Tip o’ the Week #153 – Lync 2013 shortcuts

clip_image001Happy 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 clip_image003could 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:

clip_image005Microsoft 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 8X920, or 8X…)

Tip o’ the Week #152 – Zoom, Zoom!

clip_image002If you ever see someone make a presentation or give a demonstration, who says “you can’t see this, but…” or “this is an eye test, but…” then you have to ask, well why are you showing it (or trying to)? Better still, throw things at them and make a jolly good scene.

If you’re presenting, don’t use small fonts and don’t put diagrams on screen that people sitting more than 6 feet away won’t be able to decipher – unless you make the point that you’re only including the slide for future reference when you give the audience the slides: and move on quickly. Oh, and think about your screen resolution too: 1600×900 might look fine on your desktop monitor but it’s not so good when the audience is far away.

When you do demos, take a tip from one of the gods of the big-stage presentation world, who regularly shows very in-depth technology (code, registry, lots of programs with very small fonts and densely packed hexadecimal numbers, etc) that would normally have people bored rigid.

Mark Russinovich (a very technical fellow) regularly presents at TechEd type events in front of thousands of cheering fans, who queue to get to the front of his sessions. And for a the best part of a decade, Mark has been showcasing one of his own tools during his demos – originally, without even saying what he was doing. He got so many people asking him what was that tool that made it so easy to see the tiny tiny text on screen, that he released it and now often mentions it whilst he’s presenting.

ZoomIt

Thanks to David Weeks for highlighting this tool; it’s free, it’s small (and you can “run” it from the website so you might be able to fire it up on any PC you’re using for presentation). Check it out here. The ZoomIt tool allows you to – using shortcut keys – zoom in to wherever the mouse is, to draw/mark on-screen and numerous other capabilities. Mark uses it to great effect – he’s often one of the top-rated speakers at TechEd, even if he’s in-depth and his style is quite, er, dry. Check out Zoomit, especially with the ability to freeze whatever’s happening, zoom in on it, and be able to annotate what’s seen on the screen.

clip_image003WindowsKey +

Another option is to use the built-in magnify capability in Windows – just press WindowsKey and the plus key. This will fire-up the magnifier utility, and works well with Modern Windows 8 apps too: there’s even a special mode for touch-enabled machines to make it easy to zoom in and out.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, ToW Readers. Normal service will be resumed in January…

Tip o’ the Week #151 – dates, leaks, sides

clip_image001First, an update on last week’s ToW. Both Daryl Gywn & Will Thompson pointed out a quicker way of displaying the date & time (past intern-ship in the STU must have developed a keen sense of observation that other roles don’t develop) – simply display the Charms by…

  • swiping from the right if you’re a touchy sort,
  • by throwing your mouse into the bottom right corner then moving it up if you’re more 2-dimensional,
  • pressing WindowsKey+C if you’re such a productivity demon that you can’t even suffer the time to take your hands away from the keyboard. Press the same again to get rid of the Charms so you can get back to cranking out whatever you were doing before you needed to check the time (eg the email 1 minute after the deadline for sending that email).

Now that you’ve tried out each of these, or at least settled on your favourite, you’ll spot that when you display the Charms (regardless of which app you’re in, even if looking at the classic Desktop), you’ll see the day, date & time is displayed in the lower left of the screen, in nice big friendly letters and numbers. Easy!

Another erratum, of sorts – if you installed “The Time” application from last week’s tip, you would be well advised to check for and install any updates, since one or two have been issued for the app (via the Store – see ToW #149 regarding app updates). It turns out the app was originally doing something entirely legitimate (at least the developer says so, and the customer is always right after all) but which was causing the “Runtime Broker” application to leak memory like one of those round things with all the holes in it. If you’re seeing error messages from Windows 8 saying it’s running out of virtual memory, then you’re very likely to be getting hit with this issue/side effect. The Time app is presumably doing its otherwise legitimate things differently now, as it’s all fixed.

clip_image002To check on the status of memory leaks etc, simply fire up Task Manager (press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, or else you can do all manner of faffing about with the mouse or 3-fingered salute keys if you must), and click on the Memory column to sort. Don’t be alarmed to see Outlook take the lion’s share of your machine’s resource – it does that. You may find other Office apps and Internet Explorer are shortly behind – worry not, they’re just being efficient by using the memory the system has so they can work better. Honest.

