Tip o’ the Week #298 – Searching and finding

Posted on October 16, 2015 by ewand

Who keeps an up-to-date browser favourites list these days? Most people seem to find web sites by Binging/Googling (other search engines are available(!), though some of the pioneers are no longer around) for the site they know about, rather than in trying to keep a link that might change. This relates to the filing vs. piling analogy of document and email retention, which has been covered before (here).

[The precis is that some people find or recall things by where they are, like in a folder specific to that customer or project, whereas others might have a massive pile of unsorted stuff, but they can recover items within it by remembering key words or attributes, and searching the contents]

You’d think that by now, we’d all be experts at plugging queries into search engines, maybe even doing so before posting stupid stuff on Facebook. Hint – if anything looks dodgy or unbelievable, try searching snopes.com. Please.

Anyway, here are some tips for getting more accurate searches, in a few different places…

Outlook

Did you know you can direct specific search criteria through Outlook’s Search pane? Click on the search box at the top of a folder and you will see the Search menu appear (or the ribbon will automatically show you the Search pane, depending on how you’ve got views set up). If you click on a criterion (like From), then Outlook will build the query for you in the search box, so you can see what it’s doing.

It’s possible to jump a little though – instead of clicking From then editing, you could just type from: Paul to search for all mail sent by anyone with Paul in their name, or try using a combo of other attributes (there are many – see more here), (eg. to: Paul sent: last week). Lots more example tips here.

Yammer

For many users, Yammer is a great conversational and collaboration tool, but even if you don’t use it frequently to post content, it can be a brilliant way of searching for answers to frequently asked questions, that you might not get via email if you aren’t on the right DL.

Thing is, Yammer’s search tends to be a bit overly inclusive – if you enter several terms then you might have one or two more results than you’d expect.

Adding quotes around phrases (“surface 4” “release date”) helps a bit, but it will still search for any occurrence of either phrase, but by adding a + sign to each word or phrase changes the search from an OR to an AND (ie show results with all rather than any of the phrases).

Bing

If you’re looking to trim the results you get from a web search – either carried out from the Bing homepage, or from the address bar in your browser (assuming Bing is the default search engine) – there are a few operators that it’s worth remembering. Adding site:<url> to your query means you’ll only get stuff from there, so it may be quicker to use Bing to search a given site than to go to that site itself and search from within.

Eg. Try this query – site:engadget.com Lumia –iphone, will show results from the Engadget site regarding Lumia phones, that don’t mention iPhones: not too many results there. Try that same query as a web search rather than news (here), and you’ll notice a few pages in other languages. You could try filtering more by language (here). You can also stack site: clauses with an OR (must be capitals) operator, so you could say “Jenson Button” (site:bbc.co.uk OR site:pistonheads.com).

If you’re after particular types of content, you might want to throw the filetype: operator in, eg Azure filetype:pptx site:microsot.com. For more details on the kinds of operators Bing supports, see here.

Google users can find some search tips here, too.

Tip o’ the Week #297 – Personalisation in Windows 10

Posted on October 9, 2015 by ewand

There are some pretty obvious updates and improvements when you move from Windows 8.x to 10 – the most celebrated being the Start menu changes, and the ability to run ~~metro~~ ~~modern~~ Store apps in a window. Running apps in overlapping windows, which can be moved, resized, minimized etc – who’d have imagined that?

Anyway, there are some neat personalisation tweaks that might not be so immediately visible, but can add a bit of a pleasing touch to your Windows experience…

The best way to get to the Settings menu is probably to just press the Start button and choose Settings from there, though you can also get it from the Action Center, shown by swiping from the right of the screen (in Windows 8 charms-stylee), by clicking the Action Center/Notifications icon on your task bar, or pressing WindowsKey+A.

Or you can press WindowsKey+i to open Settings directly.

Once you’re in Settings, you’ll see a nice big Personalisation menu (well it’ll say that if you’re using English (UK) as your default language – nice bit of localisation there, Windows team …), which is typical of the additional thought & polish given to the Settings menu when compared to Windows 8.x, whose PC Settings screen often felt like a thin shim over the old Control Panel (though that is still there – just look under Themes and you’ll quickly be taken back in time to Windows XP).

