Tip o’ the Week 484 – Saving Office 365 profile pics

Posted on June 30, 2019 by ewand

Office 365 users will be familiar with the Profile Picture that appears in multiple places, most visibly in Outlook and Teams. Just like their picture on LinkedIn, many users will help people understand what they look like by posting an actual photo of themselves, whereas some will insist on posting a photo of their dog, or their kids, or themselves wearing a hat and shades while standing very far away.

There’s supposedly a lot that your choice of profile picture says about you. There’s a tabloid version (akin to the “What Your Horoscope Says About Your Pet” style nonsense more often to be found on the Edge browser homepage). There are some more scientific resources with views on what people think when they see your picture, and some hints on how to choose the right one. Some fun examples of what not to do could be illuminating.

Facing left-to-right is supposedly best – maybe it makes you look more powerful, or simply, when your photo is on the left side of a load of content (like the details of your LinkedIn profile), then it’s better to be looking toward it rather than away to the left… Similarly, good advice is to stick to a head-and-shoulders shot, or at least waist-up – if your profile pic is your visible brand on LinkedIn and Office 365, then there’s no point in using a photo that shows your face as too small for anyone to recognise you.

How to save photos from Office 365

This tip will probably become obsolete at some future update on O365, such is the march of innovation, but it deals with how you can get to the profile photo that someone else in your organisation has published. The inspiration came from a departmental admin who was trying to build a nice org chart, and had to repeatedly nag members of the team to share a photo of themselves. It can also prove handy when someone has posted a photo of themselves that’s too small to see – if you can open the photo up in a browser, it can show you the original full-resolution image, and you can always use the browser to zoom in, too.

Start by going to the Office home page and sign in; you can then search for someone’s name and click on the People tab for the detailed results.

An even quicker way might be to go to https://www.office.com/search/people?auth=2&q=<name> and follow the q= with the name you want to search for.

When you have the results of the search, hover over the thumbnail of the person’s profile pic, and in the pop-up that appears, right-click on the slightly larger image.

If you’re using classic Edge, then you’ll be able to save the image locally, but if you’re on Chrome or the new Edge Dev browser, then you’ll easily be able to copy a link to it – paste that into a new browser tab, and you’ll get the full-size version of the profile pic so you can zoom in, save it, draw moustaches on it with your Surface Pen and so on.

Tip o’ the Week 483 – mobile OCR and Office

Posted on June 7, 2019 by ewand

Optical Character Recognition is one of those technologies which has gone from being just-about-possible at great expense and hassle, to so mainstream that people just assume it will work flawlessly, all in a relatively few years. Numerous companies offer OCR services or addins to line-of-business systems which help to prepare printed data for easier consumption – scanning invoices for example.

Consumers tend to use OCR in other ways; combined with language translation, you can point your phone at a foreign menu or sign and it may be able to help you understand. In OneNote, if you have captured an image (maybe through the clipper addin from your browser), then it can extract the text from that picture – not always perfectly, and not necessarily well-formatted, but it’s probably quicker than re-typing everything.

Near OCR functionality is also pervading the slew of freely available Office apps for Android tablets, phones and even Chromebooks, and similar versions for iPad and iPhone.

A recent addition to the iOS version of Excel is the ability to scan a table of printed data and use OCR plus a bit of tweaking, to import the data into the spreadsheet. See more here. The same functionality was first made available on Android a couple of months earlier …

Start with the grid capture icon on the toolbar of a new spreadsheet, and then use the camera to highlight the area of a document that you’re interested in – the UI will be familiar to anyone who uses Office Lens, as the same anti-skewing technology is used to prepare the “document” for importing.

Then the OCR goes to work and tries to lay out the data as closely as possible to its source – obviously, your accuracy will be improved by having a well-lit and clear original document, and you’ll get to tweak the contents in context of seeing the OCR’d data and the scan at the same time, before committing to insert it.

Tip o’ the Week 482 – Paste History

Posted on May 31, 2019 by ewand

Back in 2012, three weeks before Super Saturday, ToW #133 talked about the Art of Cut ‘n’ Paste. How the widely-used CTRL-V keyboard shortcut for Paste can trace its roots back to a program co-developed by Butler Lampson, one of the “Dealers of Lightning” as a founder at Xerox PARC, and now a near-25-year Microsoftie and Technical Fellow. QED was a thing before Neil & Buzz set foot on the Moon (which happened on 21^st July, not 20^th: Eagle landed on the 20^th, but it was 21^st before “one small step for a man”… at least it was in UTC).