Anyway, if Runtime Broker is running at, oh, about 300 times as much as you might see above, then you have a leak. The cure? You could right-click on it and End Task, or you could do the more considered thing and just reboot. After first making sure you have the latest versions of your Windows Store apps installed… Thanks to Louis Lazarus for pointing out the leak.

This week’s tip, if you’re still reading

Assuming you’ve fought through the prologue, this week’s tip comes from a question posed by the Dynamic Phil Newman: when using multiple monitors, Phil wants to be able to have a spreadsheet open on each, so he can copy/massage/paste the data from one to the other – and he found that Excel insisted on opening multiple workbooks up in the same window.

Now it’s possible to tweak the system to change what happens when you just double-click on a file – open it in the same instance of the application if it’s already running, or fire up a new instance just for your file… but it’s a palaver and one default is only as good as the other. Sometime you want different workbooks to be in the same instance of Excel (historically, you could only move sheets between open workbooks if they were opened within the same instance, but that’s no longer the case).

clip_image003There are pros and cons to both approaches of “open in a new instance” / “open in the current one”, but the pros in former case would mean you can park different windows in different places, either on your one screen or across your array of screens should you have them.

There’s a quick way of firing up a separate window, though – if you already have Excel running or if you’ve pinned Excel to your task bar in Windows 8, just right-click on the icon and instead of clicking on the sheet you want to open from the most-recently-used list, just click on Excel 2013 (or maybe if you’re still rooted in the past, on Excel 2010 or earlier). This launches a new window of Excel, in which you can open your favourite sheet and run it alongside whatever else you’re working on.

clip_image005You can, of course, have multiple sheets opened within the same instance of Excel, appear side/side – by using the View -> Arrange All or View Side by Side to show them tiles next to one another, where you can even enable scrolling of the documents at the same time (so as you’re moving down or across through one, the other keeps pace).

As an advert for old Tips o’ the Week, this was also covered a couple of years ago … here.

Tip o’ the Week #150 – It’s a date!

clip_image001Some tweaks and tips are basically not all that exciting unless you find they solve a problem you’ve had to deal with directly, maybe on a number of occasions, at which point they’ll transform to being a miraculous time saver that you’ll continue using for years to come. One such example, is the Copy As Path trick in Windows Explorer.

Date and time functionality in applications is a particularly humdrum area to go looking for life-changing solutions, but it’s one that we all deal with a lot, perhaps subconsciously. We’ve covered date stuff before in Tip o’ the Week – #104, #102 and others.

Windows 8 – where’s the clock?

One of the strangest things to get used to in the Windows 8 world, is there’s no clock visible for most of the time – whether you’re used to the Date/Time display from the System Tray or if you’re still missing the Vista-era clock desktop gadget, the simple fact is that when you look at the start menu, and when you’re in the vast majority of full-screen Modern UI applications, there’s nothing telling you the time. Is it a bit much to have to switch to the old fashioned Desktop (press WindowsKey+D), just to see what the time is?

clip_image002Fortunately, there are Apps which can solve this annoyance. There’s a free one that’s just a simple live tile showing The Time, or if you’re a jet set type who needs to know the time in different parts of the world, what about a World Time app that scrolls between all the places you list?

Tickety-boo.

Some date shortcuts

Did you know that if you’re using OneNote, and you press ALT+SHIFT+”D”, it will insert the date in whatever you’re editing – handy if you collect notes about a particular subject all in one page, but you want to annotate when you did something or spoke to someone. If you’re particularly time critical, press ALT+SHIFT+”T” and it’ll insert the current time too. The same tricks work in Word, and when you’re writing an email in Outlook, too.

