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 388 – Crossing Time Zones

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

Another dip into the annals of ToW, dusted down and spruced up – this topic was first covered in #301, though the topic of time zones has also featured in #280, #244, #120, #26…

When moving between countries, one of the tricks the traveller needs to decide is how to handle the switch of time zone. Do you set your watch to the destination time as soon as you board the plane, or only when the pilot announces, in his or her ever-so distincive pilot tone, what the local time is on arrival?

Also, do you wait for your phone to pick up the destination time zone automatically, or do you set it manually? If you have a Fitbit or other wearable, do you want it to pick up the time from your phone or do you force it on departure? Decisions, decisions…

Frequent travellers tend to have pearls of wisdom on how to deal with jet lag – like get your mind in the destination time zone and keep it there (ie. If you’re out having dinner after arrival, do not keep saying that it’s really 4am; it’s 8pm now and you can’t go to bed for at least another two hours), or get the sun – or even a bright light – on the back of your knees. All we can cover is how to handle the crossing of time zones using your PC…

Outlook – whenever an appointment is created, its date and time are recorded as an offset from UTC, and the time zone it’s due to take place in is also noted. If you’re creating meetings or appointments which are in a different time zone, like travel times, then it may be worth telling Outlook by clicking the Time Zone icon in the ribbon, and then selecting the appropriate TZ – especially useful if you’re moving between time zones during the appointment itself, and don’t want to run the risk of horological befuddlement.

If you’re booking a load of appointments in another time zone – eg. you’re working in another country for a few days and creating appointments with people in that locale – then it’s even worth switching the TZ of your PC whilst you do the diary-work, to save a lot of clicking around in setting the appropriate time zone specific to each meeting.

The best way to do this would be to show your second time zone in the Outlook calendar – in the main Outlook window, go to File | Options | Calendar and select the second one to show; when you’re ready to switch between your local TZ and the remote one, just click the Swap Time Zones button to switch the PC (and Outlook) between the different zones.

Windows 10 – In the Settings | Date & time menu, there’s an option to tweak how Windows deals with time and time zones – some of which might be applied by policy and therefore greyed out for you. Like other phone OSes, Windows 10 – even on proper computers – has the option of setting time zone automatically.

If you’re going to use the time zone swapping in Outlook as per above, then it’s worth disabling the automatic mode as Windows can get itself properly confused; the default time zone will change, and Outlook will end up showing the same time zone for both primary and secondary.

Using the old fashioned Windows control panel time settings applet, you can choose to show a second time zone in the clock on the system tray – in the Date & time settings, look to the right and you’ll see Add clocks for different time zones.

There’s a nice Alarms & Clock app in Windows 10, that shows a map of the world with your choice of locations, and the moving daylight line so you can see what’s happening around the globe. A good alternative to that exec boardroom display nonsense, that you might expect to see gracing the wall of your average corporate hot shot.

Tip o’ the Week 387 – Learning to Fly (reprised)

Posted on July 28, 2017 by ewand

Sometimes, the best ideas come back for another go. When thinking about the topic for this week’s tip, I realised that I’d covered some of it 3 years ago… so I decided to revisit that tip and give it a refresh. Since it started as a Microsoft internal one, it never made it onto the blog back then anyway. It’s quite a long read, but hopefully useful in places and amusing in others.

As another spring drifts into the rear-view mirror and a season of travelling looms, the whole rigmarole of getting airborne can be a tiring and unsatisfactory experience, being treated like sheep etc.. (text)

Halo 2 had a method for flying (caused by a glitch in the game that was fixed by a later update) but most of us are in the hands of mass air travel to get off the ground. While on life ~~hacks~~ tips, do check out Halo’s How Not to be Seen…

Anyway, here are some thoughts on getting a good seat (maybe even an upgrade), and having a good flight…

Join the frequent flyer program

Even if you don’t expect to fly very often on this particular airline, it’s worth signing up to their loyalty program. At least you might be able to specify if you prefer window or aisle seats, and it might help speed you through online checkin and the likes. Put up with the spam you’ll get as a result, and save your userid and password somewhere.

Obviously, racking up the points on the program might give you access to airport lounges, pre-flight massages, all you can eat/drink, extra points/miles, the DYKWIA priority queues and all sorts. If you travel a lot, and you’re prepared to commit to one airline, it’s all about attaining & keeping status.

Find out what plane you’ll be on

Most airlines will tell you which type of plane you’re scheduled to fly on (though occasionally they will change airframe, so you might get moved around) but a more useful method is to look at FlightRadar24 and enter your flight number.

You’ll see the aircraft type (in an abbreviated form – eg. B744 is a Boeing 747-400, A388 is an Airbus A380-800) and as the date & time of the flight gets closer, maybe even the actual aircraft registration that is going to take the flight. Click on that link to see more details of the plane itself, how old it is, where it’s been previously, etc.

