Tip o’ the Week #101 – Finding files for dialogs

Posted on March 2, 2012 by ewand

How many times a month do you have a file (a picture, maybe, or a document) that you want to upload to some website, or attach to an email. and you know where the file is, but then have to navigate through a dialog box to locate it from within the application? I can sometimes think of 2 or 3 such scenarios in a given day.

There are lots of alternatives, of course – if you want to attach a document that’s on your desktop to an email, then you can just drag & drop it. But many dialog boxes don’t give you that flexibility – some apps will make you point to a file, by navigating to the file’s folder and selecting it from there.

This can be complicated if you have lots of documents in the folder, especially ones whose names don’t mean a lot – think about a folder with 100s of pictures, all called P0001234.jpg or similar. When you’re previewing the picture in Explorer, it might be easy to see which one you want to share, but if you’re uploading it through a dialog box that doesn’t give you a preview of the pics, then you’ll need to remember its location & name, so you can point to the file.

One approach would be to just click on the address bar within the Explorer window, and copy that to the Clipboard – CTRL-C – then you can typically paste that into the upload dialog box, and at least you will be pointed at the folder where the files exist. If you start typing the name of the file at the end of the path in the Address bar, then it may let you select the full name (using the up & down arrow keys to select) and copy that to the clipboard (CTRL-C again) too. All very well for the keyboard jockey but there is an easier way.

Copy as path

If you’ve selected a file in an Explorer window, hold down the SHIFT key and right-click, and you’ll see a new option shows up – Copy as path. This somewhat cryptic command copies the name of the file and it’s full path into the clipboard – so you can pick exactly the photo or document, and can easily paste that full path and file name into any dialog box.

Here’s an example of a SharePoint 2010 Upload Document dialog; just right-click in the “File name” box, paste the full name and hit Open.

On the face of it, this might not seem like a revolutionary function – but start using it and you’ll be amazed at how much time and aggravation it saves you. ZDNet’s Ed Bott said, “I use this shortcut constantly. It’s amazing how many times it comes in handy. It will save you many, many clicks.”

Tip o’ the Week #98 – OneNote calendar front-end

Posted on February 17, 2012 by ewand

Here’s a doozy of a little application that provides a great front-end to OneNote 2010, from Omer Atay of the OneNote development team.

In short, it’s a separate app which shows a calendar view of all the OneNote pages you’ve written, arranged by date. If you have several notebooks open (maybe a Work one, a Home one that’s synchronised with SkyDrive etc), and like to have lots of sections and subpages, it’s an ideal way of referencing what you’ve been doing, chronologically.

Omer initially released the app inside Microsoft, but I’m pleased to see he’s making it available externally, for free, too.

To use, visit the application page from Omer’s own web site. It’s available as a stand-alone app from here, the idea being that you’d save the executable file to your PC somewhere and just pin it to your start menu to run. Alternatively, enter %programdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs into the search box on the Start Menu, and create a shortcut to the OneCalendar executable in there, so it’s not pinned but can be easily found again – either by name, or just by typing “OneCal” into the Start Menu to find the program again.

OneCal. ah, those of a certain age can reminisce about 1980s TV adverts, too.
(check out the YouTube collection of classic ads from 1983. they sure don’t make ’em like they used to.!)

Another was of getting hold of OneCalendar would be to install Omer’s Onetastic addin to OneNote – it allows you to pin an individual OneNote page to your desktop, cleans up multi-page printouts (where you print from another application into OneNote) and also launches OneCalendar from within OneNote. See more here.

Tip o’ the Week #92 – Take and Share better meeting notes

Posted on January 27, 2012 by ewand

Be the scribe

OneNote is a great audit tool.

When you’re in meetings with customers and partners why not offer to take the notes on your tablet, slate or laptop and then when the meeting is done simply save the notes as a PDF to create a simple, (almost) non editable version of the notes that you can share with colleagues, customers and partners. This is especially useful if you hook up your device to a projector (using duplicate screen mode) and use your tablet as an electronic whiteboard.

To export your results to PDF, choose “File”, “Save As” and then “PDF”. When the save dialog is displayed you can choose to save selected pages, the current section or even the whole notebook. If you don’t want the PDF step you can share your notes even more quickly by using the Share tab and selecting the “E-mail Page” button to send the page as a picture. The “audit” part comes in because both you and the customer has a permanent copy of the notes – this has extricated me from a number of potentially taught situations?

