Tip o’ the Week #165 – Take the tour

Posted on March 29, 2013 by ewand

When was the last time you actually read the manual? Or actually skimmed over the Terms & Conditions you’re agreeing to when clicking on a button somewhere? Sometimes, attempts to make things easy aren’t exactly riveting.

Now and again, though, it’s worth assuming the role of true n00b: you might learn something. That’s right, gents. R.T.F.M.

In this case, try taking the tour in the New Office applications – select New from the File menu on Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and you’ll see a selection of tips to get the most out of the new apps.

The Excel tour is particularly snazzy. The first tip is pretty cool – it’s all about the awesome Flash Fill function, which can spot common patterns in the data you’re dealing with… like the first names or surnames in a list of email addresses.

The tours finish up with Getting Started sites for Excel, Word and PowerPoint… try out the in-app tours, and have a look through these sites and you might even figure out some new tricks.

Tip o’ the Week #164 – Work Anywhere with Windows 8

Posted on March 22, 2013 by ewand

Recruiter Nick Papé recommended this week’s topic. Escalation Engineer with spare time on his hands Ben Phillips wrote a cracking Windows 8 app to inspire Nick, and UC overlord Steve Tassell had this to say about it:

“The app is another step in the consortium providing practical advice and guidance which our growing community so dearly crave. This is also an important vehicle in helping us promote the second annual Anywhere Working week which is running again from 18^th-22^nd March. There are many activities planned for the week but, I want to highlight to you the roadshows running all week. We are planning an ambitious tour of the country taking our Office hub experience nationally. In Partnership with local authorities, we are providing a networking opportunity, technology experience and Ignite-style sessions from businesses and experts already working flexibly. You can find more details and means to register here.“

Of course, Nick and Steve are both very keen to stress the possibilities of remote working using Lync – every “snow day” is another day to celebrate and sell the technology benefits, in other words. Well, news reached us of a looming collaboration between Skype and Lync, and the promise of some groovy new Lync 2013 mobile clients, due in the coming months.

Tip o’ the Week #161 – Windows Phone 8 “Portico”

Posted on March 20, 2013 by ewand

Attention, Windows Phone 8 owners… you may not have spotted it, but there’s a pretty decent update already available – code-named “Portico”. (Aside: If you visit certain Italian cities – like Bologna – you’ll see porticos as the things that provide the apparent multitude of graffiti artists shelter from the sun/rain/Carabinieri).

“Portico” is not a wholesale new version, but rather a bunch of fixes and/or additions to the platform. You may be notified of the availability of the update, but if you poke the phone to check (via settings | system | phone update -> check for updates) then you’ll know for sure.

EE rolled out the update to both Nokia 920s and HTC 8Xs, so everyone who got their phone through Microsoft UK should be able to get Portico (which updates to OS version 8.0.10211.204, as seen in settings | system | about).

Can’t take the call, reply by text

Thanks to Richard Watson for pointing out one of Portico’s coolest features, the “text reply” function – and it’s enabled by default. When someone on another mobile phone calls, you can choose to text back an automatic response from one of 4 pre-defined messages (“I’m on the phone, please leave a message” / “Sorry I can’t take your call, please try again later” / “I’m not available, please call someone else” / “Stop calling me, I’ll report you to the Police” etc). Great for when your boss calls and you want to respond “I’m on the phone, please try again at the end of the working day, about 9pm”).

Tip o’ the Week #167 – Flash! Ah-Aaah!

Posted on March 15, 2013 by ewand

Some big news for Windows 8 IE10 users this week (especially those using “Immersive IE”, aka modern/~~Metro~~ IE): the way the browser handles Flash websites has changed. More details, here. In a nutshell, the Flash player which is built into IE10 has changed its default from not allowing Flash sites unless specifically allowed, to allowing Flash unless specifically disallowed. Pretty big change, then.

The Flash player in IE10 is updated by Microsoft, so you won’t get plagued with unwanted browser toolbars – (does anyone actually want the Ask toolbar?) – and updates will be rolled out more or less automatically to everyone.

Amongst other updates, a new Surface RT firmware has also appeared, alongside IE10 and Office updates. If you have a Surface device, make sure you run the check for updates. More than once, to ensure you’re all tickety-boo.

It’s been a busy few weeks for Internet Explorer – Windows 7 users now get to enjoy it if they choose to.

Trivia: did you know that the actor who played Ming the Merciless (pictured) also played chess with Death in the Seventh Seal, and was the priest in the Exorcist?

Tip o’ the Week #159 – Avoiding breakers on the side

Posted on February 15, 2013 by ewand

What’s that you say? A Breaker on the Side? Well, Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, no self-respecting furry-dice-toter would be without their Chicken Box in their Roller Skate. The radio was channel-based, and though the users could agree to move a conversation onto a specific channel, there was always the possibility that someone else could either come in and crash the conversation, or they might be on that channel already.
Which was often interesting.