If you’re a nervous flyer, you might prefer not to know that the plane you’re about to get on made an emergency landing last month and has been with engineering since…

If you do a search for the registration number online, you’ll find out all sorts of info about when it was last serviced, how long ago it’s been since the cabin was refitted, etc. Here’s just an example.

Pick your seats online before you fly

When you’ve figured out what plane you’re on, then it might be possible to choose where you want to sit, before you appear at the airport. Things you might want to avoid when choosing a seat include being right next to the galley or the toilets, having all the gubbins for the seat-in-front’s in-flight entertainment taking up half of your legroom, not having a window, and lots more.

To see opinions on which is the best seat on your plane, look on www.seatguru.com and/or www.seatexpert.com.

Frequent Flyer sites like www.flyertalk.com have endless discussions about which is the best seat on any given configuration of plane (#firstworldproblems if ever you’ve seen them), but are an essential resource if you want to figure out how to get the best out of a frequent flyer or hotel stay program, get tips on how to access lounges or other perks at the airport and lots more. One FT’er flew from London to New York on Concorde by buying lots of biscuits at Tesco, to rack up bonus Clubcard points that got converted into Air Miles.

The right place at the right time

There is a science behind how airlines decide when to upgrade passengers to a better cabin, and in choosing who to bestow the upgrade upon. Sadly, the science is about as clear as a pint of milk and is likely different for each carrier. Generally speaking, airlines don’t give out upgrades for any reason other than they have to, because they’ve oversold a particular cabin and they have to punt some lucky folk forward into premium economy, business or first class. Unless you’re good friends with someone behind the scenes, the chances of getting upgraded just because you’re smartly dressed and polite are pretty much a thing of the past.

Airlines often do “Op-Ups” (or Operational Upgrades) when they have to, but they also increasingly offer pay-for upgrades at checkin, that can be considerably cheaper than if you’d bought the next class up in the first place. As long as there aren’t enough people happy to take money to go away and come back tomorrow, or to pay to move themselves forwards, there will always be a need to move people around. It’s worth asking at checkin if there are any pay-for upgrade options, and if you’re offered one, it might be a sign that the flight is busy and you could either splash the cash or take the gamble that there could be a freebie on offer.

If you’re travelling alone, you’ll have a better chance of getting upgraded – it’s just easier than trying to accommodate several people together. Oh, and don’t order any special catering unless you have to: if an airline goes to the trouble of getting a special gluten free/vegan etc meal for you, they won’t want to push you up into the next cabin where the food served would be different.

One way you could put yourself in the frame for an Op-Up is to be on a flight that you know is very busy, probably oversold, at least at the back of the bus. Friday night on BA48 from SEA-LHR at the end of a conference week is a good example – the airline might well sell dozens of economy seats more than they actually have available on the plane, and will either compensate or boot people off the flight if they can’t fill up all the cabins forward of economy by pushing others forward. Most will handle the situation better than in some recent news items.

Should you find yourself kicked off an oversold flight, do remember you might be up for some compensation – any EU-based carrier flying to or from an EU member-state airport, for example, is bound by the regulations known as EU261/2004 – in other words, if you flight is cancelled, very late, or if you’re downgraded or offloaded, then the airline is legally bound to give you money by way of compensation – not just free miles or vouchers etc. Know your rights, basically.

Have a touch of class

When airlines are determining who to push forward (from Economy- to Economy+, from Econ+ to business or even Business to First), there will be a number of factors that will determine who gets the red carpet treatment – normally the “status” of the passenger (as defined by the airline’s frequent flyer program), with the fare class of the ticket they have (a single-letter designator that tells which bracket your ticket falls into… different airlines will use their own codes but often “Y” is full-price economy and “J” is full price business).

If you really care about finding out how busy your flight is, you could use a site like www.expertflyer.com to interrogate the same systems that travel professionals use, though you will need to pay for the privilege – or just do a trial to see how your next flight looks.

See here for some ticket class examples. Basically, if your ticket falls into the lowest of the low classes (group booking, consolidator fares etc) then don’t bother dressing smartly and chatting up the check-in clerk – you aren’t getting an upgrade. You should be able to find your fare code or class by digging around in the T&Cs of your ticket: it’s probably not obvious, although some airlines do print it on their ticket…

Points make prizes

No Brucie Bonus, but collect enough of the miles or points that you earn by flying and you can sometimes cash them in for flights or upgrades. Sometimes the taxes and other charges are as much as the cost of just buying a regular ticket, so keep your wits about you.

With BA at least, the best use of Avios points is what is referred to as “MFU”, or “Miles for Upgrade” – in other words, you buy a ticket in one class and then use points to move yourself forward. MFU seats and Award seats (ie the entirely funded by points) are thin on the ground for some routes and confer a class of travel that itself is non-upgradeable.

