Tip o’ the Week 410 – Inbox Zero for New Year?

Posted on January 10, 2018 (Updated December 15, 2022) by ewand

ToW has covered various strategies in dealing with email (189, 223, 310 and more), but this week’s tip is shamelessly lifted from a LinkedIn article by an erstwhile colleague and media industry leviathan, Tony Henderson.

Tony, it turns out, authored a book a few years back which offered a slightly different-than-the-norm spin on productivity and how to deal with some of the difficulties of the modern workplace. It’s from this tome that he picked some great tips in handling your inbox – perhaps leading to the ability to clear it completely and leave “inbox zero”.

The Eleven Rules of Email

Daily Mail Test – “Never write anything in an email that you would not be happy for your mother to read on the front page of the Daily Mail.”
Responding – Don’t be too quick to respond to email requests – emails are very easy to send, and it is often hard and time consuming to respond.
Expectations – Get people to call you if they want something urgently so that you know whether they are really serious and why they need a response.
Inbox Management – Clear your inbox every day to less than 30 emails (so the list does not reach the bottom of outlook page). Set up folders covering each area you work on – or groups you deal with – and file religiously – even if you have not always read. That way you can go back and review by topic and avoid the stress of an overfull inbox.
Getting Things Actioned – if you are sending an email looking for someone to act flag that action is required by putting ACTION REQUIRED in the title which will mean that everyone who the email is copied will read it. To make it really clear who and what you are asking you must highlight specific requests e.g.: “Action: Alan to check this issue and confirm.” This approach works well with people you know, but may be ignored by people who you don’t – a good idea to get verbal agreement first.
Getting Your Message Across – If you need to get an email response from senior people who are busy or don’t know you very well.
- Construct your title carefully (perhaps write it as a proposition such as – “Getting final approval for Project X”).
- Get the message over in three short and punchy paragraphs – no more.
- If you want approval, ask for it by asking them to merely reply to that email and type “yes”. This works very well as it makes it so easy for them to respond!
- Remember that people are all really pressured by email but generally always scan the title and first few lines.
Avoiding Inevitable Email Accidents – the speed and simplicity of email will always lead to some mistakes; many of them can be rectified by adopting two simple principles.
- Set a Delay – Set a sending delay of at least 2 minutes on your Outbox – it gives you just enough time to delete that accidental email. Better still you can set it for specific addresses such as clients.
- Double Check Addresses – Double check your address lines in email before you send – Outlook auto insert often puts odd names in there.
Arguments – Never, ever have an argument by email – everyone loses and it is recoded for posterity. If you sense a disagreement coming, make a call or organise a face to face meeting and then circulate the conclusions by email.
Favourite Form of Communication – Email is not everyone’s favourite form of communication. Some people are better “live”, others like to use the phone, and others respond to formal letters or memos. Try and find out which form your key people like and use it for important communications.
Circulation List – When you need to respond to an email with a wide circulation on it, you need to stop and think. Do I need to send this to everyone? Is this “thread” wasting a lot of people’s time? (You can be sure that it is).
Interruptions – While internal emails can be a huge waste of time they can also avoid unnecessary interruptions. After you have interrupted someone at their desk it can take up to 30 minutes for them to get back to their original task.
So while talk is best, email may be a useful method to log a question or thought. Equally making a note and saving it for a lunchtime chat is also a good option.

See Tony’s article here, and The Leopard in the Pinstripe Suit, here.

Tip o’ the Week 409 – Touchpad settings

Posted on January 10, 2018 by ewand

Once upon a time, mice had balls, and there was even a joke field service bulletin telling customers how to manage them better.

Microsoft has had a few funny KB articles over the years, too, though not necessarily intended to amuse. Barney sometimes plays on his own…, for example – who knew?

Given that a defining feature of mechanical meeces was the fact they had a rubbery ball inside, it seemed obvious to early laptop designers that a trackball would make sense to move the pointer around.

Eventually the touchpad took over, and divided opinion – some people just couldn’t live without a USB-tethered proper mouse, which they carted around with their laptop, while designers sought to add more and more functionality to the touchpad.

A slew of 3 or even 4-finger gestures can change the behaviour of the machine, from switching between apps to controlling the system volume.

On a Windows 10 laptop, if you type touchpad at the start screen to find the settings that control it, you’ll see a load of additional gestures have been added over time, depending on what capabilities your machine has (specifically, if it has a Precision Touchpad or not).

If you’re especially particular about how your touchpad works, you may wish to look into tuning it further through registry tweaks.

