Tip o’ the Week #280 – Telling time on Windows 10

Posted on June 4, 2015 by ewand

clip_image001 For some time now, the death of the watch has been predicted, as people increasing use other devices to tell the time. The frenzy of interest around the Apple watch (even if it’s only being worn as a bit of bling) maybe shows that there’s life in the wristwatch idea yet, and whatever happens, people still need to know what time it is.

Maybe now is the era where many watches are exclusively for style and feeling, rather than for the simple utility of timekeeping. Just as celebrity petrolhead blabber Jay Leno described the automobile as the “savior of the horse” (in that horses would no longer be collectively abused as mere transport, and instead be cultivated & enjoyed as leisure), perhaps the world of horology is all about cheap and essentially disposable watches; devices like clocks, phones or computers that also tell the time; and old-fashioned mechanical watches & expensive fripperies that are primarily about “looking good” and showing off (hmmm), just like Mr Lagerfeld’s fruity phone.

Of course, as you sit at your PC, there are a number of ways to see the time – something that has been covered in the past on ToW (for Windows 7 and Windows 8). There’s a snazzy new clock application in Windows 10, that is also now worth taking a look at…

Double-click on the date/clock in the system tray and you’ll see clip_image002 the current time and a date picker that’s been redesigned to be clip_image003 touch-friendly. Clicking on Additional clocks also launches the new Alarms & Clocks application which integrates a couple of useful stopwatch & timer functions as well as a day/night view of the world map, and a configurable list of locations that you may want to keep an eye on, so you know the time at a glance.

There’s a nice “Convert” option too, where you can drag a time slider and see what the time (and condition of daylight) would be at all your listed locations; so there’s no excuse if you’re setting up calls with people from all over the globe, in choosing a time that’s inherently unsuitable. This app has the default aspect ratio of a phone app, and we can look forward to the same sort of functionality when Windows 10 lands on phones, too.

If you don’t have Windows 10 yet (check it out here), there is a simple way of finding out the current time in an overseas location, and even displaying a real-time proper clock…

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If you enter “time <place>” into Bing.com, you’ll see the current time and time zone there – in fact, lots of locations also have other details that are shown alongside, like maps, current weather, travel tips etc.

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Tip o’ the Week #278 – Skype for Business UI tips

Posted on May 29, 2015 by ewand

Skype for Business has rolled out across a good number of customers and it’s, generally-speaking, a great UI update compared to Lync. The clients’ histories were covered a few weeks ago, if you’re interested…

But there are a few differences that could catch people out. If you join a conference call, for example, it’s possible you won’t see the list of attendees, where with the old Lync client, you’d be able to quickly show them with a click of the chunky Participants button clip_image002 in the Lync meeting UI. In Skype for Business, during an IM chat or call, you’ll see there’s no equivalent participant button – there’ clip_image004 s the usual button to show the IM window, which shows the text chat section but not the participants button.

clip_image006 This has been moved to higher up in the UI – it varies depending on which kind of chat/meeting/conference you’re in. Click on the icon to the left of clip_image008 the text (hover and you’ll see the Open Participant List tooptip) and you’ll be able to view that list.

On a simple IM conversation, the same thing is true, too, only with a smaller button.

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If you look in the Settings | Tools | Options page within the Skype for Business client, under the Skype Meetings setting, you can set the default on what happens when you join a meeting.

There are some other tweaks too, such as using the view icon on the top right of the meeting window – Gallery View shows you a horizontally-arranged list of attendees’ mugshots, which can be right-clicked to interact with them. Speaker View hides clip_image016 all of that, but still shows a picture of you next to the person who’s currently speaking, and Content View hides both in favour of the presentation content that’s being shown (the “Stage”).

Tip o’ the Week #279 – Windows 10’s multiple desktops

Posted on May 22, 2015 by ewand

clip_image002 Windows 10 is developing apace. A new build (10112) arrived this week if you’re on the “Fast Ring” for getting updates (check here if you’re already on Win10 but are not sure about how quickly you’ll get updates). Sometimes, latest builds get two steps forward and one step back, though; if you want to be on the leading edge, be prepared for occasional gremlins.

