669 – Hazelnut in every bite

Posted on February 17, 2023 by ewand

What has a hazlenut in every bite? That’s right, a Topic from the British sweetie shop of yesteryear, and nothing at all to do with what’s near Tufty’s nest. Sadly discontinued last year, due to falling demand, there’s no accounting for taste.

Topics are still available today to users of Microsoft 365, as a way of curating certain scraps of knowledge that they can share with other users within the same organization. The very first version of Microsoft SharePoint (codenamed “Tahoe”) had a capability that aimed to do much the same thing – “Best Bets” were a way for an administrator to guide the search experience so that if someone ran a query for a term, rather than returning hundreds of old PowerPoint files that contain that word, it would take the searcher to a more official site.

Viva Topics – because everything is getting Vivafied just as in the days of Tahoe, every other product had Live and/or .NET in its name – is part of a growing family of “employee experience” offerings; it’s an addon to even the top flight ~~Office~~ Microsoft 365 subscription, but adds AI-powered discovery as well as the means to manually curate things.

After deploying Topics and assigning licenses to the appropriate users, topic pages can be automatically created based on the documents that exist already – the Search and underlying Graph services can identify subjects that look like are active, with people contributing to them through documents, conversations and so on. Codenames or location names, for example, could be quickly identified and suggested.

A Knowledge Manager could also be assigned to create or approve new pages; individual users could be empowered to do it themselves, though that might end up in something of a mess. Best practice would be to have some kind of form or email-based request, where a user would ask for a topic page to be created and they would then own the content within.

Discovery is pretty easy – depending on how it’s set up, if the title of a topic is mentioned on a SharePoint site, it can be automatically highlighted on a pop-up card with which will give a summary of the topic, and a link to more the main page which contains furtherinformation.

Topic pages themselves can be full of useful info; a search for documents or other pages that the SharePoint environment behind the scenes considers to be related, as well as specifically curated sources of information, contact cards for the people who are managing the project or involved with the customer, links to docs or other websites etc.

Within Office apps like Word or Outlook, if the user highlights a word or phrase and chooses to Search for it, a sidebar in Office will run a search online and across internal sites for that word – this is avialable to everyone, with or without Topics deployed.

If Topics has been configured and the searched for term is a topic (or is one of the topic’s synonyms, or is otherwise related), then the user will see it fairly prominently in the search results.

Now who’s for some chocolatey nuts?

661 – Finding mail and slimming down

Posted on December 16, 2022 by ewand

Learning how to find stuff in email is crucial, since many of us get so much that we let it accumulate until eventually it becomes a problem. Sifting through the many cc’ed work mails, or finding the order confirmation email in your personal mailbox amongst all the other stuff, we’re more reliant on search than ever.

This is a topic that has been covered numerous times in previous ToWs – 573 – Searching in Outlook and 504 – Searching Outlook for example – but is worthy of a revisit since we may have a chance to pursue the fallacy that is Inbox Zero over the next few weeks. And maybe it’s a time to find and delete the special offer emails and once-in-a-lifetime invitations that may be clogging up our personal mailboxes too.

Work mail

Dealing with desktop Outlook on the PC, there are plenty of tools available to help you find specific messages, in fact there’s a whole toolbar full of them.

As you look to search mail that meets your chosen criteria – it’s from someone in particular, maybe with a keyword in the subject, or that you know has an attached PowerPoint file, you’ll see that clicking the filters and options inserts the actual commands that will drive the search, into the Search bar positioned at the window’s top.

Remembering a few of these means it’s quick and easy to search for mail from a person (you don’t need the quotes, really, and you could use just a part of their name) by typing straight into the box. ALT+Q (for query?) sends your focus straight onto the search bar, so if you’re a keyboard warrior, you could ALT+TAB to Outlook, ALT+Q and enter a search command, before your mouse-toting colleagues have even clicked a toolbar. While we’re at it, remember that CTRL+number jumps to the location on the (now vertical) icon bar on the left, so CTRL+1 will normally be mailbox, CTRL+2 is calendar, CTRL+3 contacts, and so on.

Commands could also be used to filter on properties of a message that are not so easily visible through the UI – eg from:ewan messagesize:>10mb or from:nico sent:”last week”. See here for more examples of the kind of thing you can type. Look under Recent Searches to re-run ones you’ve typed before.

