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On a slightly more mundane front, a demo was shown The Designer manifests itself as a selection of suggested layouts that will be displayed in the right-hand task pane of the PowerPoint app, after you’ve inserted some photos from your own collection or from the various online sources. A suitable colour scheme will also be found, depending on the predominant colours in the photo(s) you’ve pasted or inserted. It’s subtle and clever. There’s a Design Ideas icon on the Design tab, if you want to manually invoke the Designer functionality too. When you start the Designer for the first time, you need to accept that the images you use within the designer will be sent to a cloud service for analysis. See here for more. At the same time as the Designer appeared, another premium O365 service was also added, called Morph (not to be confused with Tony Hart). The Morph service makes animating slide transitions really easy, and it’s probably simpler to demonstrate than to explain. Try this:
For more details on Morph & Designer, see Kirk Koenigsbauer’s blog post from November 2015. |
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Tip o’ the Week 336 – Onetastic Update
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The OneCalendar function is activated from the toolbar in OneNote, though you can create a shortcut to the separate executable if desired: · Press WindowsKey+R and enter %appdata%\Onetastic · Right-click on the OneCal.exe file and choose Create shortcut · · Rename the shortcut to just “OneCal”. Right-click it to Pin to Start if you like, or open the app and right-click on its Taskbar icon to Pin it there if you’re truly devoted · Now, you can quickly start it by pressing WindowsKey+R and entering OneCal · Or you can install just OneCalendar on its own, should you insist. Anyway. Whether or not you want to do the above steps, you can still find some cool stuff in the new Macroland functionality within Onetastic. The author, @Omer Atay, has completely rewritten the macro language to make it more like a number of regular programming environments. There are hundreds of macros to carry out everything from minor text formatting to wholesale changes like colouring or changing sections of the notebook. Some of the most useful macros include the ability to create tables of contents, breadcrumb links or even lists of all the notebooks currently open. If you’re a OneNote user and you don’t have Onetastic installed, you’re missing out. |
Tip o’ the Week 335 – Battery life on Windows 10
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For a start, check out Battery saver – Look in the Battery saver options (just type Battery at your Start menu), and you’ll also see the current charge and estimated duration, but also will let you see a breakdown per app, allowing you to control on an app-by-app basis how they will affect your battery life. One such trick might be to decide which apps you want to allow to run in the background, as each one will use some amount of system resources, though for the most part, it makes sense to leave them as “managed by Windows”, and then the battery saver will intervene if required. If you’d like a bit more info on what your machine’s battery is doing, try running (WindowsKey+R) powercfg /batteryreport, which will generate an HTML report showing you details. To view the file, just type battery-report at the Start menu and you should see the battery-report.html file show up in the list. Clearly, you can manually turn off things you don’t need – like Bluetooth or even WiFi (if you’re mobile and don’t need/want to connect), you could dim the screen or get into the practice of looking for marginal gains by doing things like switching off Start Menu transparency or even picking your colours appropriately. If you’re already running a preview of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (now due to go public on August 2nd), then make sure to use the Edge browser: the browser tunes itself to be kind to your laptop or tablet’s battery life. Using test data and real world info collected from telemetry, the Edge team has revealed that it is notably more power efficient than Chrome, Opera and Firefox. Read more here. Opera took issue, though Thurrott concurred (“Opera is still a thing?”, said one commenter). WSJ found that Edge was more power efficient than Chrome, and PC World agreed, though with a smaller margin of victory (though marginal gains are all about the 1%…) So, if you’re a Chrome fan, you might want to take a look at Edge under the Anniversary Update and see if it’s improved enough to win your heart over. Read more battery saving tips for Windows 10 here (though they are very phone-centric rather than PC oriented). |
Tip o’ the Week 334 – Windows Maps app updates
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A few months
There are loads of functional and fit-n-finish UX improvements throughout the apps on both PC and mobile, plus some notable new or overhauled features. A few highlights: · Details Card – now displayed when you select a point on the map, with clearer display of · Favourite places improvements – it will keep your favourites offline, sync between devices if you sign in with your Microsoft Account and will migrate previous faves from Here Maps too. · Guided navigation – the nav option, especially useful for phone users with offline maps, works much better in landscape mode with a clearer layout. Find out more about the updated maps app, here. And see what Paul Thurrot has to say, here. To check your current version, launch Maps and look in the ellipsis (.,,) and under Settings, then scroll to the very bottom – the previous version was v4.1603.nnn whereas the new release is showing up as 5.1606.nnn.