Tip o’ the Week 408 – sign up for email lists

Posted on January 10, 2018 by ewand

The curse of email is that it’s too easy to send nonspecific content to large groups, meaning it’s generally in everyone’s interests to avoid getting any more. How often do you have to parse some online form where you need to leave the checked checkbox unchecked if you’d like to remain not signed up to receive specially selected offers from our carefully chosen partners?

That said, email distribution lists were an early form of mass collaboration – powered by the likes of LISTSERV, where online communities formed, in some ways an alternative to USENET and the web forums that now host many interest groups online. In the days of LISTSERV, email volumes would be relatively low, and it provided a simple distribution system that fired mail out to everyone on the list, and people could easily join and leave, by simply mailing a JOIN or LEAVE command to the address.

Next time there’s an internal company email storm (the famous Bedlam DL3 storm at Microsoft occurred just over 20 years ago), it’s not necessarily counter-intuitive for people to respond in the “take me off this list” manner, even though the perpetrators themselves are probably unaware of that.

If you find yourself getting unwanted email from marketeers or newsletters you’re not interested in, there are a variety of ways of opting-out – most kosher bulk email tools will allow you to unsubscribe with a link at the bottom; if the email is completely unsolicited, however, then clicking on an “unsubscribe” link in a spam message might just mark you as a real person, and you’ll get even more spam in future. If in doubt, you might want to rely on some of the built-in tools within Outlook, to protect you from further spammage.

3^rd party bulk unsubscribe tools like https://unroll.me/ might help clean up subscriptions for consumer mail platforms like Outlook.com, Gmail etc, though exercise with caution as there’s always a risk they’ll just be exposing your data to people you shouldn’t.

Though aggregated news apps and websites are ten-a-penny, there are some very good resources out there that are worth signing up to receive mail from – for example…

WhatIs from TechTarget, which gives a Word of the Day email (there’s a big red button on the page, to sign up) which explains a topics word or phrase; you’ll almost certainly know many of them enough to hit delete as soon as you see the mail, but every so often there’s a just-detailed-enough explanation to make it worthwhile. Check out the archive of Words of the Day.
Owler is a free, professional, community-driven (crowd-sourced, even) news service that curates news from companies you might be interested in and packages, including a Daily Snapshot email that might be a good way of picking up company intelligence you might otherwise miss.
LinkedIn is a great way of getting notifications about people you’re connected with, but can also give you news about companies you want to follow, as well as a curated Daily Rundown page. It’s especially useful if you have access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator (see MS internal learning)

Tip o’ the Week 407 – e-books in Edge

Posted on January 10, 2018 by ewand

Books have been an emotive subject for centuries; they further and represent knowledge, belief, culture and a whole lot more. Doing things to books has an impact, too – whether it’s the dramatic (like tomecide, the symbolic burning of books) or just the annoying (ever leant someone a book, then seen how they folded back along the spine, or just never gave it back?)

The book business has been a metaphor for big vs small biz for years, as well – from the Shop Around the Corner in You’ve Got Mail to the phenomenon of Amazon and the massed ranks of bricks & mortar sellers.

For years now, the assumption has been that real books are going the way of the CD or the DVD – still around, but in terminal decline as technology has changed the game to allow people to read content electronically rather than needing the inconvenience of printing, distributing, retailing and storing all those bits of dead tree.

Despite gloomy forecasts for the future of the printed word, earlier this year, it was reported that sales of electronic books were falling, against a rise in sales of physical books. The dedicated ebook reader appears to have had its day, with mobiles and tablets occupying that niche more, but younger readers are turning to real books again, presumably so they thumb through the tomes while listening to their LPs.

So, what better time to introduce electronic books into your favourite web browser? Edge has an eBook library – click the Hub icon on the toolbar and look under the books icon to see it. See here for more details.

You can download eBooks from a variety of online resources – including Microsoft Virtual Academy. In more recent Insider builds for Windows 10, the functionality and layout has changed (there’s no more “Shop for books” link, as the revamped Store has – at least for now – no obvious way of distributing books), and more change is likely to come.

Still, Microsoft employees can open the books section, sign in with their Microsoft.com address, and see the employee edition of Satya’s Hit Refresh eBook automatically provisioned.

Tip o’ the Week 404 – [%subject%] not found %&

Posted on November 30, 2017 (Updated November 2, 2023) by ewand

This CONTENT can’t be reached

Tip o’ the week’s author could not be found.

Did you mean http://www.typoweek.com/?
Search bing for tipoweek

ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED

Just kidding!

Time to celebrate the error page most people probably see the most, or at least that’s what you might think. In truth, some years back admittedly, Google suggested than 500 (Internal Server Error) may be the most common. Gotta get a better server, maybe?