This week’s Tip comes after a day of being on both sides of the modern, Lync-based equivalent – that of having a conference call which has unintended participants. This often happens because the organiser of the call is using the same conference ID for multiple Lync meetings – by default, when using the Outlook addin to create an online meeting (or to add Lync meeting details to an existing appointment), the user’s default Conference ID is used to create that meeting. And that can lead to unexpected and potentially embarrassing behaviour.

It’s possible when you’ve finished a conference, that new people will start to join for the next one, and previous attendees will still be online (they may have hung up the audio piece, but if they haven’t closed their Lync window and they haven’t been booted out specifically, they’ll still appear as attendees). Worse, if there was material – such as slides – being presented in the conference, it could still be available to the newly joined people. Another scenario is that if a call is over-running, and new attendees for the next one scheduled join straight into the tail end of the previous call. They’ll probably be all, “Hello? Hello?” when they come online, and of course they’ll hear the dregs of the previous meeting as it wraps up. Bad enough in an internal meeting, but terrible in a customer or partner one.

In order to make sure this doesn’t happen, when you create a new appointment and make it a Lync Meeting, check out the Lync Meeting Options on the ribbon – the default will probably be to use your dedicated meeting space, but you might want to create a new space… with its own conference ID, and its own settings regarding whether people get to wait in the lobby, who’s a presenter etc.

Thanks to Chris Parkes for suggesting this timely tip.
Now, 10-10, see you again.

#12: Which Copilot do you need?

Posted on February 8, 2013 (Updated February 2, 2024) by ewand

Microsoft has a habit of over-pivoting to use the same terminology for lots of different things, sometimes even giving the same name to related but quite specifically different things. Think OneDrive / OneDrive for Business, OneNote / OneNote for Windows 10, Skype / Skype for Business, Teams and Teams (work account) etcetera. At times in the past, everything was seemingly appended with “.NET”, or given a name starting “Windows…” “Live…” or “One…” (or all three).

Here’s the Copilot

With all the hoo-hah in recent months about “Copilot”, it can be confusing to pin down exactly what it is – a search engine, chatbot, a tool to write code, or something that will draw pictures while summarizing your email?

There are whole standalone experiences like the Bing search which was originally Chat but has now been renamed Copilot …

… and the Edge browser integrated Copilot panel, activated by the icon in the top right. Preview versions of Windows have a Copilot button on the taskbar with the ability to tweak things inside the operating system. New PCs will soon have a Copilot button on their keyboard.

There are other “Copilot” things coming out all the time. Want some help in writing a Power Automate cloud flow to integrate stuff between systems? If you’re a salesperson, Copilot in Dynamics Sales lessens the drudgery of keeping CRM up to date. Or if you’re a developer, Github can help you write better code, more quickly. Some are free and some need you to subscribe to.

It’s very likely that these things come from different sets of technologies under the hood, though Microsoft is increasingly talking about there being a “Copilot platform” behind each of these experiences. Things are certainly moving quickly – as BizApps MVP Steve Mordue commented in his chat with Charles Lamanna. Expect the effect of AI on regular applications to move from being an addon or a side panel, to fundamentally changing the apps we use – why build a BI dashboard if you can just ask the questions you need or even have the information suggested to you?

Copilot Pro and Copilot in M365

The recently-launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 integrates priority access to some of the public web services (akin to ChatGPT Plus), and adds in-app integration with Microsoft 365 and Office applications, promising also to be able to put the back end magic to work across your own organization’s data too. It’s been in preview for a while, for certain customers – initially it was invite-only for some of the biggest (who still had to pay for it) but recently has been extended to anyone with a Microsoft 365 Business subscription.

Somewhat confusingly, Microsoft at the same time announced “Copilot Pro”, which is really for individuals and integrates with Microsoft 365 personal or family subscriptions, for a monthly fee of $20 (or £19 – forex, huh… though the USD amount doesn’t include tax whereas the GBP one does).

If you’re not a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscriber you won’t see a lot of the value which Copilot Pro adds, on top of the GPT-4 Turbo and DALL-E 3 usage. If you are already using a M365 home subscription, then for your £19/month you’ll see Copilot functionality showing up in the desktop and web versions of the Office apps. (NB – that’s £19 per user; note that the £8/month you might pay for M365 family gets you up to 6 people… they’d each need to be enrolled into Copilot Pro if you wanted all to get the benefit, so it could work out quite expensive).

Select a block of text or a page in OneNote and you can summarize it or build a To-Do list on what actions it might contain. Word shows a little Copilot icon on the left of the text editing block, and will offer to draft some text or rewrite what’s already there.

Excel’s analytical Copilot is still in preview (and works on files already saved in OneDrive/Sharepoint only), while PowerPoint offers some frankly amazing abilities to generate fluff from thin air, or jazz up the dreary text-laden slides you might already have.

