Tip o’ the Week #133 – The Art of Cut n’ Paste

Posted on August 24, 2012 (Updated August 6, 2021) by ewand

Like many concepts in everyday computing, the widely-adopted functionality of Cut & Paste has its descriptive roots in an antiquated process. A bit like a floppy disk as the “Save” icon, or an envelope for the email/send functions, the scissors used in Cut refer back to the old method of compositing printed materials, in the days when editors would literally make up a newspaper or magazine page by chopping up other sources and sticking them onto a master copy.

Everyone must surely be aware of the keyboard shortcuts for Cut & Paste – CTRL-X to Cut (or CTRL-C if you just want to Copy), and CTRL-V for Paste. So much quicker than clickety clicking with a mouse.

CTRL-V goes back a loooong way. Its first use was 45 years ago in the “Quick Editor” – aka QED – co-developed by Butler Lampson, one of the giants of computer history, now employed as a “Technical Fellow” in Microsoft Research. There are some other alumni of Xerox PARC nestled inside Microsoft too (like Chuck Thacker) – in a few years in the 1970s, they invented or developed/perfected the mouse, Ethernet, the graphical bitmapped display, laser printing, the GUI as we know it, distributed computing and a whole load of other technology. If you’d like to read more about what they got up to at PARC, check out Dealers of Lightning.

Anyway, back to the present. Did you know there’s a recognised religion in Sweden which reveres CTRL-C and CTRL-V as sacred symbols? Must be those long, dark winter nights…

For the most part, cut/copy & paste does pretty much what it says on the tin, but there are a bunch of options you might not have come across. When you paste content from a website into a document or OneNote page, for example, Office might not just take the content straight from the Clipboard but will go back to the source server to read the information, which might take a few seconds for each paste to occur. If you see a dialog which is taking a while (maybe even “Contacting server for information…” too), then there is an alternative, especially if you don’t need all the formatting to come with the text.

When in your favourite Office application, rather than pressing CTRL-V to paste (or just clicking the Paste icon), try clicking the down arrow under Paste in the Ribbon, and you’ll see various options – Paste Special offering the same gamut of choice as historically has been offered in previous Office versions, but the icons beneath provide a quick way to getting to the most common options.

At this point (ie when the icons are displayed), keystrokes can come back into play – press K if you want to paste and keep the source formatting, M if you want to merge the two formats, or simply T to keep the text and the text alone.

So, if you’re a Microsoftie doing your annual commitments setting, and you’ve gone to the http://performance website to update them, you might find it’s quicker to copy & paste into Word, edit your commitments there, agree them with your manager then paste back the changes… in which case, the Text Only option might save you a lot of waiting as changes are sent back and forth to the cloud… Just a thought.

Tip o’ the Week #132 – tweaking IE10 compatibility

Posted on August 16, 2012 by ewand

This week, a tip concerning Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 Release Preview. Not running it yet? Booo. Unless, of course, you’re now running the newly released RTM version. Hurray!

Anyway. Once you have IE10, you may find that some sites don’t work as well as they’d like. There are a few ways of fixing this – if you’re using the new full-screen App version and get any issues, the fix is basically to try opening the site in the desktop variant. Click or touch the spanner icon, then on View on the desktop option to flick over to the regular Windows desktop and view the site in desktop IE.

Once there, if you’re still seeing issues, click on the compatibility icon that IE may show you, to set the browser to a mode which is more amenable to sites that haven’t yet adopted HTML5 or are not expecting to see IE10.

You may not see the compatibility icon in all sites: if not, you could press ALT to show the menu bar, offering the ability to add your current site to the list (via the Compatibility View or Compatibility View Settings options) of sites that should be treated with kid gloves.

If you come across niggly compatibility issues, you could try this great advice suggested by Microsoft’s Helen Wright …

· Whilst browsing your suspected incompatible site in the desktop IE10, press F12

· Click on the “Browser Mode” menu, then Select the IE10 Compatibility View, and close the debug view by clicking the X in the corner.

