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Back in the day, Microsoft nerds (yes, there were some, both in and outside of the company) used to take pride in continually referring to products by their code names long after they’d been released, and by using the most Microspeak. There used to be a browsable Microspeak Glossary on the Microsoft intranet, and various versions of it online, but they now seem to have withered. The odd phrase still crops up in contemporary usage, and one which shows its age is RTM. Historically, at a point in a software product’s lifecycle, the team just needs to ship the thing – some would think it’s the completion of the development, but most developers know nothing is ever finished and therefore nothing would ever ship. Instead, it’s some date that’s been decided, and they work backwards from that date to ship whatever they have at that point. In traditional boxed-software sales, that would mean sending the final code off to be turned into floppy discs, CDs, whatever – in other words, release it to manufacturing. RTM in the CD-era often referred to the “gold code”, as it was burned to a (gold-coloured) recordable CD before being sent to the manufacturing process. So RTM also means the final build of code as well as the process to release it. Since nobody really buys software on physical media anymore, RTM is something of an anachronism. “RTW” was used for a while, meaning “Release to Web” but it’s a clunky phrase, and has disappeared from use – much like Cisco’s attempt to for a while to talk not about “IoT,” but “Internet of Everything” or “IoE”. Nowadays, products at the end of their development cycle “go GA” – Generally Available. Much easier.
If you currently use Edge – or shudder, still use Internet Explorer – then installing the new Edge will migrate your settings, history, passwords etc, but not any extensions you might have. Fear not, though, for the Chromium engine means you can install extensions from both the Microsoft Store and also the Chrome Store too. For more on the new Edge, see the tips that are shown as part of the install process, read some opinion pieces on whether world+dog seems to think this is a good thing; here, here, here … and here… and, oh, you get the idea. |
Category: Productivity
512 – Sticky Notes and Glancing
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Happy New Year! Whether it’s a way of keeping up with the NY resolutions you haven’t broken yet, or just a casual way to remind yourself to do stuff, Post-It Notes or the more generic “sticky notes” can be a useful tool. ToW # 446 talked about a handy Windows app that is now installed by default on Windows 10. Sticky Notes has been through a number of iterations, and now in v3.7 it’s looking pared back yet really functional. Sure, you can use Outlook Tasks and To Do to track significant actions, long-term projects and the like, but sometimes you just want a simple list to get you through the morning or to take shopping. If you open Sticky Notes, and click on the body of a note itself (to set focus to that window and start editing the text), then you’ll see the menu and close controls; clicking the menu lets you quickly change the colour of your note (so if you have several open, you can
You can type, write (with your finger, or a stylus), or grab pictures from camera or existing files, all into a note, then share and make sense of it later. You can sync your sticky notes to other devices: just go to the settings icon (from the taskbar context view or within the Notes list) to configure syncing using either an Office 365 or Microsoft Account.
Sticky Notes has even replaced the venerable “Notes” function in Outlook, which has been around since 1997 – go to the Wunderbar in Outlook and you may need to click the ellipsis to see the Notes pages; it’s very old-school looking and not everything is carried over quite the same, but it’s a welcome integration that replaces another duplicate way of doing the same thing. It’s part of a long-term plan, so it seems. Multi-device
If you set up sync between devices, it’s quite amusing to open the web client, the PC app, and then on your phone, add a new note… and see the other two update within seconds. Technology #ftw – far more useful than the kind of toot being peddled at CES in Las Vegas this week. On an Android phone, though, the best way to use Sticky Notes is through the integration with the Microsoft Launcher – if you’re not a phone tech geek, you might not realise that with Android, you can supplant the entire home screen UI of the phone with any number of variants. Microsoft has a mature and highly regarded launcher, that
Cortana integration featured in the Launcher at one point, though it’s planned to disappear for many of us. In a “for your comfort and safety” type announcement, news came that Cortana will disappear from the phone in favour of being part of other M365 apps in time. More to follow, no doubt… |
510 – Fluent apps flow in
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Or purportedly, it’s a “design system”, itself an evolution of an earlier “Microsoft Design Language”, which evolved from “Metro”. You follow?