For collaborating with colleagues, an even better option is to use shared notebooks. Using SharePoint 2010 (e.g. your MySite) you can create shared notebooks which are synchronised between team members and always kept up to date.

This is great for going to a customer meeting, taking notes and then automatically having them shared with your extended account teams. The only thing to be aware of is that shared notebooks (especially with ink) can take up a fair bit of disk space – but don’t worry, a call to 5000 or through ITWeb can get your quota increased easily.

To share a notebook that already exists go into “File”, “Share” and then choose the SharePoint server (“Network” option) server where you want to store it. When you’ve done this make sure that the location you stored the notebook has the correct permissions for your colleagues. To share a new notebook on SharePoint, go into “File”, “New” and select “Network” and choose the SharePoint. This is great for collaboration but even better for showing customers how we “live the dream”.

Did you know you can create a meeting note directly from an Outlook Appointment, and that note will contain the date, time, location and names of all the attendees of the Outlook item?

Just go into the meeting in Outlook and you’ll see a nice big OneNote icon – click that and the rest is obvious.

Using and creating templates

One way of gettng better organised might be to use a common template for meeting notes – if you click on the down-arrow next to the New Page command in the sidebar, you’ll see available templates and a link allowing you to set up new templates or find others online.

Some templates on microsoft.com.

Tip o’ the Week #91 – So you’re OOF? Meh.

Posted on January 20, 2012 by ewand

Now that Outlook, Exchange and Lync all provide a way of showing that someone is Out of the Office (aka OOF, not OOO), it should be no surprise when you send email to someone internally, that you get an Out of Office message.

Outlook’s tool tip tells you they’re out, Lync’s status icon shows the small * to indicate the same, and if you hover over the person’s name, you’ll see the same message shown at the top of the information balloon from Lync. Maybe it’s time to ditch the receipt of old-fashioned OOF message altogether, at least by taking them away from your inbox…?

Fortunately, a simple Outlook rule will take care of that. We’ve talked about Outlook rules before in previous ToWs… #9 and particularly, #29. ToW #29 introduced a way of having multiple rules working to remove everything from your inbox that met a bunch of conditions, meaning that what’s left is likely to be important. If you get too many emails, check it out.

A short bit of theory

Now, you might not know this, but every “item” in Outlook (eg. email, contact, appointment) is really just a blob of data with some specific fields defining the shape of the item – obvious stuff like when was it created, sent, who was it sent to, what was its subject, etc. One of the more important fields is the “message class” – that’s the information that tells Outlook how it should be displayed, and what kind of functionality the user will have. Outlook needs to use a very different form to display a contact, for example, than a regular email message, yet underneath there’s actually very little difference other than which fields exists and what their values are.

So what? Well, it turns out OOFs use a specific message class, and can therefore be filtered out based on that.

Create the rule

To set up the rule, go to the Home tab in Outlook’s main window, and under the Rules icon, create a new one. Now, go straight to Advanced Options button in the lower right. In the Condition(s) page of the rules wizard, scroll down and look for which is an automatic reply and tick it, then click Next. Now you can decide what you want to do with it (Delete? Move to another folder, etc). It’s pretty self-explanatory after this point.

One nice side-effect here is that Outlook typically strips a lot of its internal information on an email that is sent externally – so if you get an OOF from a customer or partner, it won’t have the classification of being an automatic reply… it’s just a regular email as far as Outlook is concerned. So the filtering will only remove OOF messages from internal people and will leave external OOFs in your inbox.

If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you could create other rules to handle messages based on type by using the “uses the form name” condition… Just make sure you don’t squirrel important messages away too deeply, in case you might actually need to read them…

Tip o’ the Week #77 – Saving docs straight to SharePoint

Posted on December 2, 2011 by ewand

Here’s a simple tip inspired by Luke Debono, who was asking how he could save directly from within an Office application to our departmental SharePoint site, using Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.

Now, if you open a document from a SharePoint site then you might get to view/edit it in a browser, or perhaps open and edit within an Office application. On the backstage/File menu, you’ll see a few clues that the document is on a SharePoint site – like the location, or (depending on whether the functionality is enabled on the SharePoint) the ability to check the document out & in, see previous versions etc.

If you’re writing a new document and want to publish it directly to SharePoint, you can do so directly from within Word, Excel & PowerPoint – go to the File menu and select the Save and Send option, at which point you’ll be able to save it straight to the SharePoint of your choice, maybe even one of the more recently used sites…

URL or UNC? U B the judge

If you’re working outside of Office applications but still want to save your stuff straight into SharePoint (your MySite for example?), then it’s still possible. SharePoint is clearly accessible via a URL (eg http://sharepoint etc), but you might not know it’s also available via the old-fashioned “UNC”…

universal naming convention
A naming convention for files that provides a machine-independent way to locate the file. A UNC name usually includes a reference to a shared folder and file accessible over a network rather than a folder and file specified by a drive letter and path.

