Month: November 2024

#55: Quick access to fave notes

Posted on (Updated by ewand

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A few themes have re-appeared on Tip of the Week over the years … saving time by using keyboard shortcuts, finding useful but somewhat hidden bits of Windows or Office apps, etc. One of the most prominent seams to mine, however, has been an undying for Onay-no-tay.

The UX Paradox of Office Apps

Usability research into Office applications once found that 87%* of the new features users asked for, were already in the product – they just didn’t know how to find them. As more and more features were added to apps – Excel particularly, it seems – end-users just didn’t know how to “discover” them. By Office 2000, dynamic “intelli-menus” basically hid options which were more obscure or which an individual just didn’t use, and while it made things look simpler and less cluttered, it made the problem worse.

A wholescale UX rethink in Office begat the “Ribbon”, which is now pervasive in other apps; if you’re interested in such things, check out Jensen Harris’ 2008 presentation on what led to the Ribbon being conceived. The talk offers a great historical perspective but also goes over the thought processes on how these things come about.

* statistic is made up but the story holds true. Who cares if facts and figures are correct as long as the lies are well presented? How do you think Excel charts and PowerBI got so successful?

Not Just Another Toolbar

Even with the Ribbon to make things more ordered, sometimes it’s good to be able to jump straight to a feature you use commonly; the customizable Quick Access Toolbar on the top left of many apps gives you the ability to pin certain commands, and can be an invaluable way of getting to functions you like without delving into Ribbon tabs and menus.

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Click the down-arrow to the right of the toolbar and you can pick from a set of suggested functions, or by customizing it, you can delve into any part of the extensive menus and pin just that one feature there. There are commands which are not even on the Ribbon, but you could pin them to the QAT if you like them…

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The QAT is present in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook (classic) – but not New Outlook, to some users’ chagrin. It’s not uncommon to find a similar UI feature in 3rd party apps from the mid-2010s.

OneNote Favo(u)rites (again)

New Testament Tip of the Week #39 covered saving Favourites in OneNote: #39: OneNote Shortcuts, Favourites and Pins. Despite some of the guff being taken up with browser and mobile favourites, the good stuff in that tip was in (once again) recommending the fantastic OneTastic.

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As well as providing an extensive macro capability, the OneTastic addin lets you pin a page or section to “Favorites”, and you can later go back to the same menu used to manage the pining, in order to access your previously pinned pages.

For extra goodness, try customizing the QAT and looking for Pin to Favorites…

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Select it, click Add >> and hit OK. Now you’ll be able to access the drop-down for Favorites right there from the top left corner…

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Happy Friday!

#54: New Outlook is coming, ready or not!

Posted on by ewand

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Windows Mail or Outlook users might have already noticed that a “New Outlook” is coming. If you’ve already made the switch, you’ll be familiar with the new app’s look and maybe some of its shortcomings. For many people, it will be an improvement once they get used to it. Well, “some” rather than “many”, at least initially.

New Outlook is going to become the default mail client from January 2025. A blog post from this week’s Ignite outlines some of the new and “coming soon” features in New Outlook…

There are lots of new features being built for New Outlook; some are filling in gaps compared to older experiences, though many are integrating new online services and apps (like Microsoft Places).

And there are plenty of things already in Outlook Web App (and therefore also in New Outlook) which are a step forward from dusty old Outlook (or Outlook (classic) as Microsoft is renaming it) – Snoozing email, pinning individual messages in the inbox, soon-to-arrive sorting by Copilot-deemed level of importance. If you’re responsible for delivering New Outlook to your users, check out the adoption site for more details of how to get the best out of it.

The timeline for Microsoft 365 users moving to New Outlook as a replacement for the old Outlook application has also been highlighted – from 2025, the current “Opt In” will become “Opt Out” – ie. Users will default to having the new client but can choose to revert to the old one. This will be delayed until mid-2026 for Enterprise subscribers. One glaring omission is the date when this Opt Out phase will be removed …

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A quick history lesson

Outlook has been the primary email client for Windows & Office, since Office 97 appeared 28 years ago. Outlook evolved over numerous versions and was joined by a variety of other, different apps using the same name, even if they didn’t share anything else – mobile apps, based on software from acquisitions, and a web client that came from email server teams in Exchange. Even the old Hotmail service adopted much the same UI and was renamed Outlook.com.

