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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 29th, 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…
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
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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.
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
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
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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.
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.
Fuzzy Duck? Ducky Fuzz! Does he? |
Tip o’ the Week 328 – Clip for art’s sake
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If you’re after some high-quality clip art to insert into you magnus opus, you could try a service called Pickit, previously known as PicHit.me. The Pickit Photo Finder app gives you a nice Modern app way of finding cool photos given a theme or keyword (though there’s a subscription fee if you want the higher quality pics). It’s even Cortana enabled, supposedly. There’s an Office Addin too, which lets you search for and add photos and art straight into your documents. Pickit is a Microsoft BizSpark success story, and the service runs on Azure. There are many ways of finding decent clipart for your projects – there’s Open Clip Art for an archive of more traditional vector & standard clipart image fare, or image hosting services like Pixabay, which offer free Creative Commons photos. Check out these other alternatives too. |
Tip o’ the Week 327 – To sleep, perchance to dream
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The Windows Insider program is delivering various new builds to improve battery life for Windows 10 PCs & tablets that use “modern standby” (the mode previously known as “connected standby”) that lets them stay on the network and update certain data feeds whilst ostensibly being in sleep mode. Surface 4 and Book machines have had a few issues with sleep, but recent firmware updates should sort that out. As for the organic machine, there’s plenty of advice on getting better sleep. Problem page gurus warn against drinking coffee or caffeinated tea after lunch, recommend eschewing alcohol & talk about avoiding “screen time” up to 2 hours before bed in order to fall asleep more easily and get a better quality of sleep while you’re there. The Microsoft Band 2 does a good job of tracking its wearer’s sleep, either through detecting that you’re in the land of nod, or by the user initiating the sleep mode. The auto-detect function is there for times when you’re too tired/drunk/forgetful to remember to tap the sleep tile on the Band before dropping off, but there are other
The advice on reducing screen time before bed is partly because reading email or other things that stimulate your mind won’t let you doze off easily, but also because the device you’re using to do the reading might be fooling your brain into thinking it’s still daylight. The LCD/LED screens used by lots of devices – PCs, tablets, phones etc – have a bright, blue/white light that apparently stimulates the noggin in ways you don’t want as you’re about to drop off. Agony Aunts say, don’t use that technology in your bedroom at all, but there could be a better way, if you’re a habitual browser dans le lit. 4 years ago, ToW talked about the “colour of time”, and the same tool/advice is still very useful today – F.Lux is an app that runs on Windows PCs (and versions are available for Macs, iOS, Android & Linux).
Install it on your tablet, turn up the wick on its dim settings, and use it happily in the sack without fear of staying awake all night worrying. Unless, of course, you’ve got something to worry about. |
Tip o’ the Week 326 – Skype for Business, meet Skype consumer
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Put simply, Skype for Business has the ability to communicate with users on the consumer Skype platform, as well as to federate with other parties, and Office365 has it enabled by default. This means you can exchange IMs and see presence for Skype for Business users outside your organisation.
Now, if you’re not federated (or
An even easier way is just to start typing the person’s name, Skype ID or Microsoft account, into the “Find someone…” search box within Skype for Business and click the Skype Directory button: you might well see them listed, profile pic & all – right-click on their profile to add them as a contact (which will kick off a contact request just like in consumer Skype). Once someone has been added from consumer Skype to your contact list, you can IM them, see their presence, and even fire up an audio or video call with them, without needing to use the consumer Skype client yourself. Nice if you’d prefer to keep your business contacts and your personal ones separate, but if your customer is asking to have a Skype chat with you… You can try this out by running both Skype and Skype for Business side-by-side and adding your contact, sending yourself a test IM, even cracking open a video or audio call.
Options are to ask the Skype user to join using the Skype for Business Web App, or use the consumer Skype client to call the phone number the Skype for Business meeting offers to regular phone users. For more details on how to set up and use Skype for Business federation, see here. Check this post for instructions about getting it working with consumer Skype (or here). And another. |
Tip o’ the Week #325 – your time, my time, everyone’s time
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If we become more effective in some ways, decreasing the time it takes to accomplish mundane stuff, will we spend the regained hours doing more stuff, or just fritter it away meaninglessly? Discuss, ad inifinitum. Quick Time One thing you could do when deciding what to do with all the spare hours the world of Yammer, Slack, Outlook, Skype etc has delivered, is to go right now and uninstall QuickTime from your PC. After 20 years of providing the Windows version, Apple has decided (to quote El Reg) to take QT for a long drive down a country road. The US Dept of Homeland Security advises immediate removal of QuickTime, since it contains zero-day vulnerabilities which Apple will not fix, ever. Whilst thinking about security, wonder about the effectiveness of the Thousands Standing Around at US airports, or consider if you really need to change your passwords after all. Find Time A few months ago, a Microsoft Garage project released FindTime, an addin to Outlook and Office365 which allows a meeting organiser to send a request out to a group of people, to vote for when the best time to hold the meeting is. The best part is, the recipients don’t need to be using Office365, don’t even need to be in the same company – so you could ask your customers to join in the negotiation for when the best time to meet would be. |
Tip o’ the Week #324 – Delve into something new
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If you can get access to Delve (either on https://delve.office.com or via https://portal.office.com, depending on your account and level of access), then it’s well worth playing with it for a while, especially if you work in a large company like Microsoft, where all sorts of interesting stuff is being saved onto shared document folders. One downside of Delve might be that nervous Nellies will stop putting their documents into shared areas in the fear that other people will read them, or that the default-to-open (for their internal staff) culture that typically pervades lots of companies will flip to an access-only-on-a-need-to-know-bassist. Delve lets you see what documents are popular, what people you are connected with are doing, and lets you search by document content or by author. Want to see what FY17 holds for your org? Wondering what juicy PPTs your VP has been editing lately…?
Announced recently, the Delve Analytics function (available to O365 users based on their license type), shows you not just what other people are doing, but how you are performing too. The Delve Analytics dashboard and corresponding Outlook Addin lets you see how you’re spending your time, and who you’re spending it with, promising to help you make the most of it.
The Outlook addin surfaces Delve info within Outlook’s reading pane, so as long as you’re looking at colleagues who’re in the same Office 365 environment (which might be an issue in MSIT, where there are several tenants), you’ll see stats about how often and effectively you email with each other. Here’s one example; judge not any of the numbers…
Eek. 3h 31m average response time. Must try harder to do less email and do more work. |
Have a Delve… 
Tip o’ the Week 323 – Some lesser-known Excel spreadsheetery
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Spreadsheets did – or do, still – make the modern IT world go round. As it happens, VisiCalc powered the Jobs’n’Woz enterprise to mass success, as Apple IIs were selling (even fully kitted out at $5k+ a time, in the 1980s) to middle managers who were sick of the Data Processing department taking ages to turn around financial reports, so they took to sticking an Apple on their desk and doing the sums themselves. If you’re interested in all of this, see here. This threat from Valley spooked Big Blue enough to worry about the mainframe franchise being under threat, and after a couple of false starts and a skunkworks project called Chess, the PC was born. Lotus software quickly became the de facto spreadsheet provider running on PC-DOS (as it was so fast, meaning the spreadsheet jockeys ditched their Apple IIs and flocked to PCs), but Lotus got distracted with OS/2 while Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 started to gain traction. In place of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase, the 1st party Microsoft Office suite took early and full advantage of Windows, ultimately powering Office to the front. So, Excel trumped 1-2-3, just as Lotus eclipsed VisiCalc. That means Microsoft Excel for Windows has been around for a very long time, and there are many functions you’ve probably never used – but there are loads of useful tips that could make your life easier. Here are a few…
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