· If the IE10 view doesn’t work out, then try setting to a previous mode by repeating the F12 trick and choosing an older version of the browser from the menu.

This tip has been known to work on troublesome websites. In time, hopefully all of the key sites will support IE10 specifically (as hundreds of millions of PCs will soon be using it, if all goes well). Who’d want to miss out on their website working with the awesome-looking Surface, after all?

Tip o’ the Week #130 – Searching in Outlook

Posted on August 10, 2012 by ewand

Ever since the 3^rd party “Lookout” add-in was built for Outlook about 8 years ago, the pilers have inherited the earth. That’s pilers. No connection with Chaka Demus.

Research as far back as the early 1980s into how people organise their desks suggested there were “filers” – meticulously organised people who have a place for everything and put everything in its place, or “pilers” who just let it all build up.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that – pilers have “hot”, “warm” and “cool” areas of their desk defined by the level of activity, so stuff they were working on was commonly nearby. Filers on the other hand, might inadvertently squirrel stuff away and forget all about it. Common belief might be that outwardly more “organised” people are more effective, but the research shows this isn’t necessarily the case. Read more here.

Lookout introduced the ability to just search across your whole mailbox, in literally an instant – doesn’t sound all that special today but in 2004, it was absolutely revolutionary. Imagine searching your whole mailbox (all 200Mb of it, wow!! – though some companies gave their users bigger mailboxes) in the blink of an eye… No longer did you need to file anything, or remember the subject line, or the date it was sent – recall any attribute of the message and you can always find it later.

As it turns out, Microsoft bought the company and then incorporated similar technology into Outlook and Windows directly. The main man in LookoutSoft left MS after his career peak and a couple of years, to go and work at a grubby advertising company. Never mind.

Anyway, back to the present day. Outlook gives the user the option of searching within folder (press CTRL-E to jump straight in and type a search query, then press CTRL-ALT-A to expand the search to all folders if required).

The Ribbon changes when activating the search box to show a bunch of criteria that can be searched upon, with a click:

There are, however, a few other options… mostly to do with the way one expresses a query in the search box. Just type in a word and your query will return any item which contains that word, however if you put subject: search word or subject: “search phrase”, then you can restrict the search results to only key words from the subject line.

Similarly, from:”joe blogs” or from:”joe bloggs” subject: “blah blah” will restrict ever further to just mail from an individual or even specific mail from that person with certain words in the subject.

There are some other esoteric search terms, too. Running out of mailbox space? Try messagesize:>5mb and you’ll see only the huge emails. Or for the same filter, simply add messagesize:enormous.

Many more examples of search criteria can be found here.

Tip o’ the Week #128 – Train Tickets & Times on WP

Posted on August 3, 2012 by ewand

This week’s tip aims to shine a light on a selection of Windows Phone Apps dedicated to letting the train take the strain. There have been a slew of newly released apps which let you plan your journey, find information about stations and even buy your ticket in advance, ready to collect at a ticket machine. Best not get caught on board without a ticket, or your inspector might not be so friendly as this fellow on the right.

‘Allo, John, gotta new motor?

One of the oldest railway information apps has been updated recently, namely the Avanade-written Train Travel. The update added some snazzy new features, including a “Where am I now?” augmented reality train & underground viewer.

Do bear in mind that it’s expensive to buy (£4.99 is a lot for an app on any mobile platform) and it’s had some pretty stinky reviews since the update, due to a (now fixed) bug that refused to recognise a previous purchase. And as you’ll see shortly, the majority of the functionality is available elsewhere for Brussel Sprout.

The Journey Pro app tries to meld travelling on national & London metropolitan rail, bus, tube, ferry and DLR all into one app – with a mixed degree of success, if truth be told.

Some reviewers (one, a train conductor, even) complain that it offers illogical routes or even ones that don’t exist, though this could be as much down to the back end than the app itself. As with all these things, your mileage may vary but since it’s free, then it’s worth having a look.