Either view will let you force a check for app updates, which may be delayed from arriving automatically if you’re not on WiFi or plugged in. |
Tip o’ the Week 332 – Failing to plan is, eh…
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To get the gist of what Planner does, check out the overview video, here. For tips on getting up and running, see the Getting Started guide. There is a degree of functional overlap with other task-management systems like Wunderlist or even Outlook on its own, but Planner is designed very much to be a team-based thing and is particularly aimed at businesses or for educational use. Comparisons are inevitably made with other tools, most notably Trello, and SharePoint’s own Tasks capability has had the Sword of Damocles hanging over it, if you believe the chat, so Planner is a welcome addition. |
![clip_image002[1]](https://msdnshared.blob.core.windows.net/media/2016/06/clip_image002110.jpg "clip_image002[1]")
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Tip o’ the Week 331 – OneNote Clipper Edge Extension
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With the latest versions of Edge that are available to Windows Insiders, and due to be generally released with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update on July 29th, it’s now possible to try out some preview extensions (including a couple of ad blockers – though be careful, don’t use more than one at a time or you might cross the streams). See the list of preview extensions here, noting the minimum version of Windows you need to be running to use them (try pressing WindowsKey+R and entering winver to see what you’re currently using). One extension in preview is a version of the OneNote Web Clipper application, which allows for a simple button to be added to the Edge toolbar, making it a quick click to grab the current web page and save it into OneNote. View more about the extension here. If you’re not yet on the right version of Windows, there are other ways to save web pages into your OneNote notebook…
Anyway, get into the habit of saving stuff from your browser into OneNote and you’ll wonder how you managed to run your life beforehand. |
Tip o’ the Week 333 – Du Temps Perdu
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With a good portion of the sporting world focussed on France right now (at least you’d think that, given the TV coverage), it seem opportune to look at some language tools if the de facto lingua franca of The Mother Tongue isn’t available. Machine translation has become fairly commonplace, and though it’s not perfect, it’s a lot better than the non-fluent might achieve by stumbling through a phrasebook and getting all the pronunciation wrong. Translation in real time is now built-in to Skype, with instant message or even full spoken voice translation available in several languages. The technology is moving from simple word-by-word conversion, to full semantic and grammatical translation (though not yet summarising or otherwise interpreting), and it might not be all that long before fully synchronous, real-time translation from any language to any other is possible just by sticking an earpiece in. Douglas Adams would have been pleased.
Windows 10 has added translation capabilities into Cortana; saying something like Hey Cortana, translate “Where is the nearest train station” in French or Hey Cortana, how do I say “Oh no, not penalties again” in German should let you see, and possibly hear, what the translation should be. Click on the Open Translator link to visit the Bing Translator web page, which will do the same sort of thing, but can also break down the phrase by word, showing alternative words in the translated text that you might want to use instead.
It’s a bit “all or nothing”, and doesn’t show you the individual words that it has translated, but it is quick and easy. You may want to try feeding the URL into bing.com/translator or translate.google.com to see how well the translation has gone (if you hover over translated words, both will show you the original underneath, though both have a habit of mangling complex websites). Finally, if you’d like to just translate a short phrase but might be offline at the time (so Cortana isn’t any use), it’s worth installing the Bing Translator app, which also has the ability to translate text identified from the camera, such as on a menu or an instructional sign. Très bien, or as Proust would say, “la malade imaginaire de recondition et de toute surveillance est bientôt la même chose”! |
Tip o’ the Week 330 – Windows Store updated
Windows Insiders may have noticed 
since desktop build 14342 (which made it onto the slow ring recently), that the Store app has been given a bit of a makeover (assuming you’re able to update it). Both the layout of the main screen and the pages which detail individual apps have been changed, adding functionality and making the whole thing a bit more usable.
The refresh brings the PC and Mobile versions of the store into closer alignment, and the UI adapts to the window changing size, by reordering and resizing tiles and modifying the layout of other options.