The Personalisation section includes the predictable background, lockscreen, colour etc options. As well as pretty but samey and potentially slightly boring corporate-provided background images, you could select a series of your own photo albums to show background or lock screen from your OneDrive camera roll, or other locations. Install the Bing Desktop app and you’ll be able to see the beautiful daily images from Bing as your wallpaper.

You can get the machine to set colours based on what kind of background is being shown, which is a surprisingly neat touch.

And under lock screen settings, you can change the apps which display content on the screen, much like the options on Windows Phone where you can pin information from apps to the lock screen.

As above, you’ll see the Settings option on the left side of the start menu, assuming you haven’t turned it off. You can show other shortcuts in the same location by going to Settings | Start | Choose which folders… (though having File Explorer in the list gives you a sub-menu showing pinned items anyway).

If you want to turn back time, you could even allow the Start menu to go back to being full screen… look under Settings | Start

Tip o’ the Week #296 – Win10 Xbox App: snap snap, grin grin

Posted on October 2, 2015 by ewand

There are a variety of apps out there for grabbing your PC screen in video format, using for making tutorials, saving gaming footage or other activities. There are many free screen capture apps (like Microsoft’s Expression encoder, which is still available though no longer being developed) that seem to be either pretty complex (if feature rich), or else they add all kinds of undesirable gunk to your PC at time of installation (does anyone really want the Ask Toolbar?), they force a length limit or watermark on your resulting video, etc. There are other, commercial, products (eg Camtasia) which are really good, though again can be feature-rich and complex.

What if you want to do a simple screen recording to help make a point, and you don’t want to spend ages learning how to use a Swiss Army Knife of a tool, or installing garbage/spyware on your PC, and can’t justify spending a bunch of cash for a software package you’ll use once or twice?

Well, if you’ve got Windows 10, you may be pleased to know there’s an app that comes with the OS that can be used to do exactly this – the Xbox App. You can use it to take screen snaps (though with desktop OneNote installed, you can quickly grab an area of the screen to the clipboard by pressing SHIFT+WindowsKey +S), or you can save video footage of a target application window.

Since the functionality comes with the Xbox app, it’s safe to assume that it’s really intended to save game footage to your machine, but since it works with any windowed app too, then consider it a bonus regardless of whether you’re into gaming or not. Note that it only records one window, so if you’re looking to grab the whole desktop then you’re better off looking at the top of this tip, for Expression, Camtasia or others.

Capturing a window

Launch the Xbox app by clicking on the icon on your Start menu, or press Start and just type Xbox…

Next, start the app you wish to record, then press WindowsKey+G, which will open the Game Bar.

The Xbox app will ask to confirm that the target app you’re trying to record is a game – it doesn’t matter whether the app is or isn’t a game, so just pretend that your target app is a game and launch the Game Bar.

With the Game Bar open, you can either take a screenshot with the Camera icon, or begin recording video with the red circle Record icon. During recording, a small red indicator appears at the top of the currently selected window to confirm that recording is taking place, and showing the duration of the current recording. Clicking it will stop the recording, and pressing WindowsKey+G again will show the Game Bar again.

Even easier, If you have the Xbox app running and the game bar is open, you can flick around to your target app just start recording the current application by pressing ALT+WindowsKey+R or grab a screenshot by pressing ALT+WindowsKey+PrtScrn.

Once your recording is complete, you can find it along with any screenshots with File Explorer under ThisPC\Videos\Captures. You can also find any of your recording in the Xbox app under Game DVR. That’s all there is to it.

Tip o’ the Week #294 – OneDrive sharing & syncing

Posted on September 25, 2015 by ewand

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OneDrive – the consumer-oriented file-sharing service, www.onedrive.com – has added a nice new feature which replicates functionality that used to be possible with other Microsoft file syncing technologies in days gone by, and is a key part of other services like DropBox.

It’s been possible to share folders with people for a long time on OneDrive, or even share individual documents (handy for when you want to make a presentation available to a customer or a conference organizer, for example, and don’t fancy emailing them a 30Mb file), but it’s just been stepped up a gear by allowing people with whom you share your stuff, to synchronise that content onto their own PC.