Reducing Mail Bloat

Is your mailbox size is starting to look under strain (look under the File menu to see how big your ‘box is and what the limit is)? With an active work mailbox in M365, it shouldn’t be much of a risk unless you genuinely never delete anything, but a quick way of identifying the big rocks and getting rid of them may be needed occasionally.

You could run a one-off search for all big mail as per the instructions above, or for extra control try creating a Search Folder. Expand the folder tree on Outlook’s left side, and scroll towards the bottom, to locate the Search Folders hierarchy, right-click on the top of the tree and choose New …

This will bring up a wizard which creates a query across your entire mailbox or other data file, but which looks like a folder; it’s visible only in Outlook desktop (ie not in web or on mobile) but can be a great way to locate stuff that might be filed away in the darker recesses of your mailbox.

You can choose from some set templates or do your own custom thing entirely. The age of this feature is somewhat given away by the default value for “Large mail”… click the Choose button and enter something meaningful (like 10000 for ~10MB).

This should give you a few easily deleted big mails to at least get any short-term capacity problems dealt with.

Right-click on the Search folder and choose Customize… to give it a better name, or to tweak the criteria.

Home email

If you have a Hotmail / Outlook.com etc mailbox, there may be a more pressing size issue, as over a period of years you might have been signed up to a newsletter every time you buy something online, and without realizing it, those could account for gigabytes of data bloat on your mailbox. If every notification from Amazon or eBay is 400K, they soon mount up to a meaningful size.

If you have a free Outlook.com account, you should have a 15GB mailbox quota and if you have the account associated to a Microsoft 365 home or work subscription, you’ll get 50GB.

To check, go into Settings and search for Storage.

The UI for Outlook.com is simple and effective, but one thing it doesn’t do a great job of is handling message sizes.

Sort by size and you’ll see a group heading showing which emails are the largest (displayed by default with the biggest on top), but nowhere can you find out what the actual message size is.

If you want to do a mass clean-out of your Outlook.com account, then you could try sorting by From, however the UI won’t let you click on the group heading to select all emails from that sender and make it easy to delete them.

The Windows Mail app on Win11 doesn’t offer Size either, not even to sort by.

Sometimes, the old ways are the best – you get much more functionality if you add your Outlook.com account to full-fat desktop Outlook, allowing you to change the view, see and sort by message sizes etc. Oh, and yes, you can even set up a Search Folder too. Now, tidy away!

This is the last “regular” Tip o’ the Week until January.

If you’re still here next Friday, look out for next week’s special edition – it’ll be a belter.

660 – Contacts in D365 CRM

Posted on December 9, 2022 by ewand

Sales people tend to not like CRM systems very much. They are usually foisted on the poor folk who need to figure out how to get what they need out of them, while navigating a cumbersome and unhelpful set of behaviours and expectations. And that’s just the sales people – the CRM implementations can be poor too.

If you have to use CRM, and you’re lucky enough to be using Dynamics 365 Sales (if not, you can get a free month’s trial), then there are some handy contact management tools worthy of a few minutes’ attention. First of all, the Outlook integration for the latest D365 CRM service means if you have an email from a customer or partner, you can track it and quickly add contacts on the email to the CRM system by invoking the Dynamics add-in.

Click the Dynamics 365 icon in Outlook and you’ll see a sidebar show up on the right. The “Set Regarding” option lets you add the email to a customer record in CRM. Below that, if the contact doesn’t exist already, you’ll see the option to add it by clicking on the recipient’s name and hit the + button on the lower right.

Depending on the rules of your particular system, you’ll probably need to provide a job role and maybe some other fields, and you might not be able to associate that contact with an account yet – perhaps you’ll need to save it to Dynamics first, then make the association with the account to which the contact belongs.

If the Account field is locked when you first add the contact, then once your contact has been saved in the sidebar, click the hamburger menu icon on the top left and look under Recent to open that contact again, then you should be able to choose the account name from that view, rather than fishing about in the main CRM UI for all the other added contacts.

From within the same sidebar UI, you can fire up a more fully-featured view by opening it in a separate Dynamics window. From there you can more easily do stuff like matching the contact to one in LinkedIn, if you have Sales Navigator access; it’s a handy way of associating the two, though annoyingly it doesn’t automatically pick up the LinkedIn photo and associate it with the CRM contact.

To set a picture for your contact, click on the circular initials at the top left of the name and that lets you choose a photo – ideally, you’ll have already saved the mugshot to your machine first, though if the image is online – a company website, for example – you might be able to grab the direct URL to the photo and paste it into the Upload Image dialog.