Whilst on the topic of travelling in London, of course it’d be remiss not to point out Bing Get Me There. This app combines all of the necessary travel services to get your around in the Smoke, including excellent turn-by-turn walking directions to get you from the nearest transport stop to your eventual destination. It’s a much slicker app than Journey Pro, too. London Travel Lite and City Travel London might be worth taking a butcher’s at too, stop ya getting Jonathan Ross’d.

There are a bunch of new apps getting great reviews because of national coverage (despite the association with a single train operator), and being free makes them a great alternative to other paid for apps and they carry some weight of being official, unlike some other train times apps which have come and gone in the past.

The FGW and ScotRail apps appear to be the same under the covers; no great surprises since the First Group sits above both operators. In fact, the First Capital Connect and The Transpennine Express appear to be the same thing too. All will allow you to query times, buy tickets etc.

Finally, as if too much choice was ever a good thing, TheTrainLine.com has gotten in on the act too – offering a quick & slick way to find fares, make bookings and collect your tickets up to 10 minutes before boarding. This appears to be one of the most fully-featured when it comes to buying a ticket. No surprises there…

Don’t forget, (as covered in ToW #74), there’s a snazzy Internet Explorer 9/10 optimised site at http://ie9.nationalrail.co.uk/ which lets you do a lot of the searching you might need to, from your desktop.

One can only look forward to all the lovely Win8 apps due sometime soon…

Tip o’ the Week #127 – Windows Phone and History

Posted on July 27, 2012 by ewand

This week sees a short but sweet Windows Phone tip, courtesy of Kevin Lief. He paints the picture of being in a meeting when someone says “did you get my email about … etc?”

Of course you got the email… but getting it and reading it are odds apart sometimes. How many times have you seen an email, maybe skimmed it (flagged it even) but haven’t quite got round to reading it in detail?

If your inquisitor expects you to show that you’ve at least put their email on your to-do list, Kevin’s tip might work for you.

Grab your phone and open the People hub, then select the Contact for the person who sent you the email.
Flick left to “history” and you’ll see the last messages you’ve received from this sender…
Point to the email in question, showing the sender, and admit “This one? Yes, I got your email, though I haven’t finished reading it yet…”

Of course, it helps if you have your colleagues’ details saved in your contacts list. If you don’t, try opening their details in the Outlook address book and hit Add to Contacts – or if you’re on the hoof, try searching the person’s name in the People Hub, and if you can’t find it, tap “search Outlook directory”, then open the contact, then hit the save icon at the bottom to add to your contacts.

Random thought: the “save” icon, like that in many applications, is a 3.5in diskette icon. When was the last time you used a computer that had a floppy disk drive (even if the disk was anything but floppy), where do you keep the last diskettes and what did you save on them? Answers on a postcard please

Tip o’ the Week #126 – Voice dial on Windows Phone

Posted on July 20, 2012 by ewand

It may be a little known aspect of Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 that you can issue voice commands to the device. There are essentially two functions – one, searching using Bing by voice, by pressing the magnifying glass button on the front of the phone, then the microphone icon on the Bing page … (see here for a demo).

The second voice feature of note is to control the phone by voice: press and hold the Windows button on the front, and annunciate your instruction (eg Open Calendar, or Start Maps). See here for a review of the voice command functionality or here for a few more instructions.

Issuing spoken commands to your handheld device runs the risk of making you look like a prize eejit, especially if you do it Apprentice-style whilst holding the phone at arm’s length and bellowing into the thing. But if you’re walking along a corridor or street, you could talk discreetly into the phone whilst held to your ear and it won’t raise much of an eyebrow from passers-by.

Business Intelligence guru Will Thompson found a cracking tip, though, when using the phone to call someone. If you press and hold on the Windows Key button, and say “CALL someone ON SPEAKER” (or “CALL someone HOME|MOBILE|WORK|etc ON SPEAKER”) , you’ll start a phone call with them already (as you may expect) set to speaker phone.
Even LorShoogar would be impressed. Or Kirsty & Phil off the property show.