To get started, put your content into OneDrive either directly from the web UI, by using the OneDrive app or by clip_image003 using the built-in OneDrive client in Windows 10 (look for the white cloud in your system tray, if you’ve set up your Microsoft Account within Windows 10).

Windows 8 can have the OneDrive client installed, and there’s one built-in to Windows 8.1, but, as yet, it appears not to support this sharing functionality – the line is, “Windows 8.1 users, upgrade for free to Windows 10…”

clip_image005 You can also see what other people have shared with you by looking here, or by going to the OneDrive homepage and clicking on the Shared section on the left. You’ll see all the stuff that’s been shared with you previously, and can selectively decide not to show some folders in future – or in the case of content that you’ve been given the ability to add to or edit, you’ll be able to sync those folders to your local PC too.

If you view such a shared folder in OneDrive (via the link that’s emailed to you when your friend clip_image007 sends the sharing email, for example), it will take you straight into that list of shared content, and (again, if you have Edit rights), will give you the option of adding that folder to your own OneDrive. As well as appearing in your Shared list, the folder will now show up in the regular list of folders you see when you look in OneDrive, even though it doesn’t belong to you.

If you’d like to sync that content for offline consumption on your own machine, then users of Windows 10 can right-click on the OneDrive client icon in your taskbar and choose Settings, then clip_image008 Choose Folders, you’ll see the newly-shared folder appear in the list of folder available to sync, just as if it belongs to your own OneDrive storage. Check the box next to the new content to keep a synchronised copy along with your own OneDrive content. Looking at the shared, synced files in Windows Explorer, you won’t be able to see who originally posted the file into the folder, but if you view it in the browser, then it’s possible to see that info.

You might want to think about this when setting up shared folders with lots of contributors – collecting photos from a stag do or a company event, for example, it may be best to ask each contributor to create their own folder so it’s easier to see who’s responsible for the pictures, and to stop them inadvertently mucking around with each other’s

Tip o’ the Week #295 – Outlook 2016 tweaks

Posted on September 18, 2015 by ewand

Office 2016 for the PC is nearly here. Many Office users have been already running a preview version, detailed here, but according to Julia White, the rollout of the final 2016 release will begin on 22^nd September.

With many new capabilities that might appeal to IT admins, and with distribution increasingly being done as part of Office365, end-users might be forgiven for missing what the differences are over 2013 or even noticing that the upgrade has taken place.

In Excel and PowerPoint, there are new charting types, additional polish to numerous capabilities in data presentation, analysis tools and the likes. OneNote goes largely unchanged, except for some high-DPI capabilities on very large or very dense screens. Outlook has some tweaks for being shown in portrait mode on tablet devices, and also gets some changes to how it goes about connecting to the Exchange/Office365 back end. Office apps also now support multi-factor authentication, so it’s possible to get users to strongly authenticate when trying to open a specific document, for example.

I’ll tell you what I want

One nice end-user additions to most Office apps (sadly, not OneNote) is a new feature called “Tell me” – a text box that sits to the right of the menu bar, which lets you tell the software what you want it to do. Think of it like Help on Steroids, or Clippy’s Revenge.

Click on the light-bulb on your menu, (keyboard warriors press ALT+SHIFT+Q, or just ALT then Q), and type what you want the Office app to do… and rather than just showing you help about how to do it yourself, it may jump straight to that command.

Try this – press ALT+SHIFT+Q and type forward (and as you’ll see, that is the top option anyway, after only a few letters, for… at least, it is in English…); press ENTER, then send a copy of this tip to all your friends. Simples.

You can enter help requests too, and Office will try to figure out what you’re doing, and if all else fails you can search the Help files for your phrase, or perform a “Smart Lookup” – which searches the web and displays the results in a pane to the right of the application.

Outlook has a history of incremental smart additions, like the attachment detector that first appeared a few years ago now – if it thinks you’re trying to send a message with an attachment, but you haven’t attached a file, you’ll get a pop up to check …

Well, attaching files got a bit different in Outlook 2016, and it’s one of the neatest new features, even if it’s not rocket engineering.