An entry in Microsoft’s “Microspeak” archive on the intranet (and some on the outside, too), says:

404

Someone who’s clueless. From the World Wide Web message “404, URL Not Found,” meaning that the document you’ve tried to access can’t be located. “Don’t bother asking him…he’s 404.”

… though instances of “he’s 404” still being used post-1997 are themselves probably non-existent.

Just take comfort that absence exists in other fields too.

It’s one of the better entries in the glossary, still; though not as good as…

PNAMBC

Pronounced “panambic.” An acronym meaning “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain.” Usually used for demos that look like, but aren’t really, the real product. It comes from “The Wizard of Oz.”

… another one never much used.

If you’re interested in what the other HTTP Status Lines mean, read more here (and it’s actually more interesting than you might think), and for more details on 404, including some of its more controversial uses, see here.

Tip o’ the Week 397 – Bing visual image search

Posted on October 10, 2017 by ewand

Loyal Microsoft fanbois and grrlz will doubtless use Bing as their default search engine, and many “ordinary” computer users will also stick with whatever their browser or phone apps default to. Even after years of trying, though, Bing is still very much a runner-up in the league of most-used search engines, even if arguably it’s as good or even better than the alternative. Recent stats suggest that in the US, 1/3 of all searches are handled by Bing, so it’s at least in a credible 2^nd place rather than a distant irrelevance, as some detractors may say.

Even the most persistent marketers have largely given up trying to make the verb “to Bing” catch on, and El Reg reports that Google is trying to encourage “search with Google” in a style guide for developers: ‘Don’t Google Google, Googling Google is wrong’, says Google.

Aside from the beautiful daily home-screen images, there are some neat and sometimes hidden tricks in using Bing.com to search for stuff online.

A little while back, the Bing team launched Visual Search – when you do a search and look at results in Images, click on a result to preview it, and you’ll see a small magnifying glass with a dotted line box around it, in the top left.

Clicking on that icon will let you move and resize a box around some element of the image you’re interested in, and below, you’ll see a list of related images to the one you just selected.

Handy for finding out about a specific item in a picture, or a person in a photo, for example.
(Yes, it is, in fact, Kevin Turvey)

This kind of searching is a variant on another approach, where you can either point Bing at an existing online image, or upload one that you have on your computer, and it will find similar images to that. The Visual Search UI makes it a little easier if you just want to find out about a part of the image.

Watch out for some upcoming additions to Visual Search – like the ability to recognise faces in search results, for example. Read more about that and other Bing improvements to come, here.

Tip o’ the Week 389 – Jump to Windows Settings

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

There are many ways of jumping straight into bits of Windows that would otherwise take a load of clicking around the place. ToW #312 covered some of them – especially on how to go directly to special folders like your pictures or downloads, but there are many other ways of jumping right into important bits of Windows under the hood.

WindowsKey+R / ncpa.cpl is one of the longest-serving and most useful, going back to Windows for Workgroups; it proceeds directly to the guts of the old-style networking control panel that can still be used to manage and connect to remote networks or configure advanced properties of the PC’s network stack.

Pressing WindowsKey+X shows a shortcut menu that gives you quick access to lots of different but handy bits of Windows options and settings – eg. the System page, which gives you easy way to find your machine’s name, what version of Windows you’re using, what spec hardware you have etc. Not stuff you’ll find you need every day, but when you do, this is the easiest way of getting to that page.

Maybe the easiest, but not the most direct – many of the settings pages can also be got at by running ms-settings:name, eg ms-settings:about, which will do the same – either by entering that from the Run command (WindowsKey+R) or by creating a shortcut on the desktop (right-click on the desktop, choose New -> Shortcut) and then enter the appropriate command. Try some other ms-settings: commands – appsfeatures, display. Chere here or here for some more ideas.

Tip o’ the Week 386 – OneNote Store app updates

Posted on July 7, 2017 by ewand

OneNote continues to attract love from enthusiastic end users as well as continuous improvement from the product group; the former collective shows up with many blogs, articles and addins, most of which focus on the more traditional Windows desktop app, though the product group seems to be spending more effort in building functionality into the mobile and Windows Store versions of the app.

There are clear functional differences between the two Windows versions; the desktop app has a lot more functionality, some of it shared across other Office apps. The Store version (now being referred to as “OneNote for Windows 10”) has a much cleaner design that isn’t as functionally rich as the desktop but concentrates more on ease of use and focussing on the basics that are used most often, especially cross-platform with mobile and web apps too.

e.g. As the most excellent Robert Deupree (JR) has observed, support for Tags in the Store app is considerably less useful than in the desktop one…

The Store/~~Modern~~/~~Metro~~ app version of OneNote got a big update recently, surfacing some nice new functionality (some iterations of stuff that’s already in the desktop app, but more easily used or functional – check out the Researcher function on the insert menu), and a design refresh to bring consistency with mobile versions of the app.