Go old school

If you’d rather select your dialing contacts using a keypad, you might mourn the passing of the old 3×4 phone keypad where you could type their name in using numbers. Well, if so, cry no more… there’s an app called People Search (free trial or £0.79 to buy) that you can use to type in fragments of someone’s name and it will show a filtered list of contacts. A bit like Windows Mobile 5.0 did, in fact.

Give the voice dial feature a go, and maybe try out the People Search application if you want to search contacts on your phone with a few jabs and no self-conscious narration into your palm

Tip o’ the Week #124 – The evolution of Windows Phone Marketplace

Posted on July 13, 2012 by ewand

Eagle-eyed readers may have spotted that an update a few months ago to the desktop Zune software has removed the Marketplace for buying or downloading Windows Phone apps.

This was something of a surprise move to some, since the Zune software has been the primary way of finding and getting hold of phone apps, other than using the Marketplace app on the phone itself.

Read more about the development here. Hear it from the Windows Phone team here.

Over the months since the Windows Phone 7.5 (“Mango”) release, the web site at windowsphone.com has been getting more and more functionality, including a much improved “Web Marketplace” – as of now, the web site is the only way to browse apps on your PC and get them sent to the phone. Very soon, it will only be possible to get apps for the phone if you’re running the “Mango” release.

If you browse the web marketplace (http://www.windowsphone.com/en-gb/marketplace for Brits) and see an app you like, you can quickly have it sent to your phone – over the data network, without needing to plug the phone into the PC first. It’s a good idea to be on WiFi if you’re going to be installing apps since it’s quicker, and it won’t cost anything compared to downloading data over 3G. Especially if you’re abroad at the time…

The Zune software is still going to be used to feed updates to the phone, such as OS version upgrades – it allows the PC to manage the large amounts of data required to do the update, and the Zune software can also make sure a backup is taken of your phone, in case things don’t quite go to plan. So, if you get a notification on the phone that an update is available (either the phone telling you, or if you plug it into your PC and the Zune software tells you), then it’s worth applying the update. For more info on how to get Mango if you haven’t done so already, see here.

Also, if you’re downloading very large apps (games, perhaps), you may find that they can’t be installed using the over-the-air method, e.g. if they’re larger than 20Mb in size. For apps this big, you’ll either need to connect the phone to WiFi or plug it into your PC. The delivery of apps is still done using the Web Marketplace in the latter case, it’s just that with the phone connected to the computer, it will use the PC’s own internet connection and be fed the apps that way.

Tip o’ the Week #123 –Windows 8: sign in, with Pic & PIN

Posted on July 6, 2012 by ewand

A short but sweet Tip this week, aimed at those of you who are running Windows 8: if not, why not check out the Release Preview page.

Out of the box, the logon security model that Windows 8 supports offers a variety of ways to log into or unlock your PC, though ultimately it could still requires a complex password just like before and network admins could disable certain features. It might be decided, for example, to not Both the Picture Password and PIN approaches are really aimed at making it easier to sign in when you don’t have a keyboard – unlocking a slate device using a strong password can be pretty laborious with an on-screen keyboard, so both provide a more touch-friendly way of logging in.

Picture-based logon

Picture Password allows the user to take any photo, to choose 3 features of it, and to make a gesture on each of them. An obvious (and therefore – seriously – not recommended… do not do this) choice would be a picture of your child/spouse/dog/self, where you touch on both eyes and then the nose, or swipe along the smile. This don’t-pick-the easy-to-guess-feature approach is somewhat reminiscent of the great Monty Python “How Not to be Seen” sketch*. Fans of the original Halo game may like to hark back with this spoof video.

Anyway, best practice says to choose a picture with lots of potential points of interest, so that you and only you will know which people to tap on, or which trees in the forest to swipe the trunk of, etc. Although Picture Password can be operated with a mouse, its sweet spot is really if you have a touch-capable device.