When attaching a file within Outlook 2016, you can drag & drop files as before, but if you click on the paper-clip icon on a message, you’re presented with a list of most-recently-used documents.

If the document you’re selecting lives on a SharePoint site, then (depending on how you have Office configured) the default paste behaviour may be to include a link to that doc rather than to paste the original into the email – so you can do what people have talked about for years, and that is send around pointers to the current version rather than attached copies which will go stale.

Obviously, sometimes people won’t be able to access the online variant, so it’s still possible to decide to attach a copy instead, in the traditional sense.

Be careful when sending attachments to external users as it could be quite easy to send them a link to a shared document (which they won’t be able to access) instead of a proper attachment.

Maybe a future “attachment detector” will sense that you’re trying to email a shared document to an outside recipient, and offer to replace it with an attachment instead.

ß Who knows, maybe there’s a hidden Easter Egg already in Office 2016 already…?

There are some features in Office that might appear to be Eater Eggs but are actually designed to be useful, if hidden, functions. Try typing =rand() into a Word doc, or =lorem(100) (or number of your choice), to generate lines and lines of lorem ipsum guff.

Tip o’ the Week #293 – STOP SHOUTING ON CONF CALLS

Posted on September 11, 2015 by ewand

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Keeping track of the characters on conference calls could be a new type of buzzword bingo – from the people who stay muted the whole time (the only word they say being “bye”, at the end), to the unmuted furious typer/clicker/lunch eater/talker-to-somebody-else.

This brilliant spoof of conference calls in real life features most of them, but not the blast-radius shouter that is probably more of a nuisance to people physically sitting next to him/her than to others on the call. Sure beats real meetings, mind.

Thanks to Brett Johnson, for pointing out that there’s a feature in Windows that might help reduce the volume of the well-meaning noise pollutant, something known as Sidetone. Turns out, this has been in Windows for ages, if you have a headset that supports it.

clip_image004 What Sidetone does is to play your own voice back into the audio stream you’re listening to, so if you have a headset that covers your ears entirely and blocks out background noise, you don’t completely isolate yourself and end up shouting to compensate.

To access the setting, plug in your headset then right-click on the volume icon in your system tray and select Playback devices to open the Sound settings applet, then double-click on your headset and look in the Levels tab.

Try it out and have a play with the levels, with a willing guinea pig: it’s a surprisingly subtle effect, but one that you won’t want to overdo.

Now, all we need to do is to build a Skype addin for meeting organisers to subvert the Sidetone on chosen attendees, to put a bit of a delay into the replay of their spoken voice, which could effectively deal with some of the other characters on the calls… and now we know how Garth from Wayne’s World achieved his effect.

Tip o’ the Week #292 – Stop the ads on Edge

Posted on August 28, 2015 by ewand

clip_image001 Advert blocking in Internet Explorer was covered back in ToW #247, highlighting some ways to stop annoying adverts from taking over your browser. The internet has plenty of examples of misplaced advertisement, not all of them online banner ads.

There’s a burgeoning industry in providing ad-blocker type extensions for browsers, which basically intervene and elect not to show you the ads – or the “suggested content” or other stuff that not only clutters up your favourite web pages, but also slows down their loading.

Most ad-blocking software runs inside the browser to analyse what’s going on and decide if it wants to let content through. Thing is, the Microsoft Edge browser in Windows 10 doesn’t (yet) have extensions, so there’s not much to do about adverts if you’d like to use Edge as your browser.

3^rd party software

Some 3^rd parties have started offering software that purports to stop ads in Edge – eg. Adguard Adblock, but whether not looking at ads is worth the $20 fee for use (beyond a trial period) is debatable. Either wait for more support from ad-blocking specialists, for updates from Microsoft which may help, or look to other solutions.

HOSTS file manipulation

Deep in the roots of the TCP/IP protocol which underpins the internet, lies an anachronism known as a HOSTS file. This was provided originally to tell your machine how to find other machines’ IP addresses given their names; they sometimes took precedence over other methods (like Domain Name System, DNS) or were a useful backstop if a name/address couldn’t be found trhough other means. Ultimately, HOSTS became unnecessary for the most part.

To see if your PC has a HOSTS file already, try running (WindowsKey+R):

notepad %systemroot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.