When Hypertext was first conceived – the term itself is more than 50 years old – early implementations tended to use a book metaphor, where a page was the size of one screen, and moving around the content dived in and out through following hyper-links. Apple pioneered a similar approach with HyperCard, where a stack of virtual cards would hold data (and other objects) that were linked together. Over the last decade, as web and app users have moved to being more mobile, the way content is displayed and interacted with has changed – many websites appear less hierarchical, with longer pages that can be swiped up and down, rather than the classic design where short pages were strung together with links. As one example, look at the British Airways site today – it’s designed to be touch-friendly and yet be usable with a more traditional mouse/menu approach if desired:
…compared to the old, from December 2009 … Back then, pretty much everyone who hit that site was using a keyboard, mouse and non-touch screen. Completely separate mobile versions were often build for smartphone users, but the more traditional site was still very mouse oriented. Not so today. Microsoft’s Fluent design system embraces a common ethos that applies to web pages as well as apps on all screen sizes – and forms a big part of an expanded design philosophy, as covered by an interesting article and video from The Verge earlier this year. As Fluent principles are being applied across the board, we’ve seen updated versions of lots of apps and online experiences – like OneDrive and OneNote, for example. More will follow, with Teams and Yammer being identified as “coming soon”. The same thinking may even generate new forms of application – the Fluid Preview, a new canvas-type collaboration app which was announced at Ignite potentially being one. |
509 – Edge Beta profiles & sync
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At a simple level, Profiles lets you specify your work account and personal account(s) separately, and you can switch between them quickly. Look under Settings or go straight to edge://settings/profiles in the browser if you already have it. For anyone who’s ever had to sign into a work-related website but using their Microsoft Account (eg Outlook.com / Hotmail / MSN / Zune etc credentials), this can be handy as you do it without resorting to an InPrivate tab.
To change profiles, just click on the associated picture on the browser toolbar and if you like, you can even pin the You may want to import and export favourites between profiles – like Chrome, Edge no longer stores these as shortcut files that can be simply moved around, instead holding the favourites to a “bookmarks” file. If you want to see where Edge Beta is saving your profile info, go to edge://version in the browser and check out the Profile Path. Mind how you go if you decide to start editing stuff directly. To read more about profiles and the new Edge, see here. |
507 – Momentum of Teams
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It’s been a busy few weeks on the Teams team. As an aside, what do you call a team that’s set up in Teams? Is it a Teams Site, or a Teams team, just a “Team” or …? Documentation talks about creating a team, which is fine when you’re already in Teams, but talking with someone about Teams teams can be a bit like a tongue twister. It was recently announced that Teams has 20 million daily active users, up from 13 million since July. Talk to enterprise customers who have adopted Teams, and many have a user base that really loves it. There may be more to the story, but as many Office 365 users get Teams as part of their subscription, it’s inevitable that its usage will grow. It’s great to hear stories of how customers are using technology like Teams to positively change the way they work.
See the recent The App Studio in Teams allows enterprise developers to build their own extensions and addins quickly.
Live captions – similar in approach to the subtitles in PowerPoint presentations that were recently discussed – is already available in a preview for some users. Captioning and transcription is also available for Teams Live Events, if you enable the feature in the setup of the event. |
506 – OneNote 2016 reprieve
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Office 2019 was no longer going to ship with OneNote – the desktop app was not being developed beyond OneNote 2016, but it would still be freely installable if desired. Efforts would be focussed on the Modern / Store / “OneNote for Windows 10”, which shares a lineage with the mobile apps; there’s a lot to be said in favour of this strategy, since it would bring the UX of the Windows Store, tablet, phone and web apps into alignment. For regular ToW readers, this has been covered ad nauseam. Well, blow me down, a brilliant Ignite session from @Ben Hodes only went and wound the clock back (and simultaneously painted it forward)… [Check out Union Jack Man at 42:18 in the video stream if you want a laugh] OneNote 2016 is getting some CPR, and will be installed by default with clean Office setups again, early in 2020. Point of clarity – a clean Office2019 / Office 365 install doesn’t currently include OneNote 2016 … but upgrading from an existing Office install that already had OneNote, does. If need be, go to http://aka.ms/installonenote to install OneNote 2016. Some new features are coming, too – like Dark Mode, @mentions, To Do integration and more. The OneNote for Windows 10 code base is being back-ported to the older Win32 version; in time, the same underlying code will exist, even if there remains two versions of the product. It was previously reported that across the Office suite on Windows, the Win32 codebase will be favoured going forward, even though Modern versions were released for several of the traditional apps. We will have to wait and see.
Did you know that if you insert an audio recording into your OneNote page, that any handwritten or typed notes you take while the recording is underway, will be linked to the corresponding place in the audio? Later, if you click on a block of text or handwriting, you can play back the recording at just that point, or if you just start playing the audio, the notes you took will be highlighted as the playback progresses.
No such function appears to exist in the OneNote for Windows 10 app; maybe that’s a good thing. After all, OneNote 2016 only lets you turn it on after an ominous-sounding warning… |
504 – Searching Outlook
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15 years ago, Microsoft bought a company that made an add-in called LookOut and since then, deep search capabilities have been added in a variety of ways, now provided through the Windows Search service.
