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If Data is the new Oil, perhaps the much-anticipated big privacy stick that is GDPR will be the new Millennium Bug – companies will want to avoid to be made an example of first. €20M or 4% of global turnover fines, whichever is the larger, probably gives some execs sleepless nights, even though the proportionality of any punishment will only be realised when there are a few court cases to set the tone. The threat of being caught out might well have scared CxOs around the world into doing something to make sure they look like they’re prepared. In many cases, it seems, that action has been to email all their customers and ask them to opt-in to being contactable; some got confused and emailed people, asking them to opt out if they didn’t want to get any more. As it happens, both of these approaches may well be irrelevant if not illegal themselves.
It’s time to recall a few message handling tips in Outlook which may help…
Of course, GDPR should be a Good Thing. It’ll take a bit of time to settle down (and may need some further work in the UK, post-Brexit), but at least we all get a few less emails in future. |
Category: Productivity
Tip o’ the Week 427 – OneNote roadmap update
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Talking about OneNote can be confusing, though, as there are the two PC versions – OneNote 2016, the Win32 app that’s evolved ever since the first version shipped as part of Office 2003, and the shiny new codebase that is OneNote for Windows 10, the Store app which also shares a lot of its UX with the Mac, mobile and web versions. Differences are explained here. Major users of OneNote may have noticed that over the last couple of years, the traditional Windows app hasn’t received a whole lot of new functionality, but the Store version has had regular updates with extra features… though it is a much simpler app anyway, so there’s more to improve. The Recently, the OneNote team announced that there will be no further development of the traditional OneNote 2016 application, and that it won’t be installed by default in the next iteration of Office (though it will still be available as an option, in case you can’t live without it). New features are planned for the Store version – like support for tags, and what looks to To get the latest version of the OneNote app, first check it’s up to date, or join the Office Insiders program. Windows Insiders Paul Thurrott – an unashamed fan of the OneNote for Windows 10 app, preferring it to its elder sibling – also reported on the news. Paul points out that the UWP version has better support for ink, that syncing is faster, performance is better etc. Tech Republic has some further commentary too. To keep up with other news on OneNote, you could do well to follow William Devereux from the OneNote team on Twitter, as recommended by Windows Central’s “50 influencers” article. |
Tip o’ the Week 425 – Windows Timeline
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For example, if you hold CTRL as well as ALT-TAB, the dialog persists until you select a window (click, tap or press Enter) or Escape to go back.
Windows 10 users can also click the Task View icon, on the task bar near the Windows logo by default; that has the effect of showing a tiled view of running windows, and also is the entry point to using multiple virtual desktops (as discussed previously on ToW #279). The soon-to-be-released “Redstone 4” update for Windows 10, still officially unnamed but being widely referred to as the Spring Creators Update, will tweak the Task View again, replacing the logo with one that hints to a more dynamic layout of tiles, and introducing the long-awaited “Timeline” feature. Like the Task View in earlier versions of Windows 10, you can invoke it using the WindowsKey-TAB method. Windows Timeline has been a while coming due to the back-end support that’s required to make it compelling – in a nutshell, when applications (such as Office apps, or the Edge browser) support activities as part of Project Rome, then those activities can be recorded and made accessible across devices – so if you have multiple PCs or even apps on other platforms (like using the Edge browser on your phone), you’ll be able to get a single view of what you’ve been doing and be able to jump back to the page, document or other activity. Even on a single machine, it’s useful to be able to scroll back through history to see what you’ve been doing and when.
You can even use Timeline to search through your browsing history, something that’s still not possible using the Edge browser’s History feature; it’s an often requested addition (since it was in Internet Explorer and is also in other browsers) that will hopefully make its way into the Edge browser at some stage. Just ask Bing.
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Tip o’ the Week 424 – Tracking meeting responses
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One seemingly minor but really notable improvement of late has been the ability for attendees of meetings to be able to see who is also joining them. How many times have you gone to a meeting – or conference call (video call even) – and not known who else was attending, since you weren’t the organiser? Well, one of the small but incredibly useful updates of late has been to show everyone who else is attending – just
Copy Status to Clipboard, paste into a brand new Excel sheet, select the area in question and Format as Table if you’d like to easily manipulate the responses. So you can nag the people you think should be there, but haven’t showed up yet… |
Tip o’ the Week 423 – SwiftKey update swipes in
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SwiftKey is a replacement software keyboard for iOS or Android devices, which supports a variety of auto-complete and swiping functions – and it has just had the biggest upgrade since Microsoft acquired SwiftKey back in 2016. The SwiftKey keyboard app implements a technology similar to the pioneering Word Flow – not the Word Flow app for iOS that SwiftKey has basically replaced, but the swipey writing technology which was part of the dearly departed Windows Phone 8.1.