Getting images from LinkedIn can be a little more laborious especially if you’re doing this in batches. Here’s a fairly simple technique to make it easier.

If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator and it’s integrated to Dynamics 365, open the LinkedIn tab for your contact – assuming you’ve matched them already. Right-click on the profile picture and choose Save image as. Save it to your Downloads folder.
If you don’t have Sales Navigator, then try searching LinkedIn in another window, find your contact then open their profile. Right-click on their profile photo, choose Save image as, save to Downloads folder.
Now back in D365, click on the initials back on the main contact page, to bring up the Choose Image pop-up. Click the Upload Image button, navigate to Downloads – change the view in the file picker dialog to “Extra Large Icons” to make it easier to find the right one – and select the pic you’ve just saved. Click the Change button and you’re done.

OK, so you have an image for each of your contacts – so what? Well, all the contacts you’ve just added should be visible in the Org Chart function which appears on the main toolbar of the Account. With a bit of dragging and dropping, you can quickly lay out the reporting structure for your known customer contacts.

Handles will appear on contacts as you move them around, to help manage the way the chart is displayed and keep it simple. Save the chart layout when you’re happy, and you can show your boss how diligent you’re being at managing your customer relationship. Now, who wouldn’t want that?

655 – Like my email

Posted on November 4, 2022 (Updated November 4, 2022) by ewand

Every time you buy anything, stay anywhere or eat something, you’re peppered with requests to review and recommend whatever it was. If review / like fatigue has not yet set in, there’s now the ability to signal a reaction with emails in Outlook and M365.

The likey-likey feature is only present for emails in your own organization – ie. you can’t like that email that informs you’ve won the state lottery, or that your Apple ID has been compromised (though it is reported that sometimes the reactions do work across tenants). You can, however, send an appropriate emote to any email that originated from someone in your organization (even if there are other externals on it).

In desktop Outlook, look for the smiley icon in the response area at the top right of a message in the preview pane or when you open it outright; Outlook Web App has a similar UI which might contain other extensions’ icons next to the smiley too.

There isn’t a could have been a meeting or a please take me off this email button, but whenever you click on the like, love, laugh etc icon, the reaction is visible to the originator of the mail. (Happy Silver Anniversary, btw, Bedlam DL3 – hope you get on the EBC wall)

To see what people have to say of the guff you send, look at the Notifications icon in the top right of Outlook / OWA, and as well as any mentions you may have from people who can’t type your name without putting an @ in front of it, you’ll see a summary of who has reacted to each message, and how.

Alternatively, look in your Sent Items and if you select a message you can see what reactions it has had; there isn’t an easy way to show reactions in the table view so you could see which messages are the most popular without having to preview or open them up. It probably can be done – though likely a palaver for limited utility.

Here’s a challenge – if you’re a ‘Softie and you got this in email, react to the message and see if we can break the internet.
Thank you for all that you do!

653 – Bookings with me, you, everybody

Posted on October 21, 2022 by ewand

Ideally, within an organization where people are expected to work together, they will use tools that have been around since the 1980s and actually share their calendar with their colleagues.

Outlook users can usually see blocks of when someone looks free or busy, when looking in the Scheduling Assistant tab on a meeting, though it won’t show external attendees and unless the attendees have chosen to share their calendar details, you won’t see anything other than tentative, free, busy or out of the office. Hopefully, some eejit won’t have blocked everyone else’s calendars by informing their colleagues of an impending day off.

When dealing with people in other time zones, there is a clue to whether they are likely to be able to join a meeting (quite apart from whether they have their calendar blocked or not) – the Work time setting is meant to show others what days and hours their expected work time is supposed to be.

Looking at the scheduling assistant grid, the light-grey area is supposed to be not-work time, and if there are any lighter-coloured blocks, that means they’re free and open for booking. Individually, you might also see their time zone displayed in their Profile Card when clicking on the user’s name in Outlook, Teams etc. Again, this is available for people in the same organization, so when dealing with external parties another approach will be required.

A variety of 3^rd party services exist to help people find time when others are free – a bit like a restaurant or hotel booking service, tools like Calendly or HubSpot (others are available) offer to expose your free time slots to selected external people, so they can find a slot that you are available and reserve it for a meeting with them. Office users could also use FindTime, which effectively sends a poll of suggested times to a group of people and gets them to vote on which one suits them best.