If you live your life in Excel, then CTRL+”;” inserts the date and CTRL+”:” pastes the time – again, useful if you’ve got columns in your sheet about when you last called that contacts etc. Of course, you should be using CRM, not a spreadsheet; tsk tsk.

Outlook and its dates

Way back in the mists of time, 130 weeks ago if the numbering of ToW was consistent (which it’s not, quite), there was a tip about Outlook dates, but I bet most of you weren’t reading then, and if you were, well, you’ve probably forgotten.

clip_image003In a nutshell, ever since Outlook 97 was released, it’s had some smarts built into every date field  that you can edit without using a date picker – you know, date fields on appointments, Tasks, reminders etc. Instead of just picking the date from a calendar, you could enter it “9-11-12 or 9/11/2012 or 9 Nov, would all resolve to the right date (well they would if you have your system date formats set to the UK one…)

You can also enter real expressions, like tomorrow, 3 weeks, this Sunday, next Friday, Christmas Eve. Not dates that change – like Easter Sunday, or Thanksgiving day, though there are some static “holiday” dates such as Lincoln’s Birthday, Halloween, New Year’s Day etc. Have a go, it’s really rather useful

Tip o’ the Week #145 – Fun with Drag ‘N Drop

Some things in computing have been around for so long, that it’s hard to envisage or remember a time before them. Take the humble mouse – Mr Scott might not recognise what it’s for, but at least until touch and gestures take over the world, we are all familiar with its basic operation.

clip_image002Doug Engelbart prototyped the original “mouse” (pictured left) and despite it being patented, never managed to really make anything of it – though Xerox did. Well, Xerox PARC boffins developed the idea, but it took a young Californian Hippy to really put it to the market. The mouse moved on from a couple of metal discs in Engelbart’s version, to a rubber coated ball then laser or LED variants, driven largely by Microsoft’s hardware designers evolving how the thing was being used.

Basic rodentry activity is pretty well understood, but there are a few Windows-oriented actions that a lot of people just don’t seem to realise they can do. In Windows 8, for example, the mouse is a central way of invoking a lot of the new UI capabilities – and it’s not about clicking on a specific place, but more about making gestures with it.

  • Move your mouse to the top left of your screen, and you’ll show a thumbnail preview of the last “Modern App” that you were running, if at all. You can click on it to switch to it, and keep clicking to switch through any other apps you’re running (including the Desktop itself).
  • When you move the mouse to the top left, if you then start to move down, you’ll see a list of all the Modern Apps you’re running, including the Start menu, shown in the bottom left. If you put the mouse in the bottom left, you’ll see the Start screen.

There are a few further actions that are as old as the hills, yet many people never discover them or get told about them. Everyone knows about drag & drop, right? You know, click on a file to select it, hold the button down to pick it up, then drag it and release to drop it somewhere else…?

Did you know if you have an Application open (in trad Desktop mode on Windows 8, or in many previous versions), and you drag a file onto its icon on the task bar, that will bring the application window to the foreground… and if you subsequently clip_image003drop the file into the open window, it will open the file or do something else interesting with it?

What could “something else interesting” be? Well, if you’ve a file on your PC that you want to attach to an email, for example, then go Explorer or where the file is located, drag the file to the taskbar where your email is open, hold it over the Outlook application icon and you’ll see a list of open messages… drag and hold over the one you want and (even if you get a little “no way Jose icon”, meaning you can’t drop it yet) you’ll bring that message window to the front.

Simply now drop your file into the waiting window, and attach it to the message. Where this really works well if is if you want to send someone a document you already have in email – instead of saving it out of the original message then re-attaching it, or worse, dragging it to your desktop just so you can send it on, simply:

  • Start writing the message you want to send (and if in Outlook 2013, “Pop Out” that window)
  • In the main Outlook window, find the message with the attachment you want to forward
  • Click & Drag the attachment from that message to the taskbar, hold it over the Outlook icon, then hold it over the thumbnail of the new message – this will cause your new message window to come to the foreground
  • Move your mouse over that new window and let go – you’ve now dragged and dropped, and attached the prior attachment to a new mail. Hooray!