There is a neat trick to immediately block a lot of well-known advert-serving sites. Think of it that the web page you’re reading is also telling your browser to go to sitea.com, siteb.net and sitec.biz to show you lots of ads and other content from those places. If you were to put a hosts file on your PC, which specified that each of these sites refers to the mysterious concept called “localhost”, then it means your PC will quickly redirect to itself when it comes to serving up any of that content, and it will immediately fail and move on.

Several online communities maintain communal hosts files that list the URLs of a lot of common advert sources, and if you drop an appropriate file on your PC every few months (or whenever you notice there are more annoying adverts appearing), it will quietly deal with the menace, and operates at a low level so you don’t need to do anything to your browser(s).

Find a HOSTS file

There are many out there, but a good one is from MVPS.org (which lists ~15,500 known ad-serving URLs):

Click http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip to download to your PC
In Microsoft Edge, click the View downloads button
You should see the hosts.zip file at the top of your list on the right – click on it to open
Double-click on the mvps batch file, then select Extract all then Extract, to unzip the whole lot into a folder
Select with left-click, then right-click on mvps and choose Run as administrator to update your hosts file
You can always go back into your downloads folder and delete the folder created above – its work is done

You will likely need to tweak the registry to enable Hosts resolution:

Press WindowsKey+R then run regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Dnscache\Parameters then

Click Edit > New > DWORD Value then type MaxCacheTtl
Click Edit > New > DWORD Value then type MaxNegativeCacheTtl
Double-click on the MaxCacheTtl key on the right pane, and enter the value 1
Double-click on the MaxNegativeCacheTtl key on the right pane, and enter the value 0

Another option would be to open this zip file, then double-click the file within, click Run, then Yes, Yes and OK. Assuming you trust this site, you won’t now be showing up on some list of transgressors, you’ll just have avoided the grubbiness of editing the registry as per the section above.

Now let’s compare one page:

BEFORE:

AFTER:

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clip_image006 Some sites will substitute blank space for the missing ads, but for content like the Other Stuff you might want to click on (such as the Taboola-type clickbait guff that’s normally at the bottom of the page), site may just quietly ditch whole sections without you ever knowing.

You may see the odd weird missing bit on some pages (eg from Ebay, see >>>), but that’s surely a fair price to pay for not cluttering up your machine with annoying adverts, having auto-playing videos blaring at you, etc. Now if they only made adverts like they used to, it wouldn’t be such a chore.

Pea & Ham, from a Chicken? Now that’s clever.

Tip o’ the Week #291 – A few handy date handling tips

Posted on August 21, 2015 by ewand

clip_image001 Sometimes, the Tip o’ the Week is all about one topic, and sometimes it’s a theme that spans several things. Today’s is just such a smörgåsbord of stuff, spanning a number of apps that are concerned with dates.

Windows 10 dates

This is not a new topic for ToW – the swish new Alarms & Clocks app that ships with Windows 10 was covered in #280, though the UI has changed a little since then. If you hover your mouse over the date/time on your taskbar, you’ll see a clip_image003 familiar preview that tells you a bit more detail. If you click on that section, you’ll see the new calendar view, with a link to Date and time settings which will take you to the system Settings > Time & language > Date & time options. In here, under Related settings, you can add clocks for an additional couple of time zones, if you need to – give them a label, then you’ll see those additional times clip_image005 displayed atop the calendar and the larger display of the current time.

Hovering on the system tray shows a simple view clip_image007 of the same thing. Handy for those of us who regularly work with people from all over the world, and want to make sure you’re not booking conference calls in the middle of the night. Outlook allows you to easily show a second time zone in your calendar – just right-click on the border to the left of the calendar itself, choose Change Time Zone and in the resulting dialogue box, tick the box to show an additional time zone and give it a label.

OneNote page dates

clip_image009 If you use OneNote (the desktop version – does anyone prefer the Store app?) in a shared fashion, then you’ll see coloured blocks when other people update sections of the text clip_image011 , though it’s not so easy to figure out when you last edited a page (in short, you can see the date you edited a page by looking under History tab, Recent Edits or Find by Author, but it’s not always that obvious).