Buying and deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365 business users – available to small business users on Business Standard or Premium, or Enterprise users who have E3 or E5 licenses – is something an organizational admin would need to control, so if you’re an end user then you’ll need to wait until they decide you’re worth it.

The business version (priced at £30 per month, inc VAT) gives you everything that Copilot Pro does, and also access to your own organization’s date, and, integration with Teams, where Copilot can prepare summaries of meetings you have, or offer a chatbot that can find other information in different sources.

Should I buy it?

Of course, the free Copilot experience can be very useful, but it’s not integrated into the Office apps at all.

If you’re an Office apps user and have a M365 family or personal subscription, then it’s worth taking a look at Copilot Pro – the first monthly subscription of £19/$20 will give you a chance to have a proper play with Copilot functionality, and then decide to keep it going or cancel the subscription and it’ll expire at the end of the month. It might even give you an idea – as an end user – what Copilot for M365 could give you, and thus petition the powers that be to enable it for your M365 org.

One downside of the M365 business Copilot licensing model is that, although it works out at $30/£30 per month (give or take), it’s an annual commitment which must be paid up front. So if you’re looking to kick the tyres, try the $20/£19 a month Pro first.

Tip o’ the Week #157 – Bing photos R Us

Posted on February 1, 2013 by ewand

Everybody loves the lovely photos that feature every day on Bing. Did you know the images can and do differ in disparate markets (eg PRC, USA and UK tend to have different images from each other)?

You can set the flavour of Bing you’d like to see on http://www.bing.com/account/worldwide, so if you don’t love the current pic, you could always have a look at what’s online elsewhere.

Or click/push back to get an image from the previous week.

If you’re a budding snapper (FTE), you can submit your own photos to be included on the Bing homepage – here. You could even join the Bing Homepage Monthly Report DL here to keep up with developments.

If you’re interesting in photography in Blighty, you could try tagging along to one of the short courses by Going Digital to get you off “Auto” mode.
Snap snap, grin grin, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more…?

Viewing on your lock screen & desktop

Since most of us are simply content to enjoy the daily pic, there are a few apps that can assist. The Bing Desktop App (for regular PCs, and it even runs on Windows 7), has been around for a little while, but usefully serves up news headlines as well as optionally providing a fresh desktop photo every day. If you don’t like the fact that it eats up a space on your taskbar (even when you right-click on that icon and choose Close Window), then you can drag the bar to the top or bottom of your screen and dock it – whereupon it shrinks nearly out of sight when not in use.

If you’ve set up Windows 8 with a Microsoft account synchronising your settings, then you’ll even see the daily image on your other devices – like a Surface or home PC.

Bing my lockscreen and desktop

If you’d prefer to actually set the image from a Windows 8 Modern App (aka an orteMapp), suitable for running on your Surface, you might want to try Bing my lockscreen, as recommended by Simon Boreham. If you search the store for Bing Wallpaper, you’ll find a slew of other apps to view or download previous images, but there don’t appear to be any that will automate the setting of your desktop wallpaper to the daily image in the same way that the Bing Desktop app does.

Tip o’ the Week #156 – some Windows Phone 8 fun

Posted on January 25, 2013 by ewand

If you’re a recently lucky Windows Phone 8 recipient, you’ll no doubt have followed all of the instructions in how to set up your new phone, so you’ll already know that you can go to My Phone and reinstall all the apps you’d downloaded onto your previous WP7 device (note that the previously recommended Reinstaller app no longer works, due to changes in the Marketplace/Store architecture).

The Windowsphone.com What’s New page gives a quick summary of what the main differences are between WP7 and WP8 (from a user’s point of view, at least – there are many other differences under the covers, since WP7.x was based on Windows CE whereas WP8 now runs on a Windows 8 based kernel).

Here are a few other tips that might be of interest…

Identify your phone

When everyone around you has a Black Lumia 920 too†, you might find it helpful to quickly identify which is yours, so you don’t mix up your phone with others’. One quick way of doing so is to customise the lock screen – easy enough to do, but if you’re going to the bother then why not put your own contact details on it so if your phone gets lost, it might be returned?
There’s a simple app called Metro Lockscreen Creator (a trial version does everything you need, since you’ll probably only ever run it once) – it just creates a simple block picture with a photo you select, and some text (your name, perhaps, or phone number).

Run the app, create the lockscreen and then point your phone at the picture it generates…
† other phones are available. Like blue HTC 8Xs, for example.

Bonk to send

The Register enjoys discussing “Pay-by-Bonk” (fnarr, fnarr) etc, meaning using new Near-Field Communication technology (which is now part of WP8) to allow actions like paying for goods or transferring data in some way. One obvious way of using this is to send photos to another WP8 user – try tapping on the “…” icon at the bottom of a photo you’re viewing, choose share… and then Tap+Send. You then tap/press your phone against another WP8 device, and the receiving device will prompt the user if they’d like to accept the incoming pic. The phones will use Bluetooth to transfer the content, so you will need to keep them relatively close until both sides confirm the transfer has taken place.

