Tip o’ the Week 338 – And now for something completely different

Posted on July 26, 2016 by ewand

If you’re a Skype user – desktop, consumer Skype, or the various mobile platforms (including the Skype Preview on Windows 10 Mobile), as opposed to Skype for Business, you may know about smileys and emojis, but have you used “mojis”?

Put simply, they’re short, often pithy and funny, video clips that can be quickly inserted into conversations. You can shut up your colleagues. Or they could retort back at you. There are hundreds of mojis, from naff Hollywood to Bollywood, Macca to the Muppets.

Now, Skype has released a whole selection of the finest Monty Python clips, as mojis. Click on the smiley icon in the bottom right of a Skype conversation window, then look for the new “foot” icon, and you’ll see an array of classic Python videos.

Try not to waste all day mucking around with it.

If you don’t see the icon, make sure you’re running the latest version of Skype.

Tip o’ the Week 337 – PPT premium groove things

Posted on July 22, 2016 by ewand

Sometimes, news can pass you by and it’s only some time later when you are confronted by it, that you realise just what it all means. There’s been a lot of news in the UK of late (eg Larry the Downing St cat not only keeps his post as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office but is confirmed as one of the great survivors of modern British politics, outlasting the leaders of Labour, the Conservatives, Greens, Liberals, SNP and UKIP).

On a slightly more mundane front, a demo was shown during the day #2 keynote at Worldwide Partner Conference, which drew mild gasps from the audience, even though the feature had been unveiled more than 6 months ago. The coolness in question was PowerPoint Designer, something available only if you’re running Office 2016 and have an Office365 subscription.

The Designer manifests itself as a selection of suggested layouts that will be displayed in the right-hand task pane of the PowerPoint app, after you’ve inserted some photos from your own collection or from the various online sources. A suitable colour scheme will also be found, depending on the predominant colours in the photo(s) you’ve pasted or inserted. It’s subtle and clever.

There’s a Design Ideas icon on the Design tab, if you want to manually invoke the Designer functionality too. When you start the Designer for the first time, you need to accept that the images you use within the designer will be sent to a cloud service for analysis. See here for more.

At the same time as the Designer appeared, another premium O365 service was also added, called Morph (not to be confused with Tony Hart). The Morph service makes animating slide transitions really easy, and it’s probably simpler to demonstrate than to explain. Try this:

Create a new slide in PowerPoint, and paste an image, sized to a thumbnail in one corner of the slide
Add a text box with any old text in it
Now, in the slide thumbnails on the left side, right-click on the new one and choose Duplicate Slide.
Move your image to a different corner of the 2^nd slide, and make it bigger – try adding some artistic effects or recolouring if you like, and try moving your text box to a different place, and change the font size, type, colour etc
Now select the 2^nd slide, go to the Transitions menu and click Morph. Prepare to be amazed…

For more details on Morph & Designer, see Kirk Koenigsbauer’s blog post from November 2015.

Tip o’ the Week 336 – Onetastic Update

Posted on July 15, 2016 by ewand

As has been covered repeatedly on previous ToWs, OneNote – for some people – is a life-blood app that is more heavily used than many others, and when people depend on it, they tend to care about it. And though there are a variety of addins and templates available for OneNote users to get more from the tool, the best addin is Onetastic, and has just been updated.

The version 3.0 of Onetastic introduces some subtle improvements to the OneCalendar function – possibly the most obviously useful part of Onetastic, as it shows a calendar view with a list of which pages were updated on each date, hot-linked so you can jump straight to each. If you have lots of different OneNote pages, sections, notebooks etc, then this can be absolutely invaluable.

The OneCalendar function is activated from the toolbar in OneNote, though you can create a shortcut to the separate executable if desired:

· Press WindowsKey+R and enter %appdata%\Onetastic

· Right-click on the OneCal.exe file and choose Create shortcut

· Right-click on the new shortcut and choose Cut, then try running %userprofile% and Paste the shortcut in there.

· Rename the shortcut to just “OneCal”. Right-click it to Pin to Start if you like, or open the app and right-click on its Taskbar icon to Pin it there if you’re truly devoted

· Now, you can quickly start it by pressing WindowsKey+R and entering OneCal

· Or you can install just OneCalendar on its own, should you insist.

Anyway. Whether or not you want to do the above steps, you can still find some cool stuff in the new Macroland functionality within Onetastic. The author, @Omer Atay, has completely rewritten the macro language to make it more like a number of regular programming environments. There are hundreds of macros to carry out everything from minor text formatting to wholesale changes like colouring or changing sections of the notebook.

Some of the most useful macros include the ability to create tables of contents, breadcrumb links or even lists of all the notebooks currently open.

If you’re a OneNote user and you don’t have Onetastic installed, you’re missing out.