If you’re not using Windows 10 yet, then check out the Windows Insider program (there are millions of participants already).

One of the nice features of Windows 10 that’s maybe less obvious than the Start Menu, the windowed Modern apps etc etc, is the ability to have multiple desktops. clip_image003 To access, just click on the the Task View icon on your taskbar – assuming you are showing that icon (if not, right-click on the task bar and enable it). Another means to access it is to press WindowsKey+TAB (remember that Flip 3D feature in Vista that nobody used outside of demos?)

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The Task View gives you a nice layout of all the running applications’ windows, so you can see what’s happening and quickly jump between them. Down in the bottom-right corner, there’s a New Desktop button… click that and you can create multiple, virtual desktops to arrange your windows on.

If you run lots of applications and want to group them appropriately, you could dock them onto each clip_image009 of the virtual desktops that appear at the bottom of the task view screen – just drag & drop the windows of your running apps.

Now, if you look in Task View, you’ll only see the windows that are docked onto the virtual desktop you have selected, though if you use the old ALT-TAB way of switching between apps, you’ll see all of them in the list, regardless of which virtual desktop they’re currently sitting on.

Keyboard shortcut junkies might want to know that WndKey+CTRL+D will create you a new desktop and jump straight to it, WndKey+CTRL+F4 will close the current desktop and move any windows that are on it, to the next desktop. Perhaps the most useful combo of all is WndKey+CTRL+LEFT or +RIGHT, which flicks between the desktops you have open – so if you’re doing work that needs you to quickly move between two apps, especially if you only have a single physical screen, then this is a great way of doing it.

Tip o’ the Week #276 – Reduce massive PowerPoint files

Posted on May 9, 2015 by ewand

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clip_image004 Windows Explorer has a search function which can filter found files, based on some attribute or other – so you return files that are only of a particular type or age, or maybe of a specific size. The problem is, the understanding of what is a big file has changed over the years.

In the days of the floppy disk, any file larger than 1Mb was a bit unwieldy. When server hard disks cost £1,000 per Gb, then file servers would impose quotas of maybe a few 10s of Mbs per user.

But now, with storage so cheap (e.g. a 4Tb hard drive is a little over £100, Azure storage is a few pennies per Gb/month, and OneDrive seemingly can’t wait to give it away) it’s easy to become blasé about very large files. clip_image006

One particular culprit in the generation of unnecessarily mahoosive files is PowerPoint. With the ease of inserting graphics and video, especially, it’s not hard to get files well into double figures of megabytes, which can be problematic to email and take ages to open. There are a few tips that can help you keep the size a little more trim.

Delete stuff you don’t need

Well, duh. Obviously, deleting stuff can make a big difference to the file size: before distributing a deck, maybe dump the hidden slides and the many appendix slides unless you feel they might be a useful reference…

It’s sometimes not as easy as ditching slides you don’t need, however – the template you’re using might have a lot of imagery that’s unnecessary in it, so it may be worth cleaning up a little.

Go into the View tab, look under Slide Master and you’ll be able to see the slide templates that define the look and the layout of new slides. It’s not uncommon to find hundreds of these, though in most cases they’re not a cause for concern – unless they have lots of images embedded.

This is particularly the case when an elaborate slide deck is produced for a conference, and people start using that template as the basis for their own presentations, because it’s got a really nice background or whatever – not realizing that the template might have 10Mb of grinning stooges holding long-obsolete mobile devices and conference logos from years gone by. If you don’t use the graphics slides, feel free to delete them from the master, then Close Master View to go back the regular deck. (Might be an idea to save a copy of the deck first, just in case you muck it up…)

Look within

The PPTX file format that has been used by PowerPoint since 2007 is part of the Open XML file formats – the idea being that instead of a proprietary binary file, the artefacts and contents within the file are described using XML according to a published format, so other applications could re-use the files. In order to achieve this and not end up with huge file bloat (XML not being well known for its brevity), the whole shebang is compressed.