If you can find another WP8 user who’s willing to let you try, give it a go – it can be quite hard to get started, but once you’ve done it a couple of times, you’ll be well enough versed in the technique to make it a smooth and pain-free experience in future. Chortle, Chortle.

PhotoBeamer

Whilst on the topic of pics, those of you with a Nokia handset (including Windows Phone 7.5 users with an older Lumia) can try out their PhotoBeamer app. Install from the Store (or click the previous link and follow the tag on that page), and use the app to navigate to photos you’d like to share with others. Meanwhile, on any computer with an internet connection, browse to www.photobeamer.com and point your phone at the QR Code on the screen. Immediately, you’ll send the photo you’re looking at to the PC screen, and you can use the phone to swipe back and forth around an album too. Genius.

Ringtones

Setting your own distinctive ringtone on WP7.x was always something of a faff, in fact it was the subject of ToW #93. Nowadays, it’s a good bit simpler though for best effect, you’d still be wise to edit the track you want to use, since the hook of the song you like (that you’d want to use as your tone) is probably not right at the start of the song.

To create a ringtone, just drop your choonz into the \Ringtones folder on the phone (by plugging it into your PC, running the Windows Phone app on your PC to manage it properly). No need to worry about tagging with a genre or anything.

Tip o’ the Week #154 – Outlook 2013 searching – reprise

Posted on January 18, 2013 by ewand

Sometimes, the best bits of content benefit from revisiting, improving or just being done in a different way. It was good enough for Sgt. Pepper, and a mainstay of any self-respecting 1970s concept album (try and hear the Supper’s Ready lyrics at the end of the Squonk reprise in Los Endos, for example. Now, take the anorak off and get back to work). Actors reprise previously-starred roles, to keep the tills ringing, if not the critics singing.

Anyway, this week’s Tip revisits and reprises a topic that’s had a bit of coverage of late – namely, searching in Outlook 2013. See ToW’s passim: #130, #144… and numerous other snippets.

Woody wrote a blog post about today’s topic – namely the way that Outlook now handles searching. Outlook has had built-in search capabilities for ages, but in 2013, it’s much easier to switch between searching within just the current folder (eg Inbox) and searching everywhere. It has also introduced further granularity like searching across just the current mailbox (or archive file).

Care must be taken, though – you might search for a term and find that the results include folders where you’ve archived stuff, or could be your Sent Items folder… so take it easy on the Delete key. The “Current Mailbox” | “Current Folder” selection is remembered for certain folders, so might change as you move from one to the other.

If you do search across multiple folders, when you hover your mouse over a result that’s of interest, and you’ll see a little bubble which tells you the folder that it’s in.

Alternatively, right-click on the “ALL Unread” menu immediately below the search box and choose “Folder”, and you’ll see your search results grouped by the folder the messages come from.

Tidy.

Tip o’ the Week #153 – Lync 2013 shortcuts

Posted on January 4, 2013 by ewand

Happy New Year!

On the topic of Year (2013) and New, the Lync 2013 client introduced a whole load of new UI functionality compared to the previous release; for details of what’s new, check out the What’s new in Lync 2013 post on the Lync team blog.

One side effect of moving to Windows 8, however, is that the shortcut key to bring the Lync client window to the foreground has been repurposed and now has a higher calling – in Lync 2010 it was WindowsKey-Q, but that is now universally used in Win8 to invoke the Search charm.

Fortunately, Lync 2013 has moved that most useful shortcut to WindowsKey+Y. It has the benefit of not only bringing the Lync window into focus, but the default typing location is the “Find someone” search box, so you could be IM’ing or calling them in a jiffy.

There are lots more Lync shortcut keys, detailed here.

Accessibility and communications

In other news, Microsoft UK IT’s Melissa Cordell writes to highlight a welcome addition to an instrument of communications, namely Windows Phone 8:

Microsoft has a great accessibility story, designing our products for an incredibly broad spectrum of people around the world. Just like the zoom feature described in the last week’s Tip, which can help users with visual impairments or just make it easier to use your PC in low light, our products are packed with features to enabling people of all ages and abilities to “realise their full potential”.

The new Windows Phone we eagerly await is a testament to the ongoing evolution of accessibility in our mobile platform. To improve readability, variable font sizes can be found in the new ease of access area within your phone Settings. There is also a built-in screen magnifier which improves on the current “pinch to zoom”, enabling a whole screen magnifier for all phone content and controls.

Thanks Melissa – we can’t wait for our Windows Phone 8’s (920, or 8X… 920, or 8X…) …