Check in online as soon as you possibly can

One of the supposedly most reliable ways of getting selected for upgrade is to have your name near the top of the list after your ticket class and status are taken into account, and the way to do that is to have as low a Sequence Number (or “Seq No”) as possible – this is the order (vs all the other passengers on the plane) in which you checked in.

So if you have a seat with a relatively expensive ticket class, you’re a card-carrying (the higher-ranking the better) member of the FF program, and you have a single digit sequence number… then your luck may be in.

Try not to look too smug now.

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.

Tip o’ the Week 383 – Windows Maps refresh

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

Can you remember the time when, if you wanted to know how to get somewhere, you needed to look on a paper map? Before mapping was at all available online, people would either buy paper maps or license software packages – sometimes at great expense – that had road information in a database, so they could plan journeys.

A company called NextBase released an early PC application called “Autoroute” that was bought by fleet transport managers and the likes, who might have saved time and fuel by more efficiently planning the routes that their vehicles would take. This made it worth the £500 or so that the software package cost†.

Microsoft went on to acquire NextBase and released AutoRoute in some markets, and Streets & Trips in others, and went on to sell it for the more modest £99‡.

† this figure is made up, because I can’t for the life of me find any reference to the actual cost, but I do remember it was A LOT. Like, enough to drive a lot of pirate copies…
‡ so is this figure

Now AutoRoute, Streets & Trips and their more professional data analysis counterpart, MapPoint, have all shuffled off to make way for the more popular – and mostly free – online mapping tools that people use today. Microsoft acquired MultiMap along the way, to bring additional expertise and technology to the Bing Maps platform.

So, most people will now use Bing Maps or Google Maps (Street View not available in all places) for finding directions. The latter is particularly good for finding places where you don’t need to know their address; put the name of a restaurant into Google Maps in a browser, or onto the Google Maps app on your phone, and you can get directions straight there without even bothering to look it up first.

Tip: if you search for the name of a place in Bing Maps, it shows you the result in a pop-out pane on the left, but sometimes leaves you trying to zoom & scroll, zoom & scroll to get the detail around your destination… to quickly go there, click once on the title banner (“Microsoft UK” in the example below) to collapse it, and once again to bring it back – at which point, the map view should zoom to the point.

Anyway, Bing Maps is improving its ability to find stuff around any given point – nearby restaurants, attractions, parking, that kind of thing – and this has now percolated through into a nicely updated Maps application for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile.

To see what version of Windows Maps you’re running, click the elipsis in the top right, choose Settings and scroll to the bottom to see the version number – at time of writing, the updated version is Maps 5.1705.1391.0 but insiders will be on a later release.

If you search for a place, or even just right-click somewhere on a map to Drop a Pin, you’ll get the option to see what’s nearby and quickly find more details, plan a route to the destination etc.

As well as integrating place info better, the Maps app also has some nice traffic reporting capabilities – if Cortana knows your home and work locations, Maps will immediately think about your commute when you click on the traffic lights icon near the top right. As well as showing a colour coded traffic map, it shows public traffic cameras and lets you easily access them.

And if you plan a route using the driving directions, you can pin that route to your Start menu if it’s one you use a lot…

Read more about other updates to Windows Maps in the recent weeks.

Tip o’ the Week 382 – F…F…Feeds in Edge

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

If you use the Edge browser in Windows 10 as your default (presumably by ignoring prompts on any Google property, to install and default to Chrome) then you may be familiar with the default tab behaviour, which helpfully shows you most-visited sites and also displays some “news” content below.

This “My feed” section can be a neat way to get news items of interest without having to do anything but fire up a new browser tab when you were planning to do something else anyway. Maybe distracting, though, unless you’re careful, and as well as the news, there’s plenty of click-bait garbage in there that can do just that. Who couldn’t resist naming these forgotten 1990s movies, or those car badges you don’t see any more? Or wonder what it was that happened next that shocked everyone?

There isn’t a lot of fine-tuning that can be achieved with My feed, however; a fact that’s driving people nuts on feedback forums and on the sometimes preposterously-named “Answers” forum (“please clear your browser cache, reboot, stand on one leg and rub the top of your head – that should fix it”).

Some of the feedback, though, and particularly the responses to it on the Insiders-only Feedback Hub, can be quite amusing….

The main degree of customisation you can do is to tweak the settings for what you prefer – click on the gear icon in the top right (above the Top Sites section), and choose whether you want to switch off the feed and just show Top sites or nothing. Some lanugages (not US English, oddly) allow you to choose what your favourite topics are, though deselecting some (and making the surrounding border disappear from the topic) doesn’t actually remove it from your feed – it just makes it a little less prevalent, and not quite immediately.