Did you know that in recent versions of Windows 10, there’s a useful new shortcut – WindowsKey+V?

It shows you the history of the clipboard, so you can quickly access something you’d previously copied; you can sync the clipboard between multiple machines (or phones), too.

There are other controls you can assert when it comes to pasting stuff, too – CTRL+ALT+V in Office apps will let you paste something and decide how to handle it (the equivalent of Paste Special, in most cases) and you can over-ride the default behaviour in Word too, by choosing to Set Default Paste.

In other apps, there may still be different ways of handling Paste actions – Paul Thurrott recently wrote about how to change the options in OneNote for Windows 10 (the UWP app that is replacing traditional OneNote; the one you can start by running onenote-cmd: from the Win+R box).

The “copy & paste” metaphor dates to PARC, too – and yet it’s still evolving, 45 years later.

Tip o’ the Week 481 – Lost in Translation

Posted on May 31, 2019 by ewand

Bill Gates had a vision of the future, set out in his 1995 tome, “The Road Ahead” (and later in “Business @ The Speed of Thought”) which included computers performing seamless speech and handwriting recognition, and language understanding (even to the extent of lip reading). Many of his predictions have come true yet it’s easy to forget what the world was like before the advent of technology we now take for granted.

In the not-too distant future, we may have the ability, babel fish-like, to automatically hear in our own language, regardless of what is spoken. Institutions like the EU have thousands of translators and interpreters, who provide written, spoken and signed interpretation between different languages. There are rigorous checks in place when trying to get work in these areas (though not everywhere), as we all know what can happen when wrong grammar is used, the words are unsuitable, or punctuation is in the incorrect place.

Computerised language translation has come a long way, and though it may still a way off replacing real translators, it’s good enough for most people to get the gist of a foreign document or website – so while you might not rely on it to turn a contract from French to English, it’s fine to figure out what’s on a menu or read some instructions.

There are plenty of mobile apps and websites like Bing Translator, and the cloud-powered translation service is built-into Word (just right-click and Translate on any text).

Microsoft Research Asia recently won a competition for the best machine translation between a host of languages, and the growing fidelity of AI models is helping to improve the quality – a year previously, the Chinese-English translation was adjudged to be at human conversation level already, so it might not be too long before machine translation gets good enough that it’s hard to tell the difference between that and humans.

A practical tip for users of the new Chromium-based “Edge Dev” browser; you can enable on-the-fly webpage translation by going to edge://flags/, search for trans to find the translation flag, then switch it on and restart the browser. It is an experimental feature, technically, so YMMV for now.

Now, when you browse to a foreign-language site, you’ll be prompted if you’d like to translate (or you can invoke the function using the Bing Translator icon to the right of the address in the toolbar).

Legacy Edge users can install the Translator extension.

As they say in translation circles, Yandelvayasna grldenwi stravenka!

Tip o’ the Week 480 – Installing Apps in New Edge

Posted on May 31, 2019 by ewand

Whatever you call it – New Edge, Edge Dev, Edgemium, Chromdge etc – the new Windows browser called Edge but with its rendering gubbins based on Chromium is making progress with regular updates and has quite a following already.

ToW 476 covered some of the articles that were written when it first came out, but buried within was a slew of interesting features that merit their own mention.

Such a capability is being able to install a web page as an App, making it look a lot like a normal Windows app to some degree. In older Edge browser, this was known as pinning a site.

In New Edge, just go to the … menu (top right) on any web page, and under Apps, you can Manage apps and install pages.

If the current site is a regular web page, you’ll see “Install this site…” but if the page is itself a Progressive Web App (PWA), like the Starbucks example above, then it will likely declare its name. There are lots of PWAs out there already – see here as an example – some are managed through the Windows Store, but since Google allowed Chrome / Chromium to install PWAs, many are published online and available directly.

Users don’t even need to know what a PWA is, for the most part – if a site looks and feels like an app, then that’s what it is. Some publishers report dramatic improvements in using PWA when compared to more traditional iOS/Android or UWP apps – Tinder, for example, found the PWA was 90% smaller than the regular app.

It seems that when Tindering, size really does matter.