UNCs were used in the old LAN Manager and NT days, to connect to file servers. They took the form of \\server_name\share_name, characterised by the phrase “whack whack” – as in “connect to “whack whack server_name whack share_name”…

In this instance, you can generally convert the SharePoint URL into a UNC by ditching the http:// piece and substituting forward slashes to back-slashes. If you’re in the File dialog of any application, you can type a UNC into the “File Name” box and hit Save or Enter, then the File dialog will be re-pointed to that location… allowing you to save your file (under a chosen name) into that location.

Once you’ve pointed the File dialog to browse into your SharePoint, you could even add it to Favo(u)rites to make it easy to get there in future… bearing in mind if you jump straight to \\sharepointemea\00sites\sitename then you’ll see all the other SharePoint folders that go to make up the site.

Tip o’ the Week #76 – Have you got the Lync effect?

Posted on November 25, 2011 by ewand

If you’re lucky enough to be using the Microsoft Lync IM & communications platform, it’s worth sharing a few tips on making the Lync client software a little more useful and productive. Let’s kick off with some shortcut keys you might like to try

· WindowsKey + Q – Brings the Lync window to the foreground

· WindowsKey + A – Accepts an incoming “toast”, such as an incoming call…

· conversely, WindowsKey + Esc – declines an incoming toast

· WindowsKey + X – declines an incoming toast, and sets your status to “Do Not Disturb” (note: Win+X brings up the Windows Mobility Center on a laptop)

From within a conversation…

· … use CTRL+SHIFT+ “<” and “>” to increase and decrease the size of selected text within an IM input window. So you can emphasis a specific word in larger font – something that there’s no menu option to do…

· CTRL + “]” and “[“ – zooms in & out of the text in both the input window and history – useful when showing someone an IM conversation on your screen.

· Finally, during a call or conversation, if you press CTRL-N, then a new OneNote page is created with the conversation subject & a list of the participants – perfect for taking clickity-clackety notes during the call. Just remember to mute yourself first!
[Sadly, there is no known mute shortcut key, but many headsets have a mute button or simply click on the microphone icon to mute and unmute]

There are many other keyboard shortcuts – see here – a good one being CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER when in a conversation or when selecting a user from the list; that will kick off a new call, or end any existing one.

Lync Guistic

Here’s an addin for Lync that lets you have conversations in different languages, powered by the Bing Translator service. See more on http://lyncguistic.cloudapp.net/…

As with any machine translation, your mileage may vary … but if nothing else, it’s a fun way of appearing erudite and cultured (or windswept & interesting) to your colleagues.

The Lync Adoption & Training Kit that this tool is part of, could be a really useful end-user training resource if you’re deploying Lync in your own organisation – it even includes a ready-made Lync custom Intranet site that you could use as a starting point for all your Lync specific training and user readiness materials. C’est magnifique!

Tip o’ the Week #74 – The Age of the Train

Posted on November 18, 2011 by ewand

Now then, now then… Remember the old 1980’s Jimmy Savill advert for British Rail? RIP, Jingle Jangle Jim.

Well, it seem that National Rail Enquiries adopted the Age of IE9 to deliver one of their latest consumer-facing web applications. Head over to http://ie9.nationalrail.co.uk to check out live departures and arrivals for your favourite stations, all presented in a slick, Windows Phone 7-style UI.

National Rail has said it won’t be updating the Outlook addin they built for Outlook 2003/2007 (but which isn’t compatible with Outlook 2010), however it is possible to quickly add rail travel information to your calendar. If you search for a given journey, then look at the details … click on Add to calendar and the site will download an “ICS” file which IE will offer you the opportunity to open or save. Select Open, and Outlook will create a new appointment for you with the appropriate times of the journey.

Tip o’ the Week #71 – Formatting tips for Office apps

Posted on November 4, 2011 (Updated April 13, 2023) by ewand

In various Office applications, pressing the F4 key will repeat the last command (if possible). Examples could be applying formatting to document elements (like turning text in Word into a header, or the borders of a table), where you could do it once then simply hit F4 to repeat it to other parts.