Tip o’ the Week 335 – Battery life on Windows 10

Posted on July 12, 2016 by ewand

Everyone with a laptop or tablet will know the range anxiety of running out of juice. Making a few tweaks to reduce your machine’s battery drain could give you a good chunk of additional run time before needing a plug.

For a start, check out Battery saver – it’s basically a port of functionality that was in Windows Phone for a while, meaning that when the battery charge falls below a set level, the machine will automatically clip its wings to eke out the remainder.

Look in the Battery saver options (just type Battery at your Start menu), and you’ll also see the current charge and estimated duration, but also will let you see a breakdown per app, allowing you to control on an app-by-app basis how they will affect your battery life. One such trick might be to decide which apps you want to allow to run in the background, as each one will use some amount of system resources, though for the most part, it makes sense to leave them as “managed by Windows”, and then the battery saver will intervene if required.

If you’d like a bit more info on what your machine’s battery is doing, try running (WindowsKey+R) powercfg /batteryreport, which will generate an HTML report showing you details. To view the file, just type battery-report at the Start menu and you should see the battery-report.html file show up in the list.

Clearly, you can manually turn off things you don’t need – like Bluetooth or even WiFi (if you’re mobile and don’t need/want to connect), you could dim the screen or get into the practice of looking for marginal gains by doing things like switching off Start Menu transparency or even picking your colours appropriately.

If you’re already running a preview of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (now due to go public on August 2^nd), then make sure to use the Edge browser: the browser tunes itself to be kind to your laptop or tablet’s battery life. Using test data and real world info collected from telemetry, the Edge team has revealed that it is notably more power efficient than Chrome, Opera and Firefox. Read more here.

Opera took issue, though Thurrott concurred (“Opera is still a thing?”, said one commenter).
Paul even suggested that he might use Edge more than Chrome, at least for now.

WSJ found that Edge was more power efficient than Chrome, and PC World agreed, though with a smaller margin of victory (though marginal gains are all about the 1%…) So, if you’re a Chrome fan, you might want to take a look at Edge under the Anniversary Update and see if it’s improved enough to win your heart over.

Read more battery saving tips for Windows 10 here (though they are very phone-centric rather than PC oriented).

Tip o’ the Week 334 – Windows Maps app updates

Posted on July 8, 2016 by ewand

A few months ago, ToW #318 talked about mapping on Windows 10. Well, a new update to the Maps app on Windows 10 desktop and mobile has appeared recently, and at the same time, the old Here Maps apps will stop working on Windows 10 Mobile devices at the end of next week.

The Maps app that is now native to Windows 10 devices has been given a fresh look, moving from old version’s dark and vertical icon placement on the left to a more minimalist look where the principal navigation icons are along the top.

There are loads of functional and fit-n-finish UX improvements throughout the apps on both PC and mobile, plus some notable new or overhauled features. A few highlights:

· Details Card – now displayed when you select a point on the map, with clearer display of info including what’s nearby and giving you common actions like directions, sharing etc.

· Favourite places improvements – it will keep your favourites offline, sync between devices if you sign in with your Microsoft Account and will migrate previous faves from Here Maps too.

· Guided navigation – the nav option, especially useful for phone users with offline maps, works much better in landscape mode with a clearer layout.

Find out more about the updated maps app, here. And see what Paul Thurrot has to say, here.

To check your current version, launch Maps and look in the ellipsis (.,,) and under Settings, then scroll to the very bottom – the previous version was v4.1603.nnn whereas the new release is showing up as 5.1606.nnn.

To force an update, try going into the Store – here – or just look in the Store App under Downloads/Updates (click on your own avatar on the top right on PC then select that options from the list, or tap the hamburger icon on the top left of the Phone app).

Either view will let you force a check for app updates, which may be delayed from arriving automatically if you’re not on WiFi or plugged in.

Tip o’ the Week 332 – Failing to plan is, eh…

Posted on June 28, 2016 by ewand

If you’ve ever tried to source the real originator of some popular quote, you might come across the same old names that are supposedly responsible for it – Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Jeremy Clarkson, etc. One such quote that has been widely attributed to any number of people (including self-styled 1970s time management guru, Alan Lakein) is, “Failing to plan is planning to fail”.

A new tool has been rolled out to Office365 users to help – Microsoft Planner. It’s a relatively simple-looking yet deceptively powerful group project / task management application that lets you assign and collaborate tasks amongst team members, all the time maintaining an easy to use and very visual overview of the projects.

Planner has been in preview for a few months but was released generally in early June and will automatically show up in the grid icon set on the top-left of browser-based Office365 applications.

To get the gist of what Planner does, check out the overview video, here. For tips on getting up and running, see the Getting Started guide.