Of course, you could use SharePoint, or SkyDrive Pro, or any number of ways to do it properly. But who’s got time for all that?

Tip o’ the Week #149 – Take up thy Surface and Walk!

clip_image003Far out, man! The Surface, maybe more correctly described as the Microsoft Surface with Windows RT, has finally landed and, despite the odd bump in the logistics road for some, it’s flying out of (the) store(s).

In the UK, the Surface 32Gb with no cover keeps selling out – the only option if you want an other-than-black touch cover, unless you buy one with the black cover and splash out on a more lurid one as an accessory. The good news is, a few more colours have now appeared on the UK store – so if you’re holding out for a magenta or red cover, then fill your boots. Or you basket. Big-time Surface fanboy Edward Hyde is waiting for a camouflage-coloured keyboard; or perhaps some paint.

If you haven’t bought a Surface, then go and order one now. Yes, Santa Claus might be bringing you one in only a few weeks, but it’s such a beautiful device that you need one beforehand, and you wouldn’t want to run the risk of missing out, would you. You can always palm it off onto someone else in your family if you get one as a pressie, anyhoo.

clip_image005Regardless of which version of Windows 8 you use, make sure you keep the Apps up to date – there were lots of updates which came out shortly before General Availability. If you look at the Store tile on the home screen, and there’s a number showing, that indicates that some of the apps you have installed need to be updated. To download & install those updates, go into clip_image006the Store app, and click on the Updates link at the top right to list what’s available and to kick off the process. Apps, you see, are not updated by Windows Update.

Here’s something demo-worthy of Windows 8, that works particularly well if you have a Surface already…

Have you looked at the Bing “Travel” app in any detail? Even if you’re using Windows 8 on a non-touch laptop or desktop, it’s still a very cool app to play with and show people as an example of the Modern UI.
Example:
Somewhere to go after dark if you fancy getting chibbed, perhaps?

Try the Panorama view whilst holding a Surface, or some other Win8 device with the appropriate accelerometers, and it’s impossible not to be impressed. See this demo if you can’t experience it first-hand right clip_image007away.

If you do have a Surface already…

  • Did you know that if you press the Windows button on the device (ie the one on the front below the screen) and the volume-down key on the left hand side, it takes a snap-shot of the screen to the clipboard…?
  • Make sure you run Windows Update and get the new version of Office 2013, which moved the code from Preview to the final release.
  • Did you know that the video out is just a regular micro-HDMI port, so you can use the VGA dongle from the Samsung Series 9 ultrabook or 7 tablet?
    Or get a micro-HDMI – HDMI or VGA cable from Amazon for a fraction of the cost of the official accessory? Shhhh.
  • and that you can even run the Surface in multi-monitor Mode (press WindowsKey+P on the keyboard after you’ve plugged into an external display)…?

app o’ the week


clip_image008

AudioBoo – free

clip_image010this week’s featured application…

Here’s a cool app highlighted by Liam Kelly… in his own words:

If Twitter is too outdated for you and you also believe that the “spoken word has been left behind in the current explosion of online innovation”, then Audioboo is the app for you. Come and join the likes of Stephen Fry & fellow Boo’ers and capture your own audio “Boos” and share them with the world!

Comedian Fred MacAulay knows that sometimes Boo isn’t enough (that link will take you to videos you shouldn’t listen to at work, unless you have headphones). In this case, AudioBoo is worth it only to hear an ex-Dr Who reciting the lyrics of S. Ballet’s “Gold” in a Shakespeare stylee.

Look out for the falsettoesque “Gold! Gold!” – diamond!.

Click on the logo or link to the left to find out more, and install the app on Windows 8 PC.