The upgrade to SwiftKey introduces some updated design elements and cool new functionality, most notably a toolbar accessed via the little “+” symbol to the left of the auto-complete suggestions, which provides easy access to emojis, GIFs and other business essentials. More here.
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Tip o’ the Week 422 – Freshening Outlook.com
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Microsoft has been the butt of jokes in the past when it comes to branding As world+dog runs from discrete and perpetually licensed software, to SaaS applications delivered via a variety of clients, web apps and the like, Outlook has grown into a whole family of products, not altogether without confusion. First, there’s Outlook the app that’s part of Office. That’s Office, the application suite, which can trace its roots back to 1990. There’s also a version of Outlook that’s delivered via Click2Run technology (itself rooted in App-V, formerly known as Softgrid), generally in conjunction with an Office 365 subscription.
Now, if you buy a business version of Office 365, you may or may not get the rights to use Outlook the desktop application, and you will have a web app called Outlook which is running from the Office 365 back end based on Exchange Server. If you buy a consumer version of Office 365 – Home or Personal – you’ll have email called Outlook.com, delivered to you by the same platform as the Hotmail successor but known as “Premium” and therefore without ads and with more capacity, and you may get the Outlook desktop application to use with it. Do you follow?
And returning to Outlook on the Web, ie the version of Outlook you get in your browser when you’re on a commercial version of Office 365, it’s likely that the tailored versions for mobile phones will be retired soon, and users will be pushed to use the Outlook mobile apps for iOS or Android instead. |
Tip o’ the Week 421 – Mind your passwords
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So you write your passwords down (srsly, don’t do that), sometimes in an obvious way – there’s a (probably apocryphal) story of a senior healthcare professional who left their laptop (with lots of sensitive data on it, obviously) in a taxi… the standard disk encryption neatly foiled by a Postit note stuck to the lid with their username and password on it…
Corporate domain passwords will generally enforce a certain degree of complexity, frequency of changing, and may even add certificate or token based authentication that needs to be used in combination with other forms – so called secondary or multi-factor authentication (2FA/MFA. It’s getting pretty common now for web sites to offer or even force 2FA, achieved via texting a one-time login code, or using a mobile app to authenticate you. ToW #371 covered how to enable 2FA for your Microsoft Account (MSA) – you really should switch that on. For most people’s private credentials (used for logging into websites concerned with personal lives rather than work), usernames & passwords – with the odd secret question thrown in – are the main way they’ll access sensitive information from their phone or PC. And forcing the changing of passwords on a very regular basis can be a bad idea, too, as people are more likely to use easily-guessable passwords that are in turn easy for them to remember.
The average person, apparently, is many times more likely to fall victim to some sort of computer-related incident than a more traditional robbery. You might be hoodwinked yourself, or through your lax credentials, your account might be compromised and used to scam other unsuspecting punters – as happens regularly on eBay. The Man on the Clapham omnibus is also likely to use the same username & password for every website or other system they can, even though many know they shouldn’t. It’s easy to recall the same few sets of credentials, rather than having to go and look something up every time. Don’t do this. If you want to scare yourself into action, have a look on https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and see if your (consumer) email address is on there; chances are, it might have leaked from one of the many high-profile data breaches that have happened over the years. Try entering a common password you might use on https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords and it’ll tell you if that password has ever been leaked… and advise you never to use that password again. Password managers are a way to help combat the issue – so you could have a different password for each site, sometimes even a random password that the password manager itself will generate for you. Examples include 1Password, LastPass, KeePass, Dashlane, eWallet… many will be browser based or have extensions (even for Edge!), so you can log in easily despite the complexity of your passwords. If the password manager has a cloud-storage vault, make sure it’s encrypted and there’s no way it could be compromised … and make sure you use a suitably complex but easy to remember password to unlock the password manager vault. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? If you use a password manager already, it may even have a report you can run to see how well protected you are…
Summary
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Tip o’ the Week 420 – Office 365 updates
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There are some other interesting features on the same tab (like language translation or accessibility checks), as well as dealing with Now, don’t turn on the profanity check and see how many squiggles you can generate in a single document – and stop sniggering at the back! A variety of online services now benefit from general availability of Compliance Manager, part of the tool Take a look at the Compliance Manager if you want to scare yourself silly about the amount of checks that people will be expected to complete, in order to be in line with GDPR. |
Tip o’ the Week 419 – What’s the time?