Another similarly named app was Outlook Express, a rebranding of the previous free “Internet Mail & News”, used primarily to connect to ISP-provided services using internet standards (IMAP, POP, NNTP). Outlook Express eventually went away and was ultimately succeeded by Windows Mail, or Mail and Calendar.

Both of these – the heavyweight mail & calendar app for Office users, and the “lightweight” one that came with Windows 10/11, are on the verge of collision. It will be a long time before Microsoft can completely yank the carpet from underneath Outlook, but if you’re a Mail and Calendar user then your time is running out.

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What will happen on 1st January 2025? Will Mail users be forced to move to Outlook – seems likely. Will there still be a way to revert to Mail even if they don’t care about “support”? Expect there to be unsupported back doors for a while, but eventually resistance will prove futile.

If you find yourself using New Outlook and feel like reverting back for a few more weeks, there’s still time to go to Settings | General | About and hit the button to Open mail instead.

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What’s what with New Outlook

The New Outlook application isn’t really a Windows app in the same vein as the old Mail app (which is/was a UWP app, whose raison d’être disappeared when Microsoft’s mobile ambitions died) or the classic Outlook (a regular Win32 app). New OLK is a wrapper on the Outlook Web App which is provided by Outlook.com/M365, so most of the functionality is really happening in a browser that is embedded in the application. This is part of a long-planned move of unifying the PC, Mac and web versions of Outlook and probably, in time, mobile ones too.

Some licensing changes were snuck in with New Outlook, then clarified as the restriction was lifted somewhat. [In a nutshell; if you only have an M365 Basic license, you cannot use New Outlook on your mailbox, even though you could use Outlook (classic)… think of it like closing a loophole which may or may not have existed previously]

What’s wrong with New Outlook

OK, there may be a few gotchas and glitches and some things aren’t quite finished, but so what?

If performs well enough – which it kinda-does – then who cares? Well, for Windows users at least, there are some pretty sizeable gotchas which are going to be hard to fix, if not impossible:

  • Offline. Every other email app that’s been written for Windows for years has had the ability to store an offline copy of your mailbox. Outlook 2003 and later even defaulted to using that local copy when running against an Exchange mailbox. Some offline capabilities have been / are being added to New Outlook, to help make it useable when you temporarily lose a connection, but so far, it’s a long way from having a full offline copy of your mailbox.
  • Gmail / iCloud / Yahoo! etc mail. Old Outlook and Windows Mail could both connect to Google Mail (and a variety of others, including IMAP mailboxes from old ISPs), by essentially downloading the email and doing everything locally, most likely synched with the original mailbox. New Outlook doesn’t have the offline spuds to do that yet, so it needs to sync all your Gmail into “the Microsoft Cloud” first – see here for “details”.

    There’s no obvious way to see how much storage you’re using (or where the data is being held) though at least for now, there’s no additional charge. Some people might get a bit worried about Microsoft hoovering up all the email from a 3rd party inbox and storing the data in its cloud… even if their responsible AI and privacy pledges say they won’t do anything with your email, it’s now not under your control.

Cross mailbox functionality is non-existent.

  • Search. Though you can add multiple mailboxes into a single New Outlook window, in effect you’re just pointing to nn number of M365/Outlook.com instances, one-at-a-time. Oh, and you can’t re-order them once they’ve been added.

This means that if you have – say – a work M365 mailbox, a private Hotmail/Outlook.com mailbox and maybe an old Gmail account, all synced and running in New Outlook, you can’t search for something across all of them. Ironically, the Outlook mobile client (at least on Android) does a great job, not only searching across account but presenting a single Inbox view composed from all of them.

Since each account is a separate thing on the back end, there is no way that cross-mailbox search will work unless there’s either a way of orchestrating it on the service (very non-trivial) or until all mail data is downloaded locally and the search carried out there. See item 1 in this list – not going to happen at all, or at least not in the foreseeable future.
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  • Calendar. Other small gotchas get in the way here, too. Though the Calendar view tries to present a single view of a schedule composed from multiple mailboxes, when you create a new calendar entry, it starts from whatever your default account is.

