Tip o’ the Week 458 – Grabbing pictures from websites

Posted on December 6, 2018 by ewand

There are plenty of reasons why you might want to get the URL of a picture that is embedded on a web page, and some of them don’t even risk breaching the copyright of the image’s owner or page author!

Legitimate examples might include things like downloading a company logo from its website so you can include it in a PowerPoint slide; try going to just about any major company site and you’ll probably find it’s not straightforward to save the image file. Ditto all sorts of clever pages that might stop you simply saving the picture to your PC.

Normal behaviour is, mostly, to just right-click on an image and in Edge, you’ll be able to save the picture (or use Cortana to try to give you more details on the image, even trying to guess what’s in the image depending on how straightforward it is – it’s surprisingly good). Ditto, if you’re using Chrome, except you can search Google instead. Try the same on a company logo, and you may find you won’t get the option to save or search.

If you want to grab the actual URL for an image on a web page, the foolproof way of getting it is to look at the source – if you don’t mind fishing through maybe a few thousand lines of HTML. It’s not too bad if the image is at the top of the page, but it could prove tedious if elsewhere. In Edge, an easier solution would be to right-click on the image and choose, Inspect element. You may need to press F12 to get these options in your right-click menu. Chrome has a similar thing, simply called Inspect, and can be invoked by CTRL-SHIFT-I.

The Inspect Element funciton in browsers is designed to help web page debugging; it’ll let a user or designer jump straight to the section of a web page’s source, and inspect or even modify the code behind the page.

As an example, right-click on the logo on www.microsoft.com and Inspect Element. You’ll see the highlighted section is the bit where the logo sits on the page, and immediately next in the hierarchical representation of the page code, you’ll see the <img> tag, denoting that this pertains to the image itself.

Look for the src= part, double-click on it and you’ll see the URL of the image in an editable text box, meaning you can easily copy that to the clipboard and get ready to paste it wherever you need it to go. Try pasting it into a new browser tab just to check that all you’re getting is the logo.

Using a search engine

Of course, there may be easier ways to get an image – using Bing or Google search, for example.

Bing is actually quite a bit better in this regard. When you click on an image in the results from Bing’s Image search, you’ll see a larger preview of the picture along with a few actions you can take – like jump to the originating page; search for other sizes of the same image; use Visual Search to run a query on just some selectable portion of the image; or simply just view it in the browser, thereby opening just that image and showing you the direct URL to it.

In the case of both Google and Bing, if you click on “Share”, then you’ll get a link to the search result of that image rather than the picture itself – so if your plan is to embed the image in another web page or upload it to some other place, then you’ll be frustrated.

Another legitimate use of the original URL for a logo might be to change the icon in Teams – assuming you have permissions to Manage a team site (click the ellipsis … to the right of the name and if you’re suitably perm-ed up, when you click on the Manage Team option, you’ll see a little pencil icon on the logo if you hover over it. Click that to change the picture).

Simply choose Upload picture, paste in the URL of the logo you want to use and you’re off to the races.

Figuratively speaking, anyway. You might have to jigger about with the proportions of the image by downloading it first and editing it elsewhere, as the image will need to be more-or-less square. Built-in icons in Teams appear to be 240×240 pixels in size so you could try to target that if you’re resizing.

Tip o’ the Week 454 – Time Zone Tumult Ahead

Posted on October 26, 2018 by ewand

You may be affected by upcoming changes to time zones, as much of the northern hemisphere moves out of Daylight Saving Time and back to winter, which for is happening over the next couple of weeks.

Many Southern Hemisphere nations have already moved into “summer time”, though a few will make the transition on 4^th November.

Europe, most of Mexico and parts of the Middle East will move out of DST this weekend, but most of the North America and the Caribbean will “fall back” the week after. See the list of places that currently observes DST and when they transition.