If you’re using a template repeatedly (Sales Account Plans, for example, where you take a copy of a pro forma plan then complete it), or if you’re updating pages of old notes, you may want to adjust the date/time that’s displayed at the top of the OneNote page, to show yourself (and other readers, maybe) that it has updated content.

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Click on the date under the title, and then the calendar icon which appears to its side, and you’ll be able to use a date picker to change the date – or simply click the Today button to set the current date. The same process works with the time field, too – click on it, then on the clock icon, and you can set the time – with the default being the time now.

clip_image017 OneNote has a couple of other neat date tricks that have also featured before on ToW – like the ability to insert today’s date or time, on the Insert tab – if you hover over the first two, you’ll be reminded that ALT+SHIFT+D or T inserts the Date or the Time, but hovering over Date & Time doesn’t remind you that ALT+SHIFT+F, does.

Tuck that away in your sporran for future use, as it’s supremely handy when adding notes (eg from a phone call) to the end of an existing page.

Other Office apps

Excel has a similarly handy shortcut – CTRL+; adds the current date to the selected cell, and CTRL+: adds the time. Word has a different way again; you can go to the Insert tab and look under Text > Date & Time which then displays a dialogue box to ask how you’d like it formatted. The same box can be got to more quickly by holding ALT then pressing N and then D, which is basically jumping to the menu using keyboard shortcuts. That same combo works in Outlook when editing an email, too.

While on the topic of Outlook, there’s one last tip and it’s a belter. Every time Outlook gives you a date & time control – like when you’re editing an appointment, for example – you can select the current value and replace it, either by typing in the new date/time or by using the date picker or time drop down.

clip_image019 But the date control also has some other smarts – you can put additions to dates, for example, so you could type the end date to be “tomorrow” and it will automatically figure out the offset from today and set it appropriately. The duration of the meeting will also be set, so if you subsequently went back to the start date and typed “tomorrow”, the end date would be a day further out. Clever eh?

Here are some others to try – just type a number in the date field and it sets to that number of the current month, or type next month to set the date exactly one calendar month away from the current value (or 2 months, or 1 year…). The most useful ones are often things like next Monday or in 3 days (or just 3d if you don’t want to wear your keyboard out; next mo, 2mo, 1y do the same). There are lots of special dates too – Christmas, New Year’s Eve, Independence Day, Halloween etc. You can even combine them, so could say 2^nd Monday in January or 3 days after Christmas. Maybe Outlook will integrate with Cortana one day, and you could enter “Steve’s birthday” or “my wedding anniversary”…

Tip o’ the Week #290 – get your Groove on

Posted on August 14, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002 It’s quite useful to have a catalogue of names that can be put to different uses. Codenames are frequently reused, and there was a time when every new product had to have a snazzy moniker – remember Daytona, Natal or more recently Spartan?

As well as the more public ones, there are all kinds of internal project and product codenames that never make it out into the wild. Nowadays, openly referring to old products exclusively by their pre-release code names is no longer a sign of authority and more an indication of being a wazzock.

Product names, on the other hand, sometimes get reused, though not often by the same company. Microsoft, however, took the original Surface name from the table-computer (now PixelSense) and applied it to tablet computers, and has also now renamed ~~Zune~~ Xbox Music to Groove (not to be confused with this Groove), featuring the Windows 10 app called Groove Music and a subscription service called the Groove Music Pass. If you already had Xbox Music content, you need do nothing – it’s a rebranding exercise and some fresh new app functionality. If you don’t have Win10 or a Music Pass, check out the web player to see what’s available.

Great News! Groove Music Pass users can now play with Sonos, so there’s no need to keep a Spotify (… Deezer, et al) subscription if you’re already a Groove Music Pass user. If you’re tired of waiting for Sonos to release a proper controller app for Windows Phone or Windows 8/10, then check out Andy Pennell’s Phonos. Or take to Sonos’ forums to ask what’s happening, though be prepared for a wall of silence neither confirming nor denying if and when a Windows Phone app is coming.