T

Tip o’ the Week #148 – Some top Windows 8 Apps

Ring out the bells, Windows 8 is here! clip_image001

The UPS and DHL fairies have been (eventually) making deliveries of the first Surface with Windows RT devices to lucky folk. If you’ve been waiting for yours, at least it meant you had time to biff off to the flicks to see that film instead of staying home to play with a new “fondleslab”.

This week’s ToW is given over to a quick look at a few Windows 8 Apps, suitable (as any skoolboy kno) for both regular Windows PCs and also for the shiny new RT variants. If you have a favourite app you’d like to see show up here in future, please leave a comment and I’ll look into it. Click on the App name to see more, and follow a link the Store to download.

clip_image003

London Bus Checker

clip_image004Rob Orwin worked with the partner who built this app, and of course, recommends it thoroughly. The IOS version covers London only, but the Windows 8 version covers the whole of the UK! It also uses Bing Maps, TFL travel data from Azure, has a live tile, uses the Share and Search charm and is generally very useful and looks dead cool. Rob says he used it to find the bus from Paddington to Cardinal Place (in Victoria): way nicer than the tube, he had a seat all the way there, enjoyed some sunshine and it took 20mins! It could also put an end to the questions, “when / where does the TVP bus arrive / stop?” question on Social.

clip_image005News Bento

Here’s one of many news aggregator type applications, but not just a me-too. It’s a really slick app that shows you news headlines from lots of different sources, and it also includes news feeds from many sites – as well as the ability to provide your own feeds. It’s not an ideal “Modern UI” app in some ways – there’s no senantic zoom and there are a few UI funnies, but it’s free and it’s also very nice looking.

clip_image006Didlr

Thanks to Richard Peers for this tip-off. Didlr is a simple yet very powerful app, and also one of a few in its genre – that of drawing and doodling on-screen. Clearly, it makes more sense on a tablet or other touch device, but has a pretty sweet palette of brushes, tools and effects to keep the budding artist amused for a bit.

clip_image007Wikipedia

Here’s a nice Wikipedia application, which provides a good search front-end to the massed ranks of Wikipedia content, as well as some interesting asides like “On This Day” section. It’s the same content you can get on the Wikipedia web site, but presented in an easier-to-read format.

Metro Commander

clip_image008Geeks needs to be able to fiddle with files. Ordinary folk too, sometimes. Sure, you can still use Explorer to move stuff around, but if you want to operate within the M***o (don’t say that word!) environment, then you could look at Metro Commander to help you move your stuff around. All free, so what’s not to like?

There are more and more apps arriving in the Store every day. Check it out, have a browse, and look under the categories – for each, there’s a “What’s New” and a “Top Free” section.

Tip o’ the Week #147 – Sharing Windows 8 Apps

clip_image001The next few weeks’ Tips will be out of sequence since they coincide with the launch of Windows 8.

As the world continues to enjoy Windows 8 (4m copies sold in the first week, apparently), the number of apps in the Windows Store is growing every day. It’s easy to discover apps – fire up the Store app and browse through the categories, or search for app names (just press WindowsKey-Q and enter the search term, and click on Store in the app list).

Once you’ve found your favo(u)rite apps – and there are already several thousand in the store, with plenty of big names – then you’ll be delighted that you can install them on multiple PCs (up to 5, in fact). So, when you get your Shiny-Shiny Surface device, you’ll be able to install the same Modern apps as you already have on your Windows 8 PC.

In order to install Apps from the Store, sign in using your Hotmail/Passport/MSN/Live/Microsoft ID, and that means you can always track which apps you’ve previously “bought” – whether you paid for them, or they were freebies – and you can always install those apps on other PCs, or if you had to reinstall Windows, you could restore your App portfolio.

clip_image003There is a scenario though, which isn’t so obvious – what if you have other users signing in to your PC, but you want them to see the apps too? Try creating another account on your own Windows 8 PC, and if you sign into it using a Microsoft ID, the default is that the Store will want to use that ID when it comes to seeing what apps are available.