This can play havoc with people’s electronic calendars; systems these days generally take notice of time zone changes pretty well and that means the relative times of meetings are preserved, though what this does mean is that a 9am meeting organised in Seattle (and therefore hosted in Pacific Time) will be 5pm for attendees in London this week, but it would be 4pm GMT the week after, then back to 5pm after that, as the US moves clocks back.

This topic was covered 3 years ago in ToW #301, and most of the tips contained therein are still valid today.

Maybe future generations will stop the winter/summer time flip-flop effect altogether (Californians get to vote on whether to join their neighbours in Arizona, by staying on the same time zone all year, and the EU may stop the practice of changing clocks too). In the meantime, for a few weeks a year, those of us who deal cross-border may need to think a bit more about what the time is in our neighbour’s locale.

If in any doubt, make sure you add another time zone to the time scale on your Outlook calendar view, so you can see at a glance what the time is in other regions.

One further innovation since the last time this topic was aired, is that Outlook now lets you show a third time zone in calendar if you so desire.

Tip o’ the Week 453 – Outlook Quick Steps

Posted on October 25, 2018 by ewand

Somewhat improbably, one fairly prominent feature of Outlook has never been discussed in detail on a previous ToW – Quick Steps. Hiding in plain sight on the Home tab, it’s likely that every Outlook user has clicked on Quick Steps at some point, but do you use them regularly?

Put simply, Quick Steps make some repetitive tasks easy with a single click or even a shortcut key combo – start by selecting a message you’d like to apply some action to (such as moving or categorizing it), or if you’d like to start some new item based on the contents of the message – like create a task or an appointment, including the body of the original mail.

Quick Steps can be applied to individual messages or multiples (hold CTRL key while selecting more than one), including selecting the whole conversation if you’re viewing in that mode. Click on Create New Quick Step (or click the little expand icon in the bottom right, for the Manage Quick Steps dialog, and create one from there).

You’ll see there are plenty of options available for actions that you can take on messages, some already combined if you kick off the New step from within the Manage Quick Steps dialog box – though you can add multiple actions to any one after the initial creation. The Categorize and Move option is particularly handy if you want to file all your mails for a given customer or a specific topic, into a subfolder.

For more on Quick Steps, see the tutorial here. If you ever think about backing up and restoring your defined Quick Steps, see here (very much not for the faint-hearted), or here.

If you haven’t played much with Quick Steps before, have a go – they’re fab-u-lous!

Tip o’ the Week 451 – OneNote auto-listing

Posted on October 25, 2018 (Updated January 7, 2022) by ewand

Here’s a quick tip in OneNote – both the full-fat desktop client and the modern app version – which was inspired either through PEBKAC type unexpected clickery or maybe an Office update that inadvertently switched something off. A common feature stopped working, and it caused a serious dent in productivity…

Despite the two parallel PC versions of OneNote – which have been covered previously in ToWs #441, #427, #386, #320, et al – offering a good chunk of similar functionality to each other, there are still quite a few areas where the old desktop x86 version wins through.

Add-in support is available in the 2016 variant, for example, so you can run OneTastic (and in particular, OneCalendar, which is immensely helpful if you use many notebooks and take a lot of notes throughout your week).

A simpler and more useful feature for many is the ability to grab the contents and context of a meeting request from your Outlook calendar – so you can take notes during a phone call or a meeting, with all the text in the invite, names and email addresses of attendees etc. Can’t do that with

Search in the desktop OneNote is more powerful, too – CTRL-F takes you to the search box, CTRL-E expands your search, but the most powerful and probably least used is to press ALT-O when you have search results from the CTRL-E dialog; it will order them by the date of the page update… helping to filter out current vs obsolete info.

Bullet lists & indentations (sounds like a Muse song)

Did you know that, in both OneNote versions, if you’re typing notes and press the asterisk or dash key at the start of a new line, and then the space bar, it automatically turns your text into a bulleted list? Asterisks in the middle of a text block are ignored; it’s only seen as an auto-correct function if on a new line.