This is something of a secret gem, since it’s as useful on a desktop or laptop as it is on a touch device. In a nutshell, setting a PIN on Win8 will allow you to unlock your work PC with only 4 keystrokes (you don’t even need to hit ENTER). As with Picture Password, you need to set your strong password first, and when your password changes, you’ll need to go back in and edit the settings for the PIN. Essentially, PIN and Picture Password are just used as way of unlocking the strong Alph4numer1c Pa55!w0rd that’s been stored already.

To enable either of these options, go into the Settings charm from the main Start Screen, and choose More PC settings, then go into the Users option on the left, and look under Sign-in options.

Do bear in mind that it’s possible that your company’s information security folk (if you have them) may decide that they don’t want people to use the new Picture Password feature, or the ability to unlock your machine with a simple PIN, if either won’t meet their security policies. For the moment, you might find that both are allowed, and if you get your funky Windows RT slate device later in the year (like this one?), you’ll still be able to use these techniques to unlock it.

*Mr Nesbitt learned the first lesson of not being seen: not to stand up. However, he did choose a very obvious piece of cover…

Tip o’ the Week #131 – Shortcuts with Windows 8 Release Preview

Posted on June 29, 2012 by ewand

This tip is being published out of sequence, like a few others before it, since it’s much more timely than it would be if published in mid-August (which is when it would otherwise be scheduled).

Everyone must have seen Windows 8 by now, and many of you will be running the latest version, the Release Preview. If not, you can install by heading over here.

Like any new environment, Windows 8 can take a bit of getting used to.
There have been a few previous Tips o’ the Week to help. Here are a few more.

Using Metro apps instead of desktop ones

If you’re on a regular laptop or desktop PC (ie non-touch, with a keyboard & mouse), it can be a bit strange getting used to Metro apps – especially if there’s an equivalent on the desktop that you might normally use instead. There’s no better example than IE 10 in Metro and IE 10 on the regular desktop – it may take some effort to use the Metro version rather than simply clicking on the IE icon on the taskbar, or adding tabs to your existing IE desktop window…

Every time any major bit of software evolves, there are a few things that initially seem like a kludgy way of operating, or just an annoying change, even if they subsequently turn out to be an improvement. The Ribbon in Office, for one. Moving to Metro IE as the default browser you use, can be a bit like the day you stopped caring whether Windows showed you the extensions of known file types. Try it, get over it, and live it like every normal end user will.

One keystroke that will be invaluable to any QWERTY-toter with a Metro penchant is WindowsKey – Z, which displays the App Bar, showing some context-relevant options for the app.

In the News app, for example, the App Bar will show categories of news along the top of the screen. In the Finance app, the top of the screen shows navigation options whilst the bottom is concerned with pinning items to the main Start screen. Search on MSFT, for example, Pin to the start, and you have a quick way of looking at the current Microsoft stock price.

Metro IE is possibly the most App Bar-relevant application, however, since the section at the top of the screen is where IE Tabs are controlled and navigation between them sits; and the bottom is where the site address is entered, and where you can access tools like on-page Find, the “View on the desktop” capability that shows the app in the regular IE (useful for sites with addins that don’t work on Metro IE, eg apps with Silverlight addins), and the somewhat-yet-to-be-discovered “Get app for this site” option (commentary here).