There is a degree of functional overlap with other task-management systems like Wunderlist or even Outlook on its own, but Planner is designed very much to be a team-based thing and is particularly aimed at businesses or for educational use.

Comparisons are inevitably made with other tools, most notably Trello, and SharePoint’s own Tasks capability has had the Sword of Damocles hanging over it, if you believe the chat, so Planner is a welcome addition.

Tip o’ the Week 331 – OneNote Clipper Edge Extension

Posted on June 24, 2016 by ewand

Ever since the Edge browser appeared with Windows 10, there have been calls from some quarters to allow extensions of some kind – ad blocking, the main one, though the practice of blocking ads in web pages is turning into a pitched battle between content owners and readers. Oh, and the advertisers too.

With the latest versions of Edge that are available to Windows Insiders, and due to be generally released with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on July 29^th, it’s now possible to try out some preview extensions (including a couple of ad blockers – though be careful, don’t use more than one at a time or you might cross the streams).

See the list of preview extensions here, noting the minimum version of Windows you need to be running to use them (try pressing WindowsKey+R and entering winver to see what you’re currently using).

One extension in preview is a version of the OneNote Web Clipper application, which allows for a simple button to be added to the Edge toolbar, making it a quick click to grab the current web page and save it into OneNote. View more about the extension here.

If you’re not yet on the right version of Windows, there are other ways to save web pages into your OneNote notebook…

Edge – if you click on the Web Note icon on the Edge toolbar, the intent is that you can annotate web pages (eg. with your stylus if you have one), and you can then save the annotated page to OneNote. You could skip the “annotating” bit and just go straight to the “saving”.
Print – you could just print from any application to OneNote, using the installed dummy printer driver that sends a copy of your app/page/doc to a new page in OneNote instead of physically printing.
Snip on your own – the desktop version of OneNote will let you capture an area of the screen by pressing WindowsKey+SHIFT+S – grab that, paste it manually into OneNote or set it to go straight there – look in the Desktop OneNote under File | Options | Send to OneNote and you can set the default behaviour.

Anyway, get into the habit of saving stuff from your browser into OneNote and you’ll wonder how you managed to run your life beforehand.

Tip o’ the Week 333 – Du Temps Perdu

Posted on June 22, 2016 by ewand

Last weekend saw the greatest motor race in the world take place in the presence of hundreds of thousands of visiting fans, though mainstream media barely gave it a passing glance. If you’re interested, you may be able to catch highlights on Eurosport or watch online, looking out for the Scottish knight as he transitions from two to four wheels.

With a good portion of the sporting world focussed on France right now (at least you’d think that, given the TV coverage), it seem opportune to look at some language tools if the de facto lingua franca of The Mother Tongue isn’t available.

Machine translation has become fairly commonplace, and though it’s not perfect, it’s a lot better than the non-fluent might achieve by stumbling through a phrasebook and getting all the pronunciation wrong. Translation in real time is now built-in to Skype, with instant message or even full spoken voice translation available in several languages. The technology is moving from simple word-by-word conversion, to full semantic and grammatical translation (though not yet summarising or otherwise interpreting), and it might not be all that long before fully synchronous, real-time translation from any language to any other is possible just by sticking an earpiece in. Douglas Adams would have been pleased.

Windows 10 has added translation capabilities into Cortana; saying something like Hey Cortana, translate “Where is the nearest train station” in French or Hey Cortana, how do I say “Oh no, not penalties again” in German should let you see, and possibly hear, what the translation should be.

Click on the Open Translator link to visit the Bing Translator web page, which will do the same sort of thing, but can also break down the phrase by word, showing alternative words in the translated text that you might want to use instead.

If you’re running a preview version of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, and have a build later than 14302, you can also add an Edge extension to translate a page that’s written in another language, accessed via the Translator icon showing up on the toolbar.

It’s a bit “all or nothing”, and doesn’t show you the individual words that it has translated, but it is quick and easy. You may want to try feeding the URL into bing.com/translator or translate.google.com to see how well the translation has gone (if you hover over translated words, both will show you the original underneath, though both have a habit of mangling complex websites).

Finally, if you’d like to just translate a short phrase but might be offline at the time (so Cortana isn’t any use), it’s worth installing the Bing Translator app, which also has the ability to translate text identified from the camera, such as on a menu or an instructional sign. Très bien, or as Proust would say, “la malade imaginaire de recondition et de toute surveillance est bientôt la même chose”!

Tip o’ the Week 330 – Windows Store updated

Posted on June 10, 2016 by ewand

Windows Insiders may have noticed since desktop build 14342 (which made it onto the slow ring recently), that the Store app has been given a bit of a makeover (assuming you’re able to update it). Both the layout of the main screen and the pages which detail individual apps have been changed, adding functionality and making the whole thing a bit more usable.