What you may not know is that all of the Open XML formats use the same compression as ZIP files, and if you rename the .PPTX extension to .ZIP, you’ll be able to see inside it.

clip_image010 Navigate to your file location, and make sure can see the file extensions – go to the View tab in Explorer and tick the File name extensions box if you can’t see them. Make a copy of the PPTX file you want to work on, select it and right-click to Rename (or just press F2). Now overtype the .pptx bit at the end with .zip, and agree to the dire warning that the Earth might stop turning if you continue.

Now open the ZIP file up and look in a couple of places to see what is likely to be making it huge – ppt\media and ppt\embeddings are a couple of notable sources (the clip_image012 former when you’ve maybe got a video or just lots of high-res pictures embedded, and the latter is a common source of embedded XLS files which might be unnecessary… ie. Maybe you could get away with a simple copy of relevant data, rather than the whole file?). Maybe the best way to slim down the file is to open the un-renamed one in PowerPoint, then navigate to the place where the huge content was and resize, compress or replace it.

Compress pictures

A very simple way of cutting the size of large files without digging around in their innards might clip_image014 be just to compress pictures – you can get to that from the Format tab when you have a picture selected, and clip_image016 individually reduce the size and resolution of each image.

Alternatively, when it’s time to save your work, use Save As and under the Tools drop down in the lower right of the dialog, you can invoke the same function, but which applies clip_image018 to every image in the deck.

Choose the appropriate resolution – Screen is probably a good one for PPT, though the same picture compression functionality is also available in Word and Outlook, so if you’re pasting images into an email then resizing them, it’s an idea to compress them and you can get away with an even lower resolution there.

Tip o’ the Week #275 – Prioritising External Email

Posted on May 1, 2015 (Updated April 7, 2023) by ewand

Do you suffer from email overload? The temptation is to get dragged into dealing with all the nonsense internal emails and corporate spam, but it’s worth trying to prioriti(z)|(s)e email from external senders, excepting the genuine bulk guff that you can spot quickly and delete.

Here’s a simple Outlook tip to help; it installs a custom form into your Inbox, which takes some minor faffage, but it’s a one-off process that will stay with your mailbox forever… and it allows you to create rules to prioritise email that comes from outside over the blah-de-blah you get from within.

Here’s a Before & After view of the same mailbox… you’ll guess which emails are from external senders…
{NB: this view was carefully constructed for demo purposes – some of the external emails are clearly bulk mail that could easily be ~~deleted~~ filed, but it shows that anything which originated outside and is still in the inbox, is more highlighted than everything that didn’t/isn’t}

Now to Install the form

The next section involves digging around in Outlook options, which will probably involve a fair bit of flicking to and from this window… and although reading the steps in email sounds horribly complex, it’s actually dead easy to follow if you have it step-by-step in front of you… So you might want to print this article out to make it easier to follow …

Firstly, download this ZIP file to your PC. It contains a couple of icon files and the .CFG file which defines a new form in Outlook, and that form exposes as a custom field, one of the deeply-buried properties of email messages.

Save it in your Downloads folder if you like, then open that location in Windows Explorer,
Right-click on the ZIP file and choose Extract All.
Open the folder where the files now live,
Hold down the SHIFT key and right-click on the SenderAddressType.CFG file, then choose Copy As Path

OK, now back in Outlook, go to File | Options | Advanced then scroll down to find the Developers section, and click on Custom Forms…

Now, click on the Manage Forms button, and you’ll see a dialog to do just that… click on the button Install, then a dialog box will pop up to look for the form you want to install – paste the location to the .CFG file you Copied as Path above… You should see the Sender Address Type form appear in the list, after which you may Close | OK | OK to get back to main Outlook window.

Alright, now you’ve added a form which will allow you to expose a field – similar to the usual ones like sender or size or subject – which shows the type of address that sent the email. It’s not infallible – some internal mail comes from SMTP systems, but almost all internal email doesn’t – so it’s actually more a way of filtering out most internal mail than it is a way of highlighting everything external.