If you have US English set as your language, you will get a list of topics across the top of the feed to filter its contents, but in every other language it seems to be pre-sorted.

The gripes being exposed online about the feed tend to be around the nature of the news itself or in the tone and volume of the adverts (like, in the UK, do I really want Microsoft to push dodgy-sounding $30 TV antennae?).

The most annoying ads appear to be served up by Taboola and there doesn’t appear to be a way of blocking them – unless you know differently; then please write up what you did and share the info with me, whereupon kudos will be bestowed in great quantity – so if you don’t want to put up with intrustive click-bait, then your only current option is to basically switch off the feed and go somewhere else for your news (research shows many are using social media as their preferred way of hearing news, though the tide may be turning).

Maybe use a proper news web aggregator site, e.g. Bing news or this little-used one, both of which would let you filter and customise your news sources, or rely on a news app to provide you with even more control or detail (such as MSN News or Feedlab if you’re after getting your news up the RSS).

The challenge with any news feed is filtering out the fake news. Still, there’s still the odd bit of truth out there.

Tip o’ the Week 381 – Send to OneNote

Posted on June 30, 2017 by ewand

OneNote is a favourite app for many people, especially if you like taking notes using a pen. With the Surface Pro announcement, it’s apparently even better with inking, even if the groovy new pen isn’t bundled with the package and only a third of existing Surface users ever pick their pen up.

There are some updates rolling out to the mobile & web versions of OneNote, that will improve a bunch of navigational and creative features, and will appear in the modern Windows app version (though OneNote 2016 will be unaffected).

As well as being a place to collaborate and store information, OneNote is a great place to dump all sorts of stuff you want to keep – from the business cards or expense receipts you might get from Office Lens, to emails or other documents you may want to associate with notes around a given topic.

If you have OneNote 2016 installed – via Office365 for example – then you’ll have a “Send to OneNote 2016” options visible in the print dialog from any application – but there’s a new Store app called Send to OneNote that does the same thing but for the modern Windows App once installed, you have another fake printer available for any app to drop a printout into OneNote.

Of course, there are other ways of getting content into OneNote – from the Share to method that was covered recently in ToW 378, to the OneNote Clipper browser extension, or even the direct email to OneNote function… all of which may both provide a more useful sharing/clipping experience, but are only usable in certain applications or ways.

The modern OneNote app keeps getting minor updates that both bring it more into line functionally with the traditional desktop OneNote 2016, but also give it a fresher UI in some respects, especially on touch or pen-friendly devices.

Tip o’ the Week 380 – Hey Cortana, take flight!

Posted on May 30, 2017 by ewand

With the news that Cortana is coming to a consumer audio device near you, it’s worth revisiting a few things that Cortana on your desktop can do for you. If you have a Windows 10 PC with a microphone, then you may be able to enable “Hey Cortana”, which lets you talk to your machine and ask it stuff. See what’s new with the Blue One in the Creators Update.

You can leave yourself voice notes and Cortana will stick them in the Quick Notes section of OneNote – using the Modern App version of OneNote, look under Settings -> Options -> choose a notebook for Quick Notes to set the default location.

Even if you don’t talk to your PC, pressing WindowsKey+Q will launch Cortana, as a quick way of searching for apps or documents on your machine, or answers on the web – just type in your query, then filter by the icons on top of the window as appropriate.

Cortana can do a lot more than just be a shim for Bing search; she can offer immediate advice, like what the time is in a different location, what’s the weather for tomorrow, and more. Type a flight number to see its current status, a stock symbol for a quote or a couple of currency symbols for an immediate exchange rate estimate.

While many of these commands work when you type them (eg type, time new york, as on the left), some will only work when spoken and some will give a better UI and/or more detail when voiced rather than typed (such as the “Hey Cortana, what’s the time in New York” query on the right)…

Of course, there are plenty of stupid things you can ask Cortana – open the pod bay doors, sing me a song, knock knock, who let the dogs out, etc etc. Just like Alexa or Siri, there are many built-in Easter Eggs.

You can sometimes string some interesting productivity commands together, too – some could be useful in context, like reminding you to buy milk next time you’re in a supermarket (whereupon your phone will trigger a reminder when it knows you’ve just walked into a supermarket, based on GPS) or next time you talk to a particular contact, to remind you to ask them something (where it will pop up when you next speak to them, exchange emails etc).

You can issue some pretty complex instructions to add reminders – eg. “Hey Cortana, add Pink Floyd exhibition Their Mortal Remains at the V&A to my calendar for tomorrow at 3:45” … and Cortana can put it on your calendar, or just maintain a list of reminders in her own Notebook.

(NB: screen shot to the right was not faked up, although it did take more than one attempt …)

Cortana’s getting skills, too, from Graph to bots to Rome.