How useful this is might depend on how and when you use Outlook search – if you’re looking for a way to return very specific results, it might be more of a distraction than a help (ie if you’re a natural piler, you might use Search as a normal way of retrieving stuff rather than an occasional tool for finding something in particular).
Top Results also appears in Outlook Web App (outlook.office.com), in the consumer Outlook.com and in Windows Mail – and it doesn’t appear that you can disable it: much to some users’ chagrin. Turn to Uservoice or Feedback Hub if you feel similarly. To get more out of Search in the desktop Outlook app, it’s worth understanding how to be more specific – even using just a few keywords will help you narrow the results. Search for from:bob, for example, and all results will be mails that originated from someone who had “bob” in their display name. Narrow the search even more by adding terms like sent:yesterday, about:pricing or messagesize:enormous as well.
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503 – OneDrive Personal Vault
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Browsing in your OneDrive data folder, you may need to enable Hidden Items in the View tab to even see it. You can treat it like any other folder, adding files and other folders that are particularly sensitive – scans of important but infrequently-accessed documents like passports, driving licenses and so on. Why infrequently accessed, you may ask?
If you had a file in your now-locked PV that you tried to access from Maybe apps will in time come to know that a file is in PV, and prompt the user to unlock before opening? Then again, security through obscurity (the most sophisticated form of protection, right?) might be a good thing here; when the PV is locked, there is no such folder therefore no apps can get access to it without the user taking specific and separate action to unlock it first. Not being seen is indeed a useful tactic.
Unlike in the PC scenario, the PV folder is always shown and indicates if it’s open or locked based on the icon. The Web UI offers other help and advice about how to use the Personal Vault effectively.
OneDrive on PC – Setup error 0x8031002c
To work around this and get up and running, try:
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502 – Presenting PowerPoint Subtitles
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When they do it properly, you’ll often see presenters kick off by fishing
PowerPoint will typically be set up to use Presenter View by default, and the screen that’s being shared will be showing the speaker notes / next slides etc, while the full-screen content is being displayed on the 2nd monitor that isn’t being shared.
Choose the language you’d like to display, the location of the subtitles and when you start presenting, the machine will listen to every word you say and will either display what it thinks you’ve said in your own language, or it can use an online service to translate to subtitles in over 60 languages. It’s fantastic. See more here. Go and try it now.
Windows has a closed captioning setting page that applies to other apps that support it, too, if you’d like to show subtitles on video that has the content already defined. Closed Captioning is legislated by several countries, for traditionally-broadcast media as well as online video. You may also want to add captions to videos that you plan to embed – more, here. |
Tip o’ the Week 500 – Greatest Hits
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On days like these, it’s easy to reflect on previous glories and favourite moments. Brits of a certain age, start playing that TOTP chart rundown tune (without getting distracted by YouTube clips of what was actually in the charts back in the day – some of it was undoubtedly great, some just bad noise)… and get ready for probably the 5 best Tips of the Week since the whole sorry enterprise started nearly 10 years ago… Horizontal lines – this one is incredibly handy when you’re formatting an email or document and need to demarcate a section of content. Simply type three (or more) dashes “—” and press enter. Bingo, thank Autocorrect for that piece of magic. First seen all the way back in Tip o’ the Week #16: All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound? OneCalendar / OneTastic – a fabulous addin to the pensioned-off OneNote 2016 (and its predecessors), the OneCalendar function shows you a calendar view of note pages, arranged by when you edited them. It’s brilliant if you use multiple notebooks, and you want to recall something you knew you did on a particular day (like the previous week’s regular call). OneCalendar spawned OneTastic, a suite of other useful addins and macros for OneNote.
Actually, as ToW 393 covered, searching in old OneNote is better, anyway. ALT-O – who knew? OneCalendar was first discussed back in Tip o’ the Week #98 – OneNote calendar front-end
Originally uncovered in Tip o’ the Week #101 – Finding files for dialogs WindowsKey + V – a fairly new entrant to this chart, a feature that arrived with the October 2018 update to Windows 10, and was redesigned a little in May 2019: it shows you the clipboard history, so you can recall URLs, screen grabs etc that you might have copied a few steps ago. Hugely useful once you remember it’s there, once you’ve enabled it. See more in Windows help. First look was in Tip o’ the Week 482 – Paste History 404 – not so much of a tip, as a practical joke played in email. It doesn’t work quite the same in the browser, but you’ll get the idea. Also has some of the best tangential links to random content. Guess what? It was in Tip o’ the Week 404 – [%subject%] not found %&
Thanks to all the regular readers who provide feedback, ideas and encouragement! Will anyone still be here for ToW1000? |