This means that if you set up a PC and install all your bestest apps, then create an account for your Significant Other to use it too, they’ll log in and be offered only the apps that come out of the box.

You can also do this with a Surface or other Windows RT tablet device – so it’s a cinch to switch between profiles and have all the personalisation and content follow each user from other PCs as well as be kept apart on the tablet. Try doing that on your fruit-based, single user tablet Smile

Share your apps

In order to let your better half see the apps you’ve already clip_image005purchased/downloaded and installed, you need to go into the Store, bring up the Charms†  (WindowsKey-C, swipe from the right, or throw your mouse into the top or bottom right of the screen), open Settings then go into Your account and Change user to set the account that will be used for the Store.

† Not to be confused with the lucky variety.

Now, when you swipe from the top or bottom of the screen when in the Store (or press WindowsKey-Z, or right-click the mouse anywhere), you’ll be able to look at Your apps and see the apps that are available but not installed under the user’s account…

clip_image006When you’re finished “installing” the apps, you could – if you want – reverse the process so your S.O. could go and buy/install their own favourite apps on the PC too. And you won’t get to see whatever apps they choose to install, on your “Your apps” list.

Tip o’ the Week #144 – Office 2013 Templates

A short and sharp tip this week, courtesy of Louis Lazarus, concerning the way the New Office clip_image002handles template files… and how to configure search in Outlook 2013 to be a bit more fullsome. See more templates online, and now, over to Louis…

When you create a new document in Office 2013 with Word, Excel, etc, you are not given a choice of the templates on your local machine.  You can fix this by…

1. Click File, Options

2. Select the Save item in the menu on the left

3. Enter the location of your templates folder in the “Default personal templates location”…
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4. clip_image005Click OK

Now when you select New, you will see a choice of Featured or Personal Templates – click on PERSONAL to see your templates…

clip_image007Outlook 2013

By default Outlook 2013 only includes your emails for the last 12 months.  You will usually see a message saying something like “there are more items on the server” – clicking the link sometimes returns more items and sometimes does not.  To get rid of this message and have all your items sync’d to your PC…

1. Click File, Account Settings…

2. Click Change… and drag the slider to get All mail items…
clip_image009

3. Click Next and then Finish

4. Now all your mail will be available offline.

Tip o’ the Week #143 – Share your calendar externally

Organising our home lives is increasingly done digitally, from keeping in touch with friends and making arrangements over social networking, to just the basics of communicating intra-family – how many readers have multiple laptops or <cough>tablet type devices(soon to be Surfaces for Microsofties at least, thanks Steve!) at home? Have you ever IM’ed your significant other even if you’re both in the house at the same time?

Well, as an adjunct to the merry-go-round of keeping your home life under control, Tim Hall suggested this week’s tip, and although it concerns something that’s actually been possible in Outlook for several versions, it’s a hugely useful feature which is perhaps easily forgotten.

We’re all used to having other people in the company being able to see our calendar, so they don’t make arrangements with or for us that conflict with other appointments. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to share the calendar clip_image001with your nearest and dearest?

Well, you can. Go into Calendar in Outlook, and in Outlook 2013 (other versions are available, though the UI may vary), look at the Ribbon on the Share part of the main Home tab. You’ll see the ability to Publish Online – with a few clicks, you can have Outlook push some or all details of your calendar to an external service on Office.com (after prompting you to login with your Office.com/Hotmail account ID), and which can in turn be consumed by invited Outlook.com/Hotmail etc users if they too are running Outlook. You choose who to invite, and they get emailed a link to add your calendar straight into their Outlook client. Simple as that.

There are a few other options which could prove more useful if not quite so straightforward to set up. What if your other half isn’t using Outlook? How about being able to sync a copy of their calendar onto your Windows Phone…? We’ll look into these in a future Tip o’ the Week, but if you’re keen to press on, you could look into a free third party addin that replicates content between two calendars, meaning you could keep a copy of your work Calendar in a household Outlook.com account, and sync that to the Windows Phones of everyone in the house…