There’s also a Bookings application which is part of Microsoft 365; accessible via the app launcher icon (the grid of squares on the top left if you login on office.com using an account with an active M365 subscription). Bookings is designed to manage scheduling across a group of people – like in a hairdresser’s salon, where multiple members of staff could be available on different shift patterns, but a simple web UI is presented to an end customer so they can find a time when their favourite snipper is available.

Regular ToW contributor Ian Moulster spotted a new addition to Microsoft 365 which appeared in July, and though it may have common underpinnings, it’s a different offering to Bookings – called Bookings with me.

You might spot the Bookings with me notification in the top right of Outlook Web App, or try setting it up at outlook.office.com/bookwithme.

If available in your subscription, you can then set up a booking page with a menu of meeting types you want to accept – eg 20 minute 1:1 Teams calls in “public” (ie available to anyone who has your booking page URL – you might even add it to your email signature), or more specific meetings that are “private”, which you can choose to make available individually to sets of people. There are numerous of controls over how much time before and after the meeting, what days/times it can happen etc. Availability is synced with your Outlook calendar.

When you share the booking page or private URL with people, they just find themselves a time that’s free, and either sign in with a M365 work or school account or give another email address. If the latter, they will get an email with a verification code to enter into the booking form (M365 users are presumed already clean), and after confirming the code, they’ll get a meeting request sent from your calendar, with location and/or Teams details.

650 – All hands meetings

Posted on September 30, 2022 by ewand

Even though Dilbert isn’t funny any more there have been some good ones in the past, satirising corporate life. People who used to be cubicle or office based might struggle to deal with the new reality that most office workers would rather not be in the office 5-days-a week, 9 to 5, yet bosses would prefer people to not be slacking off at home in their PJs.

Zoom, Teams and other platforms adopted a metaphor in an online meeting, where attendees can figuritively raise their hand so they can be asked to speak. It works well when the people running the meeting have the discipline to check that they don’t have a forest of lifted paws before asking, “are there any questions?” to their audience.

It helps if presenters are not doing the lowest-common-denominator thing of sharing their desktop to present slides. Using Teams’ own slide sharing means you can see the chat, and who’s joined, and whether they have their hand raised.

Meeting participants also need to have the practice of raising their hand and waiting to be invited to talk, rather than blaring in to raise new topics or talk over others. Other attendees can also see who has their hand raised (look in the video gallery and you may notice those who have their hand raised are highlighted) and if you look in the People pane, you’ll see the order that attendees raised their hands as well, so if you’re the organizer then you can ask the top and most patient questioner to contribute at a point that makes sense.

A new etiquette has sprung up in hybrid meetings, though – how to balance commentary from remote attendees with chatter that’s happening in the room? Ordinarily, you’d rely on body language in a meeting room to decide it’s time to interject, nodding and perhaps making hand gestures yourself.

When some / half / most of the attendees are remote but you’re in the physical meeting room, it might be prudent to actually join the same Teams meeting on your PC – you’d only be sitting in the room looking at email on your screen anyway – and use the hand raise function before speaking, even if you’re sitting next to other contributors. This way, you’re on the same footing as all the remote attendees and it shows that you are at least giving the pretence of thinking about them too.

When joining a Teams meeting on your PC, there’s a yeah-yeah dialog box which pops up just before entering the “room”, which presents various potentially relevant audio related options. The norm would be to use comptuer audio, then select what speakers/mic you want to use.

These join options can also give you a number to dial in to (or be called by the meeting, so you can stay silent and camera-less on somebody else’s dollar).

If you’re the first to join while in a physical Teams Room, you could bring the room system into your meeting and control it from your machine.

If you are a bod in the room, though, then choose “Don’t use audio” to avoid any mic or speaker issues, causing endless echo. That way, you can enter the online meeting while being in the actual room, interact with other attendees on chat and use features like reactions and hand raising just as if you’re sitting at home.

Just remember that you are, actually, in front of other people, and also remember to change the default option back to “Computer audio” next time you enter a truly remote meeting, or you’ll spend the first few minutes saying “hello, hello? Can you hear me…?”

649 – Exploring SharePoint libraries

Posted on September 23, 2022 by ewand

SharePoint is now old enough that it could walk into a bar and buy itself a beer. It has changed a lot over the versions; starting out as a server product that would produce “portals” (or “digital dashboards”) it grew quickly to being rather more document-centric. SharePoint became the back-end for OneDrive for Business storage, and both have evolved a long way.

Two years ago, SharePoint was said to be used by over 200 million users. The following year, the Gartner MQ had it way out in front on the “Ability to Execute” Y-axis and slightly behind only one other supplier on the “Completeness of Vision” X-axis. It won’t be long now for the next MQ report to appear.