To hear a bit more about the ethos behind this redesign, (and other interesting info) check out this interview with OneNote design director, March Roberts.

If you’re a OneNote fan, there are plenty of great resources to get more tips and help – though quite a few of the blogs you may come across are pretty dead by the look of things. The most informative and up to date is maybe the official Office blog, which regularly posts OneNote content, especially with an educational spin: a key use scenario, given the effort that’s been put into the suite of classroom tools centred around the OneNote Class Notebook.

Twitter is a also good place to go for OneNote news and articles, especially OneNote Central, the official account or OneNoteEDU for educators.

To get some more detail on what’s new, see the announcement here.

For users of desktop OneNote, the best addin remains the OneTastic suite, available in free and pro versions that offer slightly different sets of functionality.

Tip o’ the Week 385 – Using Tags in OneNote

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

There are many bits of functionality buried in Office applications, and the typical assumption is that most people use a few percent of the functionality (though you can never be sure that it’s the same few percent used by everyone, otherwise everyone would settle for a much simpler and less functional Office suite – see Scott Adams’ The Dilbert Future, from 1997, draws a comparison with the Network Computer idea then being peddled by Scott McNealy – “many people will prefer a low-cost solution, even if it means giving up some functionality and prestige” – the answer? “one word: Yugo”).

OneNote is no exception – even heavy OneNote users will probably find useful functionality if they spend 10 minutes having a snoop around in the menus and trying stuff out. In this case, we’re talking about the more traditional Desktop OneNote app rather than the Store / Modern version. Ya falla?

Tags is a set of features you couldn’t say were hidden – they’re right in the middle of the Home tab on the Ribbon, in their own group called, er, Tags. You’ll see a supposed-to-be-easy-to-use list of common tags, a big shortcut to mark something as “To Do” and a Find Tags command. The idea is that you can select a blob of text or other object on your OneNote page, then click on the appropriate Tag to mark it as such, and recall it more easily in future.

First, let’s look at the list that’s provided by default – it has some probably pretty useful but unspecific things like “Remember for later”, but you can edit or add your own if they’re more particular to your needs.

There are a variety of ways to getting to the customize dialog – the simplest being to right-click in that list of tags and choose Customize Tags … (or just Modify the one you’re right-clicking). You’ll see a variety of things you can change about the Tag in the list, and you can also re-order the tags, and the top 9 will automatically get CTRL+number shortcuts.

Tags start to get really useful when you search for them, particularly if you use them a lot, and when you consider the relatively blunt search capabilities in OneNote (ie. It’s relatively easy to search either within the current page/section/notebook, but it can give you a huge amount of search results if you have lots of old data).

With Tags, you can scope down to a few predefined (though not customizable themselves) filters, and even create a single page referencing all of them.

One final note about Tags is that if you right-click on the list of Tags on the Home page, you’ll get the option of adding the Tag “Gallery” (as we now know the list to be called) to the Quick Access Toolbar, making it easier to select a tag for some piece of content from anywhere inside of OneNote.

Tip o’ the Week 384 – Insiders Update 16215

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

The Windows Insider program has over 10m participants, and after the release of the Creators Update, the heat is being turned up again as the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update starts testing.

If you’re an Insider on the Fast Ring, you can get hold of the newly-released build 16215, which contains a load of new functionality – for some more detail of what to expect, read here or see this.

There are myriad UI changes, many of them quite subtle, and Edge browser gets some interesting new features (and some returning ones) – more details here. Full release notes for the build are here.

Gotchas

As ever, there are a few known issues documented in the release notes. In this build, If you have multiple displays at different scale resolutions, Edge may habitually load pages at the wrong scale – so everything is either really really tiny
or absolutely massive.

To workaround this, just flick to another tab and back again – and save constantly zooming in and out.

Another issue to be aware of is that after installation of 16215, you may find that Outlook won’t connect to your mailbox any more – and any attempts to create a new profile will fail.

Repairing / reinstalling Office won’t help either. Instead of going through the aggro, try a quick fix in disabling HTTP/2 on the machine:

Open Registry Editor (WindowsKey+R regedit)
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\WinHttp
Add a new DWORD value, called EnableDefaultHttp2 – default value will be 0x00000000 – that’s fine.
Now repeat by adding the same value, at: HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\WinHttp
Reboot. Bob’s your uncle. Enjoy.