsoft tech which has ceased to be) has a part which deals with the audio file format, Windows Media Audio – see it on https://tipoweekwp.azurewebsites.net/2016/10/21/tip-o-the-week-350-killing-me-softly-part-i/#:~:text=Windows%20Media%20Audio.

Handily, if you want to generate a link straight to a word or phrase on a page, both Edge and Chrome offer a feature if you right-click on some text on the page – it may use other text fragment features to help steer to this specific piece of text, rather than just the first time that phrase appears on the page. See it in action, here.

685 – Browser searching

Posted on June 9, 2023 (Updated June 6, 2023) by ewand

Research from a couple of years back showed that the most-searched-for term on Bing.com was “google”. While it seems crazy that people would type the name of a search engine into the search box of another, it’s possible they were entering “google” into a box on their homepage or even in the browser address bar, and that term was sent to bing.com as a query, rather than sending the browser to google.com.

If you’re using Edge and have Bing as the default search experience – other search engines are available – then you may see the prominent search box in your new tab page, but it’s worth remembering that the address bar at the top of the browser is also a search box. You can jump to the address bar in Edge or Chrome by pressing ALT+D, which also selects the current site’s URL (if there is one) so you can edit it or just replace by typing something else.

If you start putting the name of a site into the address bar, you’ll be offered autocomplete suggestions from your favourites and your previous browsing history, so it may be very straightforward to jump to not just the website but a specific and previously accessed page within.

Entering a site name and pressing CTRL+ENTER will add the https://www. and .com bits so you don’t need to; therefore, to go to the BBC website, you could press ALT+D bbc CTRL+ENTER and you’d go there directly.

Although the address bar will ultimately use your default search engine to query a word or phrase that doesn’t appear to be a web site address, you can force it by starting to type ? in the address bar, then enter your search term after the question mark.

Some sites will allow the browser to search within them by adding the site name and then pressing TAB. Whatever text you enter after the TAB will be sent to the specific search page of that site. Not all sites support this method, but many common ones do, like Twitter, Amazon, YouTube and more.

Go to the search engine settings in Edge (or jump to the address bar and enter edge://settings/searchEngines) to see which sites are set up already. You can add your own “search engine”, which means you can direct Edge how to search within that site.

Click Add to include one of your own, using the appropriate site URL while replacing the bit where the search term is specified with %s – eg searching the OneDrive photos section for “dogs” would give a URL of https://photos.onedrive.com/search?q=dogs.

Give the Search Engine a shortcut name you want to use and then paste the modified URL and hit save. Now, in this example, typing photos | TAB | cats | ENTER would seach OneDrive for cat pictures.

If you are a Microsoft 365 user then you might be able – if it’s been enabled for your tenant – to search internal work documents and Sharepoint sites, just by typing work | TAB | etc. It’s on by default, but admins could also give you custom keywords / shortcut words too.

Finally, on the topic of Searching in the browser, it’s possible to search across all the tabs you have open; start typing something in the address bar and you’ll see the option of filtering that search to apply to Work, history, favourites or tabs.

Alternatively, press CTRL+SHIFT+A to kick the search off, type in the word of phrase you’re looking for and it will filter the list of current tabs to show only ones that match.

To quickly jump to that tab, use the up and down keys to select the one you want, and press Enter.