Nowadays, SharePoint underpins quite a lot of Microsoft 365 functionality, such as apps like Lists which provide a groovier UI over the top of the base web services, and the document oriented collab in Teams.

If you look at a file library in Teams, you’ll see a bunch of SharePoint-y options – you can Sync the content offline and it will be held offline, using OneDrive to sync it (and if you like, syncing only the files you’ve opened rather than the whole shebang).

The Sync’ed libraries show up in the Windows Explorer app, and in any number of applications’ File | Open / Save dialog boxes, so you can access and interact with the files through the apps you use rather than browsing to SharePoint.

You’ll see a collection of folders that have been set up to Sync, shown with your organization name, alongside any personal OneDrive and OneDrive for Business synced libraries.

The Download option (next to Sync on the Toolbar in Teams), creates a single ZIP file your computer, with the entire contents of the folder you’re looking at, so use it carefully.

One somewhat overlooked option further to the right of the toolbar (or may be on the ellipsis (“…”) menu): Add shortcut to OneDrive. This creates a shortcut link to the current SharePoint folder within your main OneDrive for Business storage, making it easy to find that SharePoint folder in the future, even though it’s not synced offline. The Add shortcut option is also visible on the ellipsis to the right of sub-folders when viewed in SharePoint or Teams.

Don’t add shortcuts to libraries – or sub-folders – which are already being Synced offline. That would be bad.

One downside to the OneDrive shortcut approach is that it just dumps the link into “My Files”, which is the root folder in OneDrive. The shortcut is named the same as the original source – so if you have lots of Teams folders with the same name (eg “Documents”), they will clash with each other as adding a new link would try to create a shortcut with the same name as one that exists already.

One solution would be to create a subfolder in OneDrive, called Sites (or similar), and after creating the shortcut to your latest Teams/SharePoint site, go to the root OneDrive folder and move your new shortcut – maybe renaming it too, so you can see what its parent site was (since the shortcut doesn’t make it clear what the source SharePoint site is) – you’d then have a Sites folder with lots of Shortcuts like Project Team – Documents etc.

Another side benefit of using shortcuts rather than Syncing offline, is that if you have multiple PCs – or feel like accessing OneDrive through a browser on a different machine altogether – you will always have access to the same collection of shortcuts, whereas the Sync offline capability is configured separately on each machine.

646 – Finding stuff in OneNote

Posted on September 2, 2022 (Updated September 1, 2022) by ewand

Many people ❤️ OneNote. It has evolved much over the ~20 years since it sprang from the “Scribbler” project at the turn of the century and was released in the Office 2003 wave, under the name which the developers disdainfully referred to as “Onay-no-tay”. A recent update to the OneNote strategy for Windows was covered in Tip #632.

There were other OneNote tips a few weeks previously, in Tip #617, including OneTastic, a great addin to the traditional desktop app – the ~~Metro~~ Modern app never had an addin capability.

As well as powerful macro capabilities, which can do things like generate tables of contents or sort pages and other works in ways that the base app doesn’t offer, the OneTastic addin includes the OneCalendar application – also available to install separately – which lets you see which OneNote pages were edited on each day.

If you keep a note of every meeting, stored in different places – by topic, by customer etc – then this is invaluable when it comes to finding notes, as you can see what you last wrote on a given day.

Of course, OneNote has searching capability where you could look across notebooks for key words. There is the ability to Tag notes too, and you can search across notebooks for tagged content.

A powerful yet somewhat hidden search capability in desktop OneNote is also available – you can press CTRL+F to search on a given page, or CTRL+E to run a simple query across multiple places, for where a particular word is mentioned.

Look, however, at the “Pin Search Results (Alt+O)” option at the bottom – it opens search results in a pane to the side, and lets you sort by different criteria, e.g. date modified.

This ALT+O option can only be invoked from within existing search results, so if you want to find all your recent notes with a searched-for word, press CTRL+E to start, then ALT+O and search by date modified to see the results clustered by month.

642 – Finding work stuff

Posted on August 5, 2022 (Updated August 5, 2022) by ewand

Data storage has become very cheap over the decades – a while ago, ComputerWorld wrote an article, saying that when it was founded 50 years previous, a 1MB hard disk would cost you $1M, and in 2017, that would work out at $0.02. 5 years later, $0.02 would get >1GB, more than 1,000 times as much.