    Start adding details – subject, changing meeting times, etc – and if you realize you meant to use a secondary account, then it’s simple enough to click the drop-down box at the top of the calendar item and choose the account you wanted.
    And everything you’ve just edited will be lost, with a blank entry now created in your other calendar.

  • Drag & drop. There’s no way of dragging stuff from one mailbox to another and there’s no way of importing from or exporting to a PST file either, yet. If you’re leaving a company and want to make sure you have all your private calendar entries and contacts, along with any personal mail you have stored in your work mailbox, better use Old Outlook to do that move.
    Also, if someone sends you an attachment, in Old Outlook, you could drag and drop it into a folder elsewhere on your PC; no longer. You need to save it to OneDrive or download it to your computer first.

  • Zoom is horrible. Especially on smaller laptop screens, it might be necessary to zoom in and out of the preview pane in mail. In Old Outlook – just as in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Edge, Chrome and however many other applications, if you use a mouse scroll wheel while holding down the Control key, the content in the application window will smoothly zoom in and out. Ditto zooming in and out using a pinch motion on a trackpad, or pressing CTRL +/-.

    In New Outlook, some zoom motions don’t work (pinching on the trackpad) or if they do (mouse wheel + CTRL), it’s far from smooth and also zooms everything around the content too – including all the UI surrounding the content like the Reply buttons etc. It’s jarring evidence of the fact that everything in the preview pane is just the OWA browser view, and you’re zooming into everything, buttons and all, not just the content of the message

Example – here’s an email at 100% magnification:
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Increase Zoom to 200%:
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Yuck.

There are plenty of other things which grind the gears of online commentators, though some people quite like it (even if they later conclude that it’s still got room to improve).

If you’re using New Outlook, keep sharing your views on https://aka.ms/newOutlookFeedback and hopefully Microsoft will fix the stuff that’s not insurmountable, in addition to the quest to “Copilot all the things!”

#53: Right tool for the job

Posted on by ewand

Designer (24)

Anyone who has worked in IT for long enough will likely have seen cases where unwitting users are wielding completely the wrong utility or application to get stuff done. Perhaps the entire company finance system is running on an old Access database, or the accountants were using a spreadsheet for holding something other than numbers? It’s one thing having lots of tools, but knowing which one to use when is sometimes a lost art.

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Sometimes, organizational culture is to blame – if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail (as how Microsoft leaders once felt about Oracle’s Larry Ellison saying that “database” was the answer to every question). Some companies use email for everything, others have moved all their internal comms to Teams or Slack, and occasionally use email only for customers.

The advent of Electronic Forms

One early measure of effectiveness of newly-installed IT systems, was the inefficiencies it managed to replace – and reducing paper forms was one often paraded benefit. Literally cutting red tape, not only speeding everything up and reducing wasted paper, moving to electronic forms was and is an easy case to make. Nowadays, you’d use a web form onto some kind of cloudy data store without even thinking about it, but it wasn’t always so simple.

In the late 1990s, forms were a key component of “Groupware”, with Lotus Notes being the early market leader (and which spurred Microsoft into competitive action in trying to build an alternative).

Microsoft had a separate E-Forms product as far back as the early 1990s, running on top of the old MSMail system, later being migrated into Exchange. The idea was that companies could easily make forms to send around in email, capturing data fields and making smart routing and workflow decisions along the way. It’s safe to say, they never really took off…

Outlook picked up forms duty (see here, in the cutting edge “Developing a workflow application” Exchange 5.5 whitepaper). There are still vestiges of Forms Designer in Outlook today (if you’re on Outlook (classic) rather than the upstart New Outlook, that is).

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Forms in the 2020s

It’s so easy to use forms now – quickly building a web front end to a set of data is par for the course with Google Forms and Microsoft Forms, to name just two examples. Both are available in free versions (using a consumer Gmail/Outlook type login) or are part of corporate packages which bring extra functions and access to other data.

It is easy to create a form with some simple validation, and then collect responses from people – anonymously or (if they’re in your organization) capturing the logged-in username of the person who submitted it. Results are easily summarized and viewed with charts, word cloudswordclouds and the like.

Each form is basically a series of questions, with different types used to validate data – like getting a rating, picking a date, choosing from set options or even entering specific types of text or numbers.