Just hit enter after you’ve started typing to add another new bullet or hit enter at the beginning of new bullet to finish the list. TAB and SHIFT-TAB lets you indent and un-indent a bulleted line. It doesn’t sound all that revolutionary, but if you’re typing notes during a phone call, it can make all the difference between keeping up or missing discussion points as you fish around with the mouse looking to click the toolbar. If you’re used to it and it gets switched off, it’s a real pain.

The same kind of functionality exists in Word and Outlook too, but now and again it does get in the way – if you’re marking a block of text* that you then want to expand on later without auto-bulleting, for example.

* The simplest way to get an asterisk or dash at the start of a new line is to quickly press Undo – CTRL-Z – as soon as the indentation with the bullet happens, and you’ll be reverted to simply having the character at the start of the line.

To enable or disable the automatic list features on desktop OneNote, go into Options and look under Advanced…

There doesn’t appear to be any way of disabling the feature on the Modern App (which you can start by running onenote-cmd: at the Win+R box, if you read ToW #445 and #443) – maybe that’s a good thing, preventing the user from harming their own productivity…

Tip o’ the Week 449 – Snipping Tool gets the snip

Posted on October 4, 2018 (Updated January 19, 2023) by ewand

As mentioned in ToW #447, there are some tweaks coming in the Windows 10 October 2018 update, which might be with us sooner than you think.The old Snipping Tool (not to be confused with the similar screen snipping utility that’s installed if you have OneNote 2016, activated by pressing WindowsKey+S) is going away, and giving way to a new program. And some people aren’t happy about it (in fact, if this was a story which features on the sponsored clickbait tiles on the Edge browser homepage, it’d be described as Microsoft Has a New Trick, and These People are Furious About It…).

The new Snip & Sketch tool (which is a Modern App, and that in itself means Some People Are Mad at What Microsoft Just Did…) also replaces the previous OneNote method (by using WindowsKey+S), launching a simple toolbar at the top of a greyed-out screen, making it quick and easy to either grab a rectangular portion of the screen, a free-form selection, or the whole screen itself.

If grabbing a free-form selection, once you’ve more-or-less completely made a shape and when you release the mouse button you’ve been holding down, then a large “toast” appears in the bottom right of the screen advising that it’s now in the clipboard. If you click on that, you’ll be launched into the Snip & Sketch app, where you can do various tweaks to your grab, save it, share it and so on. An alternative to the Win+S method of invocation is to go into Snip & Sketch to start with, and initiate a new screen grab from there.

Despite the fact it’s a Modern App and People With Too Much Time On Their Hand Think This… is a bad thing, it’s actually pretty snappy and provides a useful polish to one of the more esoteric but handy features in Windows.

Handy especially if you prepare any kind of training documentation, or you’re stupid enough to send out a weekly tips email to thousands of people for 9 years.

Of course, another method (useful in the preparation of this very note) is to rely on the old PrntScn button, the pressing of which dumps the contents of the screen – floating toolbars and everything – straight into the clipboard.

Paste the contents into MSPAINT, then use the Snipping method above to grab the relevant section of your screen grab, and you’re sorted.

Tip o’ the Week 448 – Sometimes, size does matter

Posted on September 20, 2018 by ewand

Once upon a time, users had to deal with email quotas that meant they often had to shuffle messages around to stay within their allowed size limit, or else get limited functionality. The Outlook Thread Compressor tool* was written to help reduce the size of a user’s mailbox, and for a while, had thousands of users inside Microsoft. It inspired the Outlook team to write the “Conversation Clean Up” feature, which works in a slightly different way but does similar things.

Nowadays, with 50 or 100GB mailbox quotas being the norm, most Outlook users don’t need to worry about reducing the size of their mailbox other than to keep it from being too hard to use – a tidy mind and all that. But if you have massive mailboxes, the storage and organisation of all your content may put an unnecessary strain on your PC, so it’s worth taking a few steps to check and clean up if you can.