Anyway, here’s how to create the above view…

When in your Inbox, Go to the View tab in the main Outlook window, and look under View Settings – this will now let you tweak the settings of the current view, in the current folder
Click on the Conditional Formatting button in the dialog which pops up – this can set rules on how emails are highlighted, or not, and is what’s used by default to make unread emails bold, or urgent emails red.
Create a new rule by clicking on Add then give it a name, then click on the Condition button. This now sets the times when the rule will fire – so the best thing to do is go straight to the Advanced tab…
click Field and scroll down to the Forms… option at the very bottom, to choose the form you’ve just installed …
Select the new Sender’s Email… form, click on Add-> and then Close. This will then allow you to use that form to choose attributes for formatting. If you later chose to create Search Folders, Inbox rules or other filtering within Outlook, the same process would apply.
Still at the Field drop-down, now choose the new form from the list and select the field, Sender Address Type. This is the one custom field that was added through the whole form shenanigans above – if the sender was internal, it’s probably either blank or EX, if external it’ll be SMTP.
Now, set the criteria – if the Sender Address Type is SMTP, then we want to treat it differently – click Add to List then OK.
Finally, set the view attributes you’d like on the emails which match this condition – best avoid bold as other rules will probably be setting bold on unread emails, but italics in a different colour and a different size could be a good combination… try it out and if necessary, just go back in here to tweak to your satisfaction.

You may find that the customised view doesn’t show up on every PC, however the form is now installed in your mailbox so should be available everywhere – so if you needed to create new versions of this view, it should be much more straightforward. To edit the view in another folder, repeat the last few steps above (starting from the View tab as above, but this time in your other folder – the form is available all the time so you don’t need to install it again).

Tip o’ the Week #273 – Projecting your Windows Phone

Posted on April 24, 2015 by ewand

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It’s often handy to be able to show to an audience what’s happening on a phone’s screen (or other device). Many an A/V technician has had to deal with the challenges of switching from PowerPoint clip_image003 bore-ware to an analogue ELMO projector, trying to set autofocus so as not to make the audience sick, and the light levels balanced enough so people can actually see what’s going on.

There are a few options for projecting what’s happening on your phone using a more modern solution – you can use Miracast to send images over Wifi to a suitable telly or projector (though it can be a “fragile” process).

If you have a No-KEE-Ah phone (you may need IE compatibility mode or Chrome to show that page properly), you may want to check to see if Wifi projection is supported on your device (NB: 820, 920 and 1020 are not on the list). See the Help for more details of either wired & WiFi solutions.

If you’re presenting using a PC anyway, why not cable up your phone over USB and run the separately-installed Project My Screen app instead? All you need to do is install & run the app on the PC, plug the phone in, and you’ll get a prompt to mirror the display of the phone on the PC, and Bob’s Your Uncle.

clip_image005 Symbol Swipe

One thing you might want to show your friends is how they can more easily use Word Flow on their phone, and maybe how to quickly swipe symbols and numbers (a tip courtesy of Robert Deupree Jr. and his excellent Microsoft internal Yammer group) – in a nutshell, tap and hold the “&123” symbol key in the bottom left of the keyboard, and instead of then tapping the key you’d like – such as a number – instead, keep your finger on the &123 key and then swipe to end up on the destination key, then release to go back to the standard keyboard layout.

It maybe sounds more complex than it looks – so is probably easier to show than explain.

Tip o’ the Week #274 – Hello, Skype for Business

Posted on April 17, 2015 by ewand

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Instant Messaging (and later, voice/video calling) has been with us, in the corporate world, for 15 years – the first real enterprise IM platform was Exchange 2000 Instant Messaging, which used a variant of MSN Messenger as its client, and some workers had been using MSN and AOL for a while before that.

The Exchange 2000 IM server was a one-off; it was superseded by Microsoft Office Live Communication Server (released at a time when everything at Microsoft was seemingly prefixed or suffixed “Live”, and somehow linked to Windows or Office) and latterly Office Communications Server (when the edict came around to ditch the practice of sticking “Live” in every product name), and later acquired the much groovier name of “Lync”.

And now the next phase has rolled out; just as the original MSN Messenger gave way to Windows Live Messenger (see?) and then went away in favour of Skype, Lync has now given over to Skype for Business – though SFB is effectively a technology update, rebranding & a new UI, rather than the wholesale change of underlying technology that MSN/Live Messenger to Skype was.