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There are lots of scenarios where a simple form could take the place of sending an email – like registering for an event and collecting dietary requirements, or asking a group of people for a time and place that works best to meet; instead of trying to juggle lots of responses, a form could be the ideal way to present options and get their selections.

For meeting arranging scenarios there are numerous ways of trying to make this simpler – from websites like Doodle, the various Calendly/Bookings options for 1:1 meetings, or the former add-in utility FindTime for finding group availability in Outlook, which has now been replaced with a built-in Scheduling poll feature.

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2020s meet 2000s

There are some things which should be easy, using Microsoft Forms, that are just not. Even though Forms can be run inside a M365 organization’s own tenant, and therefore we know who everyone is as they’ve already signed in, there’s no way of adding a “Person” to a form, such that they could be picked from the directory.

To do that needs to revert to an altogether older form technology – the SharePoint List. Originating from 2001, SharePoint really hit its stride by 2007, offering lots of web-based collaboration functionality that almost equalled what Lotus was doing a decade earlier. Microsoft did have another forms/data toolset, InfoPath, with SharePoint integrations – but that’s gone away now, not replaced with any single thing. We don’t really talk about InfoPath any more.

Using SharePoint and withWith a bit of nous, you cancould quickly build a detailed list – think of it like a simple database – and generate a form with data validation, branching logic and so on.

But a much easier way is to look at the newer Lists web app, which combines simple forms stuff with a SharePoint based back-end, meaning there’s more integration with M365, including directory integration …

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… which looks a lot better than having to type someone’s name in.

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Lists is part of M365 (look in the app grid on the top left if you go to Office.com and sign in, then peek under the More Apps section). )

In true Microsoft fashion, there are many ways to skin this feline – there’s also Loop, which could be used to do all kinds of groovy things in browsers, Teams, Outlook and more. Oh, and PowerApps. Mash all these tools together and you can build a spidery app legacy to keep your successors entertained for years.

#52: The Power of the Cloud

Posted on by ewand

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Being shown around a modern datacenter is a pretty awesome experience. The huge rooms full of servers, networking gear and storage can be reminiscent of that last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s the power systems that are truly jaw-dropping; how much power the DC uses when it’s running and what to do if the power supply goes away is a big part of building these operations.

At one point, Microsoft used huge Caterpillar diesel generators, each of which could generate several megawatts and was kept ready and waiting by continually pumping hot oil inside, so the machine could be started and running at full tilt in a fraction of a second in the event of power failure. Moves are afoot to use hydrogen fuel cells or other means of storing and generating backup power.

AI and Datacenter boom

As much traditional computing has moved into the cloud over the last decade or two, and faster and more mobile internet access drives end-user demand, datacenters have been getting bigger and more numerous. They almost can’t build them fast enough. About 1/3 of all worldwide DCs are in the US, and together they soak up about 6% of all electricity.

Datacentres worldwide used about 460 TWh of electricity in 2022; that’s 460 billion KWh, or enough to run 35 trillion lightbulbs continuously – about 4,300, 24×7, for each person on the planet. That’s quite a lot of power. Expect that amount to double by 2026. Google and Microsoft reportedly consumed 24TWh each in 2023.

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[source – Electricity 2024 – Analysis and forecast to 2026]
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/6b2fd954-2017-408e-bf08-952fdd62118a/Electricity2024-Analysisandforecastto2026.pdf

Generative AI is VERY power hungry: estimates vary but research showed that generating one image used as much power as over 500 smartphone charges, averaging around 3KWh per image. Better make sure your ChatGPT / Copilot / Microsoft Designer usage is worthwhile and not just creating stupid images of cats and dogs.

To put the commensurate CO2 output into context, however, 1,000 of such images would be the equivalent emissions of driving a car for 4.1 miles. It’s thought that Generative AI on its own could well consume 100TWh or more by 2027.

DC providers are also looking for ways to ensure they can get enough power into the datacenter – Microsoft has even committed to restarting one of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactors and buying all of its power for 20 years. A nod to the old commitment of being carbon negative by 2030, perhaps, but the massive DC expansion to fuel demand for AI makes achieving that target seem increasingly unlikely.

Maybe new governmental administrations will incentivize clean power and reward efficiency?