The uses are myriad – pretty much any repeatable command, from formatting, lining up shapes, table commands – just try pressing F4 to repeatedly do the same thing, rather than having to go back and forth to the menu. Deleting whole columns or rows in Excel is another great use – rather than right-click/delete row for each one, or clicking on the left hand border then pressing Delete to clear its contents, you could do it once then move the cursor to the next row you want to affect, press F4, and Robert’s your auntie’s live-in lodger.

The Tech for Luddites blog described F4 as the “Magic Office key no-one knows about”. It’s been a feature of Office for years. Yet I bet most of the ToW readers haven’t heard of it before…
I hadn’t, until Luke showed it to me…

There are other ways to repeatedly apply formatting design – such as the Format Painter, that lets you select something you want to copy (a paragraph in Word, for example), and by clicking the paintbrush icon, you can quickly apply the same formatting onto other selected area – and if you double click the Painter icon, you can keep applying in multiple places until you press Escape. [NB: the screen shot is from Word, where there’s a handy shortcut key to the format painter… sadly, Excel doesn’t have a shortcut so you have to use the menu].

On another note, the Office Labs team has released a great new version of their popular “Ribbon Hero” addin to Office – test your own skills in using Office applications, and maybe find a few new ways to make yourself more productive…

Tip o’ the Week #69 – Keep your favourites and Office settings synchronised

Posted on September 23, 2011 by ewand

We covered using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise OneNote files between computers in ToW #52, but overlooked one really simple but useful check-box capability – the ability to sync your IE favourites between PCs, and to sync your Office settings too. Jamie Burgess suggested this would be worth covering.

In essence, this gives you a one-click (on each PC) means to keep your favourites up to date across multiple home and work PCs, as well as keep your Office spelling dictionaries, templates and email signatures up to date too.

If you have multiple PCs and one of the first things you need to do when building a new machine is to recover your Outlook signature and IE favourites, then this is just for you.

To switch on, install Live Mesh (as part of Live Essentials) if you haven’t already, then switch on by entering “mesh” into your start menu and then click on Windows Live Mesh to open up the settings. More detail here.

Turn on and off with a single click and you’re done. For the more advanced users, you could set up a Sync Folder to copy your Favourites (generally found in c:\users\<alias>\Favorires) etc to SkyDrive, and that way they’d be available from any PC (via http://skydrive.live.com), or a useful way of backing up your settings if you only use one PC.

Tip o’ the Week #52 – OneNote on 3 screens & a cloud

Posted on August 5, 2011 by ewand

After the first year of ToWs, let’s start the 2nd with a short celebration of a cool feature in OneNote – not revolutionary, but the kind of thing that makes one smile when encountering it – somebody really thought about how OneNote was likely being used.

Try typing a sum – like 52×1045= (that’s the number of ToW emails times the current readership) and when you press Enter, Space, TAB etc, you’ll see that OneNote does you the service of calculating the answer. It even works with brackets and everything… try out different operators (*, x, /, ^2 etc).

Not everything in OneNote’s garden is rosy. Try copying a table (with formatting) from Excel and pasting into a OneNote notebook and you’ll maybe feel a little short changed. You could try grabbing the screen area (by looking for the Screen Clipping tool on the Insert tab), or by pressing WindowsKey-S, which will immediately grab a screen area of your choice and paste it either into a OneNote book, or put it in the Clipboard.

Share and Share alike
OneNote is such a useful way of sharing info, using SharePoint to host shared OneNote documents for work purposes, or synching personal info around – there was a way of sharing a notebook between work & home PCs, using the now-superceded Live Mesh (which was replaced by Windows Live Mesh as part of Windows Live Essentials).

A potentially simpler way of achieving the same thing is to use the newly-upgraded SkyDrive & OneNote in concert with one another, using SkyDrive to create a notebook that lives in the cloud and then, having opened the Notebook in the OneNote Web App, it’s a snap to open it in OneNote and to synchronise it onto multiple PCs.

If you have a Windows Phone 7, check out the Office Hub and look in there at OneNote – if you set the WP7 up to use your Windows Live address and choose to sync OneNote with SkyDrive, it will (by default) create a notebook called Personal (Web) in the Documents / My Documents folder. You can keep it to yourself or share it with others – click the “Shared with:” link on SkyDrive to assign permissions.

If you use this OneNote notebook to keep your scraps of personal stuff, it will synch to the cloud (accessible via a browser and OneNote Web App), via any number of PCs that you choose to synchronise it to, and it’ll also be accessible from – and updateable with – your phone.