Tip o’ the Week 479 – Tipping in Public

Posted on May 11, 2019 by ewand

Tip o’ the Week started back in December 2009, and a year later the content started appearing on a public blog, hosted by the TechNet blogs platform. Readers asked if they could share the Tips with their customers outside of Microsoft, so most were published online for any and all to see. At the time, the TechNet and MSDN blogs were hosted on a customised version of an off-the-shelf blog environment.

After some years, the Technet/MSDN blogs moved to WordPress, an open-source blog platform based on PHP and MySQL (the P & M, and mostly, on the L & A in the LAMP stack, that was once seen as antithesis of Microsoft, before Linux Love settled in).

Nowadays, with open source and Linux being fully (?) embraced by Microsoft engineering teams, it’s no surprise that a staple offering on Azure, is the WordPress blog platform. You can link a custom domain to your blog, too.

Not all the Tip o’ the Week content moved online, mind. Some Tips were basically internal-only, or were slightly edited from the version sent in the Friday email. By and large, though, the weekly mail content went onto the blog – sometimes delayed by a few weeks.

The time has come the Tip o’ the Week public blog to move – here on www.tipoweek.com.

Running on WordPress, on Azure, obvs. Share widely, as you see fit.

Tip o’ the Week 478 – O365 and Windows’ Mail and Calendar

Posted on May 8, 2019 by ewand

On the mobile platforms that still survive, the highly-regarded and rightly popular “Outlook” mobile apps have no relation to the Outlook desktop Windows app which first appeared with Office 97, before smartphones were a glint in anyone’s eye. Mobile Outlook has hundreds of millions of downloads on both iOS and Android; quite a feat, as later this year Windows Mobile sinks quietly beneath the waves.

The genesis of Outlook on the phone as we know it today, is perhaps the acquisition of a company called Accompli 5 years ago, and a great deal of refinement and effort since.

Somewhat interestingly, traces of the same app have come to Windows as well – namely the Mail and Calendar app(s) that are in the box on Windows 10. Look back to ToW 445, and you’ll see that the names for the apps are outlookcal, outlookmail and outlookaccounts. Stick a “:” on the end and you can run them from a prompt.

e.g. Hit WindowsKey+R then enter outlookcal: and you’ll jump straight into the Calendar app.

Both have come a very long way – at first release, they were pretty basic, but they’re now so well featured that most people could use them as their primary email and calendar apps, most of the time.

The Calendar app is functionally pretty similar to the Outlook desktop app, except when it comes to working with other people – there’s no way to view someone else’s calendar, for example, but for a personal diary of appointments it’s really very good. And if you want the best of both worlds, you can connect your Office 365 account to both Outlook – as might be your primary way of working – and to the Mail and Calendar apps, for some side benefits and quicker ways of getting some things done.

Go into the settings on the Calendar app, then Manage accounts, then + Add account… or just Win+R then outlookaccounts: and you’ll be able to add your Office 365 account onto both Mail and Calendar.

If you have multiple calendars connected – like home Office 365, Gmail or Outllook.com accounts as well as your corporate one – you could selectively enable them for display in the app, and the set of calendars that are shown will also appear in the agenda if you click on the clock / date on your taskbar. You can also see your upcoming appointments in a live tile on the Start menu, if you still use such things.

You’ll also see your next appointment on the Windows Lock Screen if you have it enabled under Lock screen settings.

You may want to go into the Notifications & actions settings page (just press Start and begin typing notif…) and turning off Calendar notifications, or you’ll get a blizzard of reminders from desktop Outlook and the Calendar app.

Tip o’ the Week 477 – Grabbing pictures from websites – again

Posted on May 8, 2019 by ewand

Here’s a quick tip for getting the URL of a picture on a website you’re browsing – it’s a topic that’s been covered previously in ToW 458, but with a refinement for a more recent browser platform.

Some pages will let you simply get the image URL from right-clicking on it, but lots of sites will prefer to hide direct access to their images.

Never fear, though, as described in #458, you can always use the Inspect feature (in both Chrome and Chromium Edge) or Inspect Element in classic Edge, though it might involve fishing about in the source HTML of the page to find the actual URL of the photo.

In Chrom*, just go to the Sources tab in Inspect and you’ll be able to see many elements of the page, including the image files that form part of it, and helpfully, they are previewed if you select them. On busy pages, there could be hundreds of nodes, but you’ll soon figure out where to look and at least it’s likely to be consistent within that page in future. From there, you can open in another tab or just grab the URL.