Readers with long memories might recall where “Groove” came from – it was the product of Groove Networks, brainchild of erstwhile Lotus Notes inventor, Ray Ozzie, whose company was acquired by Microsoft 10 years ago, largely to get the man himself. Along came the baggage of the (frankly horrid) Groove 3.1 then Groove 2007, which begat Sharepoint Workspace and was subsequently deep-sixed as a separate product line. Or so you may have thought.

If you dig around in Task Manager (CTRL-SHIFT-ESC to jump there quickly, keyboardinjas), or better still, use the excellent Process Explorer from SysInternals, you’ll see something interesting…

That’s right – the bones of Groove live on in OneDrive for Business, at least for now – the plan being to unify the OneDrive for Business and consumer OneDrive sync engines. Good thing too.

Tip o’ the Week #288 – When I’m reinstalling Windows

Posted on August 7, 2015 by ewand

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Now that Windows 10 is here, Whether you’ll be waiting for a new machine that comes with Windows 10, or whether you’ll be one of the millions that will upgrade, there’s lots to be thrilled about or to quietly look forward to, depending on your personal level of excitability.

If you’ve been running a preview version of Windows 10 then it may be best to install a clean build of the RTM, just to be sure there’s nothing left behind that might clog your machine up. Some say it’s probably best practice to wipe your PC every year or two, and reinstall only the stuff you need.

clip_image003 Fortunately, with OneDrive and Office365, reinstalling isn’t the major effort it used to be – with a huge mailbox, nobody should need PST files anymore and fret about whether they’re backed up properly. No need to worry about My Documents when OneDrive (on your home machine) can accommodate Terabytes of data, and OneDrive for Business (on your work PC) will sync all of your stuff too.

If you’re linking your MSA (Microsoft Account, ie Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com etc address) then lots of other settings will be replicated between machines too.

There are a few things that don’t automatically get sorted out – Outlook Signatures being a particular annoyance, though moving them into OneDrive has been covered in ToW #267. Another is the list of notebooks which OneNote is configured to open – you may be able to select from your commonly used notebooks when you start the desktop version of OneNote up, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a quick shortcut to where they’re all stored, to make it easy to find them again?

OneTastic again

ToW regular contributor Stuart Leeks once again recommends a particularly neat trick, courtesy of the awesome OneTastic suite of extensions and addins to OneNote. OneTastic and OneCalendar come from the hand of Omer Atay, who’s part of the OneNote team but has built these tools on his own. There is form for home-grown extensions making it – more or less – into the product… maybe Omer’s product group will follow suit.
[Outlook Thread Compressor is long dead, btw; don’t bother trying to download it now]

Anyway, if you use OneNote in anything more than a cursory capacity, go to http://www.omeratay.com/onetastic/?r=download immediately and download the app.

clip_image005 OneTastic adds loads of functionality, including a macro language and the MacroLand repository of useful extra commands. One such downloadable is the List Notebooks macro which will generate a page at the current section, listing each of the notebooks you currently have open and with a hyperlink to reference the book directly. So when you rebuild your machine, even before reinstalling OneTastic, just click on each link to reopen the notebook.

The genesis of OneTastic was OneCalendar, an amazingly useful applet which shows you each page you’ve visited in OneNote arranged by date – so if you know you took notes on a call last week, you don’t need to navigate to the page or search for it… just go to OneCalendar, and the page will be listed on the day in question. If you’re using shared notebooks, then OneCalendar will even embolden pages that other people have updated – a feature which could be super-handy or super-annoying, depending on how collaborative your co-workers are.

clip_image007 If you use lots of notebooks, there’s a neat feature in OneCalendar, which might help – take a look in Settings clip_image009 and you can specify which notebooks OneCalendar will show you changes from – so you might want to restrict it to the less busy notebooks and all your own personal stuff, or maybe even get into the habit of turning some on & off when required.

There are lots of shortcut keys in OneCalendar, for the power user – CTRL and + / – will make the text larger & smaller, CTRL+ Left / Right arrow moves back and forth between days/weeks/months (depending on what level of zoom you’re viewing), CTRL+ 1 / 2 / 3 switches between the days/weeks/months, and CTRL+ S jumps to settings. CTRL+ 0 jumps to Today, and CTRL+ F lets you “find” so it will filter the view based on keywords.