If you browse to a site in Metro IE and it shows the spanner icon with a small “+”, then it means the site has a corresponding Metro App that can be downloaded, and the “Get app for this site” option won’t be grayed out…

Other shortcut keys of note:

In Metro IE, press ALT-D to display the App Bar and set the typing focus on the address bar, so you can enter a new site
CTRL-T creates a new Tab in Metro IE, and sets the focus to the address bar to type in the URL. This view will also show a list of icons of frequently used sites.
If you’re using multiple monitors, the keystrokes for switching the Metro App “window” between screens is WindowsKey – PgUp or PgDn, rather than WindowsKey –left or WindowsKey –right arrow which is the norm to switch windowed applications. The main Start screen can be flicked between monitors by the same Wnd-PgUp/PgDn trick.
WindowsKey – Q within a Metro app will let you search for content, with that app as focus. An example would be if you’re using Metro IE, then pressing Wnd-Q will let you enter a Bing search straight away. If you’re using the Mail app, the same key combo will search email content, etc. Essentially the same thing as showing the Charms, clicking on Search, entering the search term, then clicking the App you want to search within. Except, it’s a lot quicker. Obviously.
To send your machine to Sleep quickly on Windows 8 RP, try the following: CTRL-ALT-DEL, ALT-S, TAB (to switch focus to the options for shutdown on the right), then Space or Enter to accept the top one – Sleep.

Remember the days when Microsoft keyboards had Sleep buttons? An idea ahead of its time: the PC hardware wasn’t really reliable enough at suspend/resume then, but now it is: and Sleeping a Win8 PC only takes 7 keys … that’s progress. Unless, of course you know different. Answers on, oh whatever. Zzzzzz.

More shortcuts for the Win8 RP are here.

Tip o’ the Week #122 – The Sky (Drive)’s the Limit!

Posted on June 29, 2012 by ewand

For years now, SkyDrive has offered a chunk of online storage to anyone who wanted to use it, if they had a Windows Live (aka Hotmail, MSN Messenger, .NET Passport & others) user ID. Adding Windows Live Mesh to the mix gave the ability to not just store and share stuff online, but be able to back up files automatically from your PC, “to the cloud…”.

SkyDrive and Mesh have both featured a fair bit in ToWs passim – (#52, #69, #109…) though some of those missives have been superseded by more recent developments.

SkyDrive upgrade

One such change has been the release of a PC client for SkyDrive, so it’s not reliant on the Live Mesh software. It now provides easy access to SkyDrive storage directly from within Windows Explorer, and therefore any other application. Even though there’s a preview SkyDrive Metro app for Windows 8, this is the first time we’ve made it so deeply integrated to Windows through the provision of a PC client.

The differentiator here is that Mesh provided a way of backing up a maximum of 5Gb to “SkyDrive” (somewhat oddly, not taken out of the total 25Gb allocation from the regular SkyDrive), and made visible from the Windows Live Devices page. There was no really easy way to retrieve stuff that had been synced by Mesh into the magic 5Gb bucket, other than viewing the folder within the browser and downloading a file by saving it to your PC then opening it, or by synching the folder onto another PC and downloading it that way.

The fab new SkyDrive app, however, exposes the full online storage facility just like it’s any other folder that happens to be on the network – so you can move files around, double-click on them to open in native applications, right-click for properties etc. If you use SkyDrive on multiple PCs, it could be used to synchronise your content with each PC and with the online SkyDrive service, meaning you’ve always got the ability to get to your files from any browser. Live Mesh could still be useful to synch content between PCs only (eg copy all your music between two PCs at home).

Other clients are available too – Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Mac …

Get your 22Gb free, quickly!

It’s worth noting that the previous 25Gb storage limit on SkyDrive has been reduced, so now you “only” get 7Gb. It turns out that less than 1% of SkyDrive’s existing user base had more than 7Gb of storage in use, so the gratis amount has been reduced somewhat. Never fear, though – existing users can request a free upgrade to retain your 25Gb of space, though don’t delay… it’s a time-limited offer (see here and here). It’s also now possible to buy additional storage if you want – £32 per year will get you 100Gb, for example, surely a price worth paying to ensure all your photos and home docs are backed up and accessible from anywhere…?

· For more info on the new SkyDrive features, see here.

· For some commentary on the new SkyDrive service, see here, and for info about how much better this is than the vaguely comparable DropBox, Apple iCloud or Google Drive services, see here.
(DropBox, for example, gives you 2Gb free, and charges $20 per month for 100Gb, as a comparison).