Handy for pasting into online forums, Yammer, Facebook etc. In most cases, you’re just referencing – embedding, even – a file that’s out there on some website or CDN, so you’re not even breaking copyright law. Probably.

Tip o’ the Week 476 – New Edge clickstorm

Posted on May 8, 2019 by ewand

After the first week or so with the New Edge browser, it feels grrrrrrrrrrreeeeat!

Paul Thurrott – a well known Microsoft commentator who’s branched out in recent years to cover lots of other tech too but is basically still a Microsoftie at heart, has published lots and lots of advice on www.Thurrott.com…

If you haven’t tried the new Edge out yet, then give it a whirl – it’s not finished and it’s not perfect, but so far it feels fast and it’s (mostly) compatible…

These are the Features Microsoft Turned Off or Replaced in Chromium-Based Edge – lots of Google services built into Chrome have been switched off. Or replaced by Microsoft services doing much the same thing, only more trustworthily and less advertisingy…

Living on the (New) Edge: Getting Started

Living on the (New) Edge: What Syncs, What Doesn’t – though see we’ve already announced plans to update Android version of Edge to sync back with the new desktop Edge.

Living on the (New) Edge: Extensions – since there are some popular classic Edge extensions that aren’t yet showing up in the new Edge extension lists, you too can put Chrome ones in there. Like OneNote Web Clipper.

Living on the (New) Edge: Favorites – familiar if you already use Chrome

Living on the (New) Edge: On Startup and New Tab – one of the nicest features… you get the beautiful Bing image with your most-used tiles, and all the clickbait-infested Microsoft News content is a scroll away.

Living on the (New) Edge: Web Apps – a nice feature that makes it easy to “install” web pages and/or PWAs just like proper apps. You can pin apps to the start menu or task bar, you can jump straight to the others you have by going to edge://apps.

And there are many more… but we’ll finish up with:

Everyone Needs the New Microsoft Edge (Premium)

Thurrot has a premium subscription service to get certain content, though you can read a couple of articles for free. In this one, he summarises why he thinks the new Edge will be good for all –

What if there were a version of Chrome that was literally stripped of all the Google tracking services, a browser that looked, worked, and performed exactly look Chrome, but didn’t follow you around the Internet like some lonely dog that’s been trapped in a house alone for the day? What if there was a version of Chrome that provided the same benefits of Chrome—its stellar compatibility with web standards, its market-leading performance, its support for PWAs and other web apps, and its cross-platform sync of bookmarks, passwords, and other data—while actually respected your privacy? I mean. Can you even imagine such a thing?

The new Microsoft Edge is that browser.

Tip o’ the Week 475 – Chrome-plating to the Edge

Posted on May 8, 2019 (Updated May 8, 2019) by ewand

April’s big news was the public preview of the first Edge browser that uses the Chromium rendering engine. If this seems like a minor footnote in history, it at least marks a turning point in browser development by Microsoft. Instead of continuing with the Edge browser on Windows 10 using its own EdgeHTML rendering engine (and all the potential compatibility headaches and support issues that may entail), the team decided to move to using the open-source Chromium engine that underpins Google’s Chrome, and to make Edge available on older versions of Windows as well as the Mac.

After early builds were leaked, the Edge team has been working to release the preview in daily (“Canary”) builds, or weekly (“Developer”) versions. They can be side-loaded alongside both the regular Edge browser and Chrome, so giving it a try is a fairly low risk activity, and in unscientific comparison tests it appears to be as fast or slightly faster than both Chrome and the other Edge.

Check out more info on the Edge Dev blog, and get the latest build from the Edge Insider site. The Chromium-based Edge (already being referred to as “Edgium” by some) will support addins built for Chrome, though for now, just a subset are available from the Microsoft Store, and many more will follow and it is possible to add others.

In time, most (though not all, it seems) of the features that have been built into Edge will migrate to the new version, but for now, the test builds that are being made public look a lot like Chrome in places – eg. the settings menu, that takes place inside a browser tab rather than a sidebar, like “Classic” Edge.

Other oddities include shortcut keys – in old Edge, CTRL+SHIFT+P will launch an InPrivate window (useful for logging into Azure portal or Office365 admin page using different creds … what else?) but in both Chrome and the Edge Dev build, that launches the print dialog, and Incognito/InPrivate is CTRL+SHIFT+N.