In Outlook 2016, go to the File menu and look for Tools > Mailbox Cleanup for a bunch of tools that can help, including being able to view your current mailbox size…

… and marvel at a dialog box that hasn’t changed since the earliest days of Outlook, evidenced by the fact it measures size in KB rather than MB or even GB…

Limits to be aware of

There are some recommended limits that have been given to Exchange/Outlook users over the years – not just about the overall size of the mailbox, but the number of items in certain folders and even the number of folders themselves. See a 2005 post on the Exchange blog here, for example, which advises keeping the item count low on certain folders (< 1,000 items in the Inbox, Calendar and Contacts folder was the recommendation then – also on the Exchange Blog, check out some of the examples in this post for early pioneers of huge mailboxes).

In more recent versions of Outlook, though, there are some guidelines to avoid performance problems:

Keep the number of items per folder below 100,000
Keep the total number of folders to less than 500

Now, you’re probably not going to have too many folders with more than 100k items though it might be worth checking Sent Items and Deleted Items. Unfortunately, the mailbox size tool above shows you the total size of each folder, rather than the number of items – and if you want to know how many folder you have, you’d need to manually count them in the scrolling list box: not an easy task if you have lots of them.

It’s quite possible if you’ve had your mailbox for a while, and you’re a very diligent filer (especially if you use a methodology like GTD or tools like ClearContext), you could inadvertently have more than 500 folders – and if you use AutoArchive, then you could find a lot of them are empty, since the archive process moves the items out into another location but leaves the folder structure behind.

FolderCount to the rescue

Here’s an interesting little hobby project – a macro-enabled Excel sheet which cycles through all the folders in your mailbox, tells you how many items are in each one and offers to get rid of the empty ones for you.

It can be run in:

Read Only mode – it’ll just show you what you have, and leave it up to you to clean the mess
Active mode – for each identified empty folder, you’ll be prompted if you’d like to keep or delete it
Nuclear mode – just assumes you want to delete the empties, so doesn’t prompt.

Use with caution; though anything that is successfully “deleted” will be moved to Deleted Items first, therefore you’ll need to run it again to actually do the damage (or just empty your Deleted Items… a thought that fills some people with dread).

To run it, click on the link above, save the file locally, open it up in Excel and you’ll need to enable the Macros to run – probably by first enabling editing, and then allowing macros by “Enable Content”.

Once you’ve done that, click on the appropriate button to let it run. I’d suggest starting with the top one until you feel brave…

*The Thread Compressor tool was made available externally after a time, but the domain disappeared… the actual Outlook Addin is again available here, but you’re a bit on your own as far as installing and using it is concerned…

Tip o’ the Week 446 – What’s brown and sticky?

Posted on September 20, 2018 by ewand

Q: What *is* brown and sticky?

A: A stick…

Q: What’s yellow and sticky?
A: One of the most successful product design failures in history.

Yes, the Post-It note (which has gone on to spawn many imitators, sometimes known as just “stickies” or “sticky notes”) was essentially invented by accident almost 50 years ago, by a scientist at 3M who was trying to make a super-strong glue but instead came up with one that didn’t really stick very well but was at least reusable and didn’t leave any residue behind.

Of course, the real story is a lot less simple – the product really took more than a decade to perfect, and convincing people that it was a viable business took several attempts, but eventually it went on to be one of the most-bought office supplies in history.

The digital equivalent has had decades of evolution too, from a simple note app from the company that brought you Tiny Elvis to the Sticky Notes application that shipped with Windows 7, and innumerable similar apps in the various mobile and desktop app stores.

Starting with the Windows Insider “Skip Ahead” community (but soon to roll out wider), the Microsoft Sticky Notes app has been heavily revised, consolidating the multiple windows that would typically be left on your desktop with a single list, and then pop-out notes that feature multiple colours, support for ink, cross-device syncing and more.