The Store hasn’t grown a hamburger menu (yet?) but it has adopted a dynamic UI layout, one of the tenets of UWP now that modern apps can run in a window, can be resized more easily and may be targeted at different device types and screen sizes.
If you check the Downloads and updates option (reached by clicking on your profile pic, to the left of 
the search field/icon) then you’ll see “Recent Activity”, which shows you the details of updates including the current application version.
There’s still a paucity of update and version information within the main Store experience though – it would be nice to be able to search for an app and sort/filter the results based on the average ratings or the date the app was published or updated; that way, it would be easier to filter out stale or rubbish apps. If you agree, try suggesting through the Feedback Hub.
In the My Library section of the store, you can also hide apps you’ve previously purchased or otherwise had installed – like Candy Crush Saga, maybe, not always with your consent. There are other ways of ditching ready-installed apps if you’re especially bothered about their presence.
While on the topic of the Store, it’s worth keeping an eye on the Windows Store Weekly posts on the Windows Experience team blog – it highlights apps (games, especially) and TV or movie content that’s new or being promoted within the Store.
Tip o’ the Week 329 – Fuzzy Duck? Yes, he does
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Be honest. Do you know how to use the VLOOKUP function in Excel? It has its roots in @LOOKUP from VisiCalc, which goes back well over 30 years – see here for a demo (and, wipe a tear, you missed “VLOOKUP WEEK 2012”). It’s one of the more useful functions, where you can use tables of text to cross reference one another – leading some to create spreadsheets to manipulate data that might be achieved elsewhere by a database join or an IF…THEN…ELSE statement. VLOOKUP (and her friends, HLOOKUP, LOOKUP and the other reference functions) is all very well if you have nicely constructed and controlled data – but what if you have messy text that has been entered by end users? How do you go about normalising that without boring brute force (ie ploughing through it all yourself)? Imagine, if you will, that you have a list of a few hundred company names exported from your CRM system – let’s call them “Partners”. What if you also had many thousands of unique names from people who’ve registered at a conference? (Let’s call that “Partner Conference”). Wouldn’t it be nice to run a report which shows the team that works with each partner, who has registered and where they’re from? If the registration tool allowed anyone to enter free text fields for the name of their company, you’ll get any number of variations, mis-spellings etc – maybe even the odd deliberate spanner. (On the McXFace front, once again, El Reg excelled itself with this headline, though has a way to go to top the best so far… or the subheading of this one, which reads like a line from a DC Thomson cartoon). These names won’t allow VLOOKUPs as they’ll show up as all different, and therefore cross-referencing one source with the other will be difficult. So even telling Jane Smith, who manages the ACME Inc account, that these 10 people are attending the conference, is going to be hard if every one of them registered with a variation of A.C.M.E, ACME Inc, Ac-me Ltd and so on.
The Fuzzy Lookup tool will add extra columns to the source table; showing the text that it thinks is the nearest match, and a score of “similarity”. The technology comes from Microsoft Research, and uses the Jaccard Similarity method of comparing sample data sets. One technique for comparing a couple of different columns is to set conditional formatting on the Similarity column and choose colour scales for easy identification of the ones likely to be correct; or simply put a filter on that column and hide rows below an arbitrary low bar (like 0.6). Then spin down the two columns to the left and check to see if they tally up, given the human eye for spotting similarity, spelling mistakes etc. You could even add a Y/N column to the right so you can manually affirm which is right and which is not, then filter on that to confirm.
Fuzzy Duck? Ducky Fuzz! Does he? |
Tip o’ the Week 328 – Clip for art’s sake
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If you’re after some high-quality clip art to insert into you magnus opus, you could try a service called Pickit, previously known as PicHit.me. The Pickit Photo Finder app gives you a nice Modern app way of finding cool photos given a theme or keyword (though there’s a subscription fee if you want the higher quality pics). It’s even Cortana enabled, supposedly. There’s an Office Addin too, which lets you search for and add photos and art straight into your documents. Pickit is a Microsoft BizSpark success story, and the service runs on Azure. There are many ways of finding decent clipart for your projects – there’s Open Clip Art for an archive of more traditional vector & standard clipart image fare, or image hosting services like Pixabay, which offer free Creative Commons photos. Check out these other alternatives too. |