This profusion has turned many of us into pilers – what’s the point of organizing data and deleting old stuff, be that files, emails, camera roll photos?

Outlook has a pretty good search function built in. OneDrive photos has some great organizing and filtering capabilities (like On This Day, or if you have GPS enabled on your camera/phone, you can easily group photos by the location taken from).

Still in OneDrive, there is also some AI-based tagging of your pics, which can sometimes be a bit hit & miss… but more often than not gets it about right.

While browsing “All Photos”, if you mouse-over to the right, you’ll get a scrollable timeline too (similar to the Windows Photos app), so you can quickly jump to a reference date.

Assuming you’re using Microsoft 365 / Office 365 at your workplace, there are other ways to find stuff that is more work-related, like documents, email and messages. One easily overlooked source is the “new tab” experience within the Edge browser.

The content on the default home page can be customized in a variety of ways, from choosing whether to show a background image or keep it clear; to displaying content from various “news” providers and clickbait advertisers that Microsoft News / MSN has elected to present to you, or hiding that altogether.

You can do some filtering of that content too, though for work purposes, many people may want to leave the page layout in “Focused”, which puts a link bar at the bottom and hides the content to be a scroll away.

Edge Profiling

If you have a “Work” profile (or you only have a single profile) and it is connected to your work account – ie your Microsoft 365/ Office 365 email address rather than your personal one – then you’ll see a “Microsoft 365” link within the list of content providers, which gives you a simple view of your most recent documents, SharePoint sites you visit and a whole lot more. To learn more about this Edge Enterprise tab, see here.

Also, you’ll see the search box containing your company name – it uses Bing to search for whatever you put in there (somewhat controversially, regardless of what your default search engine in the browser is…). Edge doesn’t give you the option – like IE used to – of starting a tab with a completely blank page, though there are hacks to make that work.

If you stick with the standard new tab, it will also give you the choice of restricting your search to “Work”, so looking at documents and the likes. You’ll see a list of content sources displayed on the left side as tabs, allowing you to filter what you’re looking for or where you want to search.

There’s a fairly new one that searches “Messages”. At least for now, that means Outlook and / or Teams messages, but it could be really useful when trying to remember if a conversation you had was in email or in a Teams chat.

A quick way to jump to this section is to go to aka.ms/messages

– regardless of which browser you’re using, as it uses the Bing.com/work back end.

640 – Smart Dates

Posted on July 22, 2022 by ewand

For all the time that computers have been used, date handling has been a problem. Bad dates cause problems from sorting lists to processing payments, yet many systems force the user to figure out what it expects by way of date entry – from web sites which force 2-digits (a la 01/01/22 vs 1/1/22) to non-localised apps which assume a date format without allowing it to be changed?

If you ever say a date out loud like “this report is due by eight-one”, meaning 8/1 or 1^st August, then 91% of the world’s population will need to interpret that differently to how they represent dates, since most will expect the format to be day-month-year, or arguably most sensibly, year-month-day.

Try saving things like expense reports or invoices using the file name starting yy-mm-dd or even yyyy-mm-dd and they’ll be much easier to handle (aside from just sorting by created date, of course).

When a user enters a date into a Windows app, the vast majority will respect the format set by the operating system, known as the User Locale.

That doesn’t help too much if the author of a spreadsheet – for example – is in one locale and other users are elsewhere; if the default date format is numeric, then the field remains in the format of the author, and that may cause befuddlement.

Switching display format to Long Date – or even setting a shorter custom format – could avoid confusion. Under the covers, Excel still stores the date in a universal format, but people might interpret it incorrectly when display in a different format.

Other tools can handle dates in surprisingly smart ways – even since its first version in 1997, Outlook lets you enter text into date windows like a Due Date for reminders or tasks – any time you are presented a date field that lets you type as well as select a date from a calendar picker, you can put stuff in like tomorrow, 2 weeks, next Friday, third Tuesday in October etc. There are shorter versions – 2w, 3m 10d – or you can string things together, like Monday before Christmas.

Microsoft To Do has also has some date smarts; if you type in a new task to track, it can read dates and times out of your task description and automatically set due dates and Reminders.

It has other kinds of parsing – in 3 days etc – though not quite as comprehensive as Outlook’s. There are also a load of special dates recognised (at least in the US).

So far, this functionality is available on Windows and iOS apps and for the most part it’s really neat. If it detects a date you don’t like – you’re suggesting something may happen, rather than it is happening on 1^st May, for example – then just hit backspace to clear that association.