Keep an eye out for the Sticky Notes 3.0 arrival on your PC. As MJF says, with the same team now responsible for OneNote, To-Do/Wunderlist, and Sticky Notes, it’ll be interesting to see how deeply integrated they get.

Tip o’ the Week 445 – Finding Modern App names

Posted on August 24, 2018 (Updated November 5, 2021) by ewand

As detailed in ToW #443, there are ways of running Modern Windows apps from a script, command line or maybe just from the WindowsKey+R Run prompt – so you don’t need to use the mouse or your finger to activate them.

If you’re looking for the shortcut name for your favourite app, there’s a somewhat lengthy process to find out what it is, but at least you only need to do it once…

Try the following:

Fire up PowerShell (press Start, type powershell then make sure you don’t go for the ISE unless you want to do some script authoring and debugging. In other words, if you don’t know why you would want to run PowerShell ISE, then just stick with PowerShell…)
From the PowerShell console, run get-appxpackage > $env:userprofile\apps.txt – this will grab the details of every installed modern app in turn, and pipe all of the text to a file
Press WindowsKey+R and run apps.txt to launch the file, and you’ll see an almost impenetrable wall of text (thousands of lines – in Notepad, go to the View menu and enable the Status Bar then press CTRL+END to jump to the very bottom, if you want to see just how many lines…)

Now, you might be able to figure out from the Name line in the text, which app the following details pertain to, but it’s not always obvious – take the Mail app, for example … if you have it pinned to the Start menu and then drag/drop it onto your desktop to create a shortcut, you can see the target (which is the same as the PackageFamilyName attribute in the text file) is a bit more opaque…
There are all sorts of ways you could dig around in the file system and/or the registry to find out what the shortcut name is to launch your chosen app, but perhaps the quickest is to copy/paste this text into a PowerShell console and hit enter:

foreach ($p in $(get-appxpackage)) { foreach ($n in (Get-AppxPackageManifest $p).package.applications.application.extensions.extension.protocol.name) { $p.packagefullname + “`t `t `t -=- ” + $n } }
This will display a list of all the packages and the “protocols” that each can support, in other words the direct commands you can run to invoke them (if you run that command and stick a “:” on the end). Some will be pretty useless, but others can be handy – like onenote-cmd: which launches the Modern OneNote without the annoying prompt you get if you just try onenote:
If you want to create a traditional (eg Desktop) shortcut to one of your fave apps, just right-click, New, Shortcut and enter the command, give it a name, and Robert’s your father’s brother.

You could use a variant of this approach to automatically launch Modern apps when Windows itself starts – from WindowsKey+R, enter shell:startup and drop (or create) your shortcut in there.

Tip o’ the Week 443 – Starting modern apps

Posted on August 10, 2018 (Updated November 5, 2021) by ewand

Power Users often like to start applications quickly, without recourse to grubbing around with a mouse or a trackpad. Super Users might even want to write scripts that automate all sorts of things that mere mortals with less time on their hands are happy to do manually. Regardless of your penchant for automation, here are a few short cuts you can take to quickly start apps that you use often.

Apps pinned to taskbar

The taskbar in Windows obviously shows you what’s currently running, but can also be used to pin frequently accessed apps or – by default at least – those that Windows thinks should be frequent (Edge, Store, etc – right-click on them to unpin if you disagree). You’ll see a highlight line under the apps that are running, so those without the line are simply pinned there.

If you start typing the name of a favourite app at the Start menu, then right-click on it in the list, you can choose to pin it. So far, so good.

If you drag the pinned apps around, they’ll stay in that position relative to each other, and new apps will always start to the right (or underneath, if you use a vertical taskbar, as you really should). Now, if you press WindowsKey+number, you’ll jump to the app that is n along the line, and if that app isn’t running, then Windows will start it. So in the picture above, pressing WindowsKey+2 would start Edge, or WindowsKey+3 would bring Outlook to the fore.