Local PC power usage

There is something of a dichotomy in power usage on a local computer, especially if it’s powered from the wall rather than using a battery. You want to buy the highest performing, most feature-laden machine you can afford, so (apart from preserving battery life) why would you deliberately knobble its performance to save power? Like buying a Ferrari and driving everywhere at 20mph.

Some quick wins, especially on laptops, could be to reduce the brightness of the screen and use Dark Mode. Check the Power settings on your PC for recommendations on how to lower its energy use. Reduce the number of background apps and trim the ones which start automatically.

If you have an Intel-powered computer (PC, Mac or Linux), they have a free power usage gadget which might give you some idea about the total power consumption of your system, though doesn’t really shed much light as to what’s making it do what it’s doing…

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You could try firing up Task Manager (CTRL+SHIFT+ESC) and adding a couple of columns to its default view (right-click on the column headings); useful to know which apps or processes are causing the power usage to shoot up, but devoid of actual numbers for the more data-obsessed.

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Edge browser has an Efficiency mode – click the … settings menu in the top right and look under Browser essentials.

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If you need more data on overall system performance, try GPU-Z – it gives detailed stats on the Graphics Processing Unit and other main components of your system, including current, maximum / minimum / average power consumption …

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In the screenshot above, the Power Consumption (%) shows how much of the graphics board’s maximum power consumption is currently being used. A similar utility, CPU-Z, can give data about the TDP of the main CPU and how it’s doing too.

#51: Windowing Arrangements

Posted on (Updated by ewand

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The idea of running applications in overlapping, resizable windows has been around since the early 1970s. Pioneered at Xerox PARC, along with pretty much everything else, the idea of having windows arranged side-by-side or in a variety of other ways was revolutionary. Everybody copied it.

Smartphones have mostly avoided trying to put stuff into windows, but computer users will be familiar with the motifs involved, even if you often run windows at full screen size and switch between them when necessary.

Add multiple screens or great big monitors, and how you lay your windows out might become a bit more relevant, especially when you’re referencing different documents or websites at the same time.

ToW has talked in the past about using OneNote on the side (even last week)…

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… or putting windows into different sections of the screen using Windows’ own Snap Layouts feature, making it easier to show them next to each other. The biggest and higher resolution the screen, the more layout options you are given.

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There are other utilities, too – Fancy Zones in PowerToys, or Dell’s Display Manager.

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Split Screen viewing

Of course, sometimes you don’t want to arrange multiple apps, but to see things side by side from within the same application. Windows has done a pretty good job of managing apps where there are several documents open at the same time, even if there’s only one “instance” of the application and it happens to have several files open. In Excel and Word, for example, though there’s only one app on the taskbar, multiple open files show as separate windows which can be snapped to different areas of the screen for easy cross-reference. You can tweak the “combined icon” behaviour if so desired.

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Sometimes you might want to have several windows open from the same document; maybe you’re copying and pasting content from one part of a Word doc to another, or working on different tabs in the same Excel workbook.

In such cases, look under the View menu and create a new window, which can be snapped and arranged as desired.

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The same menu lets you arrange multiple open documents in a variety of ways too; try Split or Arrange All to see the output.

Edge by Edge

If you followed the advice from the recent ToW #38 and bought yourself a gigantic, curved monitor, you might want to check out another feature in Edge that is there to make thing a bit more usable – Split Screen mode (whose icon looks a bit like the Immersive Reader, so it’s easy to overlook).

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Since most people have lots of browser tabs open at the same time, Edge (and Chrome) tend to lump all the open tabs under one browser window, so you don’t clutter things up too much. You can move tabs between browser windows or even create a new window with just a specific tab (right click the tab and you’ll see the Move tab to > option), so could arrange separate browser windows using the normal snapping etc.

The Split screen view lets you quickly show 2 tabs side-by-side, and can prove very useful. While in split mode, you’ll see two URLs in the address bar…

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Exit split screen or tweak some of the behaviours using the X and the “…” options buttons on the top right…

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Finally, in Windows 11 and using Edge, you can make it show separate tabs in the ALT+TAB view of open applications, so they appear like they were separate windows even if they aren’t.

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The wording of this setting makes it sounds like many apps would be able to support this (since “tabs” are appearing in other places like Notepad or Explorer), but for now, it’s only Edge.