The refresh brings the PC and Mobile versions of the store into closer alignment, and the UI adapts to the window changing size, by reordering and resizing tiles and modifying the layout of other options.

The Store hasn’t grown a hamburger menu (yet?) but it has adopted a dynamic UI layout, one of the tenets of UWP now that modern apps can run in a window, can be resized more easily and may be targeted at different device types and screen sizes.

If you check the Downloads and updates option (reached by clicking on your profile pic, to the left of the search field/icon) then you’ll see “Recent Activity”, which shows you the details of updates including the current application version.

There’s still a paucity of update and version information within the main Store experience though – it would be nice to be able to search for an app and sort/filter the results based on the average ratings or the date the app was published or updated; that way, it would be easier to filter out stale or rubbish apps. If you agree, try suggesting through the Feedback Hub.

In the My Library section of the store, you can also hide apps you’ve previously purchased or otherwise had installed – like Candy Crush Saga, maybe, not always with your consent. There are other ways of ditching ready-installed apps if you’re especially bothered about their presence.

While on the topic of the Store, it’s worth keeping an eye on the Windows Store Weekly posts on the Windows Experience team blog – it highlights apps (games, especially) and TV or movie content that’s new or being promoted within the Store.

Tip o’ the Week 329 – Fuzzy Duck? Yes, he does

Posted on June 3, 2016 by ewand

Sometimes, when writing the ToW, the topic is inspired by a specific problem that someone has emailed me – it’d be a lot better if they’d email me the solution to a problem, but never mind – and sometimes it comes about because of an issue I’ve spent ages struggling with and then happened upon a solution. Today’s is following one of those latter episodes.

Be honest. Do you know how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel? It has its roots in @LOOKUP from VisiCalc, which goes back well over 30 years – see here for a demo (and, wipe a tear, you missed “VLOOKUP WEEK 2012”).

It’s one of the more useful functions, where you can use tables of text to cross reference one another – leading some to create spreadsheets to manipulate data that might be achieved elsewhere by a database join or an IF…THEN…ELSE statement.

VLOOKUP (and her friends, HLOOKUP, LOOKUP and the other reference functions) is all very well if you have nicely constructed and controlled data – but what if you have messy text that has been entered by end users? How do you go about normalising that without boring brute force (ie ploughing through it all yourself)?

Imagine, if you will, that you have a list of a few hundred company names exported from your CRM system – let’s call them “Partners”. What if you also had many thousands of unique names from people who’ve registered at a conference? (Let’s call that “Partner Conference”). Wouldn’t it be nice to run a report which shows the team that works with each partner, who has registered and where they’re from?

If the registration tool allowed anyone to enter free text fields for the name of their company, you’ll get any number of variations, mis-spellings etc – maybe even the odd deliberate spanner. (On the McXFace front, once again, El Reg excelled itself with this headline, though has a way to go to top the best so far… or the subheading of this one, which reads like a line from a DC Thomson cartoon).

These names won’t allow VLOOKUPs as they’ll show up as all different, and therefore cross-referencing one source with the other will be difficult. So even telling Jane Smith, who manages the ACME Inc account, that these 10 people are attending the conference, is going to be hard if every one of them registered with a variation of A.C.M.E, ACME Inc, Ac-me Ltd and so on.

A relatively little-known Excel addin might come to the rescue (technically described as a technology preview in the EULA, but it’s been around for a little while in its last variation, and a few more before that; so probably is not going to advance a great deal more) – the Fuzzy Lookup Add-in for Excel. Simply take two sources of data (formatted as tables), create one or more mappings between them, and run the tool to see what it comes up with.

The Fuzzy Lookup tool will add extra columns to the source table; showing the text that it thinks is the nearest match, and a score of “similarity”. The technology comes from Microsoft Research, and uses the Jaccard Similarity method of comparing sample data sets.

One technique for comparing a couple of different columns is to set conditional formatting on the Similarity column and choose colour scales for easy identification of the ones likely to be correct; or simply put a filter on that column and hide rows below an arbitrary low bar (like 0.6). Then spin down the two columns to the left and check to see if they tally up, given the human eye for spotting similarity, spelling mistakes etc. You could even add a Y/N column to the right so you can manually affirm which is right and which is not, then filter on that to confirm.

After installing the Fuzzy Lookup addin, you’ll get a fairly detailed Readme and a nicely illustrative Excel sample file showing some share price comparisons (with company names in wildly different formats being matched with eerie accuracy). It might be in preview but it could be exactly what the Excel jockey needs.

Fuzzy Duck? Ducky Fuzz! Does he?
(look it up on Wikipedia – NSFW, obvs).