Shortcut to desktop

You could try an old-skool method, by creating a desktop shortcut to apps that are already on your Start menu – press WindowsKey+D to show the bare desktop itself, then press Start to show the actual Start menu.

Assuming your Start menu isn’t full screen then you’ll be able to drag icons or tiles from the menu to the Desktop, and if you right-click the shortcut and look at Properties, you’ll see a Shortcut key: option… just press some key sequence that makes sense to you and press OK to save.

This method differs from the taskbar one above, because each press of the shortcut you set might start a new instance of the app (if it supports that) – which may or may not be desirable. If you end up with several windows of OneNote, for example, you could cycle through them by repeatedly pressing the appropriate WindowsKey+n as above.

Keep on Running

There’s no better mark of being a real PC deity than by launching your apps through running the executable name… you know the drill? WindowsKey+R to get the Run dialog (it’s so much faster than pressing Start), then enter the app’s real name and you’re off to the races. winword, excel, calc, notepad… they’re for novices. The genuine hardcases might even dive into the (old fashioned, obvs) Control Panel applets like ncpa.cpl rather than navigating umpteen clicks.

Looking at the shortcut to OneNote’s modern app above, though, it’s clear there isn’t a simple executable to run – onenote will launch the on-life-support OneNote 2016 version.

Many modern apps do, however, let you launch them from the Run dialog by entering a name with “:” at the end…

Examples include:

onenote:	Modern OneNote (annoyingly, you may get prompted to open in OneNote 2016 – just hit cancel and it goes away)
ms-settings:	The new-fangled control panel. You can tag on other commands like ms-settings:display or ms-settings:windowsupdate but you might be quicker clicking the icon than typing all of that.
bingmaps:	A good bit quicker than launching the browser and navigating to the maps URL, even if you do press ALT-D to set focus to the address bar, and type bingmaps <CTRL-ENTER> to auto-fill the www. and the .com
outlookmail:	Even though it’s not real Outlook, this launches the Mail part of the Mail & Calendar store app. outlookcal: does the other bit.
ms-windows-store:	For when you can’t wait to check out all the great new apps in the Microsoft Store.
fb:	If you feel the need to do a personality test or look at other people’s holiday photos.

Tip o’ the Week 441 – OneNote updates again

Posted on July 27, 2018 by ewand

As everyone knows…

Tips talking about OneNote include coverage of the Modern App version, on ToW’s

#320, #386, #427 among others. The tl;dr version is that OneNote 2016 = great desktop app, OneNote metro/store/modern/whatev = not so functional but simpler and getting better, with a consistent UI across Windows, Mac, mobile & web. The OneNote team has basically said the desktop version is on life support and all new function development effort is going into the Store app version. Here’s a summary of their differences.

There have been a variety of updates recently – they should make their way to you automagically, or if you want to give your machine a poke to hurry it along, go to the Store app, click the Ellipsis menu in the top right and choose Downloads and updates.

You might see that the Microsoft Store app itself has had a bit of an overhaul, too…

The OneNote Store version (sometimes officially referred to as “OneNote for Windows 10”) is a new codebase, which misses some of the more power-user features of OneNote 2016 but at the same time has added some new functionality that doesn’t exist in the desktop version, like ink to shape conversion. While many of the new feature adds are filling in gaps to the desktop release, some are adding new functions altogether.

The latest update delivers a mixture of new and old – officially, there are no new features (according to the status page, at least at time of writing) but that’s not what is being reported widely (here, here), and by OneNote program manager @William Devereux, who summarised it nicely on Twitter.

If you’re a OneNote 2016 desktop user, why not set yourself a challenge and try switching to the OneNote for Windows 10 version for a week? Both versions can happily coexist and access the same data files, so you won’t lose any data and can easily switch back and forth between them, even running them both at the same time and perhaps with different notebooks open. To change the default version of OneNote, see here.