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Windows 10 tweaked the way time is In the Windows Insiders builds of the last few weeks – currently 17101 (which is now in the Fast Ring), there have been changes that bring the clock further forward too – the Game Bar has been updated to include the clock on the What is time? Existentially, time is relative. If you ever find that your Windows PC isn’t keeping time accurately, you may want to check that you have it set to get its time automatically (check Settings -> Time & Language – > Date & time), or go into the old-fashioned Control Panel, search for time and look at the settings in there, especially under the “Internet Time” tab to see where it’s syncing the time from: time.windows.com is probably the default. Windows Time is also a thing – the number of milliseconds since the machine was started up, and also the name of the Back to simple relativity, though – what is the actual, real “time”? If you have multiple clocks, watches, phones & PCs, it’s a fair bet that they’ll all be divergent, unless they’re all being synchronised by some external device (your broadband router, maybe). If you’d like to find out exactly what the time is and don’t have access to an atomic clock or similar, there are a few online resources that might help… and you could even try asking Cortana, as she knows about time zones and stuff. But the best time site is http://time.is. Try it from any device and you’ll get the time right now; some allowances need to be made for network latency but the operators have tried For an illustration of what latency (as ultimately governed by the speed of light) means when accessing nearby vs far away websites, check out www.azurespeed.com, which measures the time to connect to storage services at Azure datacenters. Some variance could be explained by performance spikes and so on, but the main impact is network latency due to distance travelled. The results can sometimes be surprising.
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Tip o’ the Week 417 – Resolving aliases in bulk
This might be a very old-Microsoft culture thing, but alias names have always been a relatively big deal within the company; not an alias in the sense of a nom de plume or some alter ego, but a name curiously given to mean your login name.
Before enlightenment, Microsofties were emailed simply by sending to alias@microsoft.com – and still are, so even if the primary mail address is forename.surname@microsoft.com, you could still mail them at forenams@microsoft.com, or whatever their alias is.
In a company with a handful of people, it was easy to remember such a name for when you wanted to drop them an email, but with hundreds of thousands of mail addresses, you might need more room – when Exchange Server came out in 1996, it supported 64 characters in the alias name, though oddly, Microsoft has never embraced longer than 8-character aliases. Back in the day, your mailbox was a folder on a Xenix server, then an MS Mail postoffice, and the folder names were restricted by the 8.3 filename format. There are probably too many legacy systems that also have an employee name represented by their 8-letter alias, and it still kinda works. Aliases – and the cultural phenomenon of calling people not by their name, but by their alias… eg “we had a billg review” – were a central part of the 1995 Douglas Coupland book, Microserfs.
But the true “alias” lives on, even if the Skypey “Contact Card” UI in Outlook does its best to not show you what someone’s alias is (but you can usually still get to Open Outlook Properties, which shows you the traditional Outlook address book view, with alias in the very top section). Lots of reports from Microsoft’s internal systems will refer to an employee using their alias name, so it often helps if you can decipher an alias into the person behind it. Resolving an alias to a name one-at-a-time is all very well, but when looking at a column of alias names in some spreadsheet, it’s a bit of a palaver to turn each of the FORENAMS into something meaningful. Bulk alias resolver in Excel Fear not, worthy reader, for a solution is to hand.
This can be handy if you’re building Excel reports and want to add names to a table instead of aliases – you could sort the list of aliases alphabetically, run them through the resolver, and then reference the table with a VLOOKUP formula so you could hide the column of aliases from your report and show instead the derived real names. |
The alias, or logon name, at Microsoft was historically an up-to-7- or 8-letter moniker, based by default on surname|first-letter-of-forename, eg billg or steveb.
Some people at Microsoft still talk about an email distribution list as an “alias” – eg. “TAKE ME OFF THIS ALIAS!!” as a Reply-All (