So now we have Skype for Desktop (the traditional Windows, Mac etc application, which uses a Skype ID or Microsoft Account to sign in), there’s Skype for a variety of mobile & TV platforms, Skype for Outlook.com (the plugin to Outlook.com online email, you know, the email service that was once Hotmail). And for Windows 8.x users, there’s also Skype the Modern Application, now also being referred to as Skype for Tablet.

D’ya follow?

And now the spangly new Skype For Business client has been distributed via Windows Update, as an update to Lync – so you may already have received it. If you haven’t, and you’re still on Lync, you could either:

Try downloading the update to turn Lync into Skype, from KB2889923
If you’re running Office in “Click to Run Mode”, you can check for updates by going into (for example) Word and choosing File / Account, then select Update Options / Update Now. See here for more.

Or maybe you’ll get it automatically via a corporate deployment. It may even have been pushed out to you already,

Whatever, you’ll have a cracking new updated UI compared to Lync, and the emoticons will be better again… in fact, most of the animated icons from the regular consumer Skype app have made it over to the corporate one, with a few of the less work-oriented ones removed.

Tip o’ the Week #272 – Finding your phone (again)

Posted on April 3, 2015 by ewand

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(breaking the fourth wall)
Inevitably, when writing the Tip o’ the Week for 4½ years, the odd topic is revisited, sometimes because there’s a notable improvement or update, and sometimes just because it makes sense to do so. I try to keep the stuff that’s written about here as broadly relevant as I can, and with a particular style of humour that tries – though on one or two occasions, fails – not to offend anyone. Please keep the ideas and feedback coming, as it wouldn’t be possible to send this out every week without you, the dear reader. Oh, and a bottle of red wine on a Thursday night. Yes, that, too.

Recently, a colleague’s better half lost her phone. More accurately, she accidentally laid her phone down for a few minutes and, when returning to that place to retrieve it, found it had vamoosed. As it happens, some opportunistic light-fingered vagabond had made off with it.

clip_image003 What to do? Well, if you can get to a network connection somehow (even a friend’s phone), then you should be able to locate your handset. This is a capability that’s been in Windows Phone for a while, but the web UI is being jazzed up a bit. It’s possible to:

Find your phone (it shows up on a map)

Ring your phone (with a distinctive ring, even if the phone is set to silent, so you can zone in on it)

Lock your phone (with a message offering kudos and karma to the finder)

Wipe your phone (if you know it’s a goner, like the aforesaid colleague’s wife who called the phone and spoke to the thief, who promptly informed her what she could do with rest of her evening, before hanging up and turning the phone off)

clip_image004 You do need to make sure it’s enabled to start with – best check now, as you won’t want to discover that your phone isn’t reporting its location, the one time when you need to find it. Just go to the settings and look under find my phone.

If you sign in to the WindowsPhone.com portal, you’ll see where the phone was last contacted, and you can ping it (which sends a text to the phone, and makes the phone report its location if it can) by clicking Refresh.

clip_image007 The updated UI for the Find My Phone function only seems to appear on the latest IE/Windows 10 build, but it provides a little more info – like when your phone was confirmed to have been found/locked/wiped etc.

clip_image006 If you know you’re phone’s never coming back, you can wipe it – so your data doesn’t end up in a baddie’s hands, but your phone is reset to factory defaults so will still be a functional device that could be used again.

There is a movement to allow remote “bricking” of phones – the challenge being that it probably could be too easily exploited and unless the phone commits some kind of self-immolation at a hardware level, it’s always going to be possible for a savvy hacker to re-activate the device. The best thing to do is, just don’t lose your phone. Natch.

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Tip o’ the Week #271 – Finding your Friends

Posted on March 27, 2015 by ewand

Sometimes, people don’t want to be found. That’s maybe understandable if you’re a sweary unemployed pugilist, but often, you’d like to locate your friends and colleagues and you’d like them to find you.

Start by letting people see your calendar – in days gone by, the norm in Microsoft Outlook and Exchange was to let everyone see what your calendar says, but in recent versions, the only info you’d see by default would be their free/busy status – which isn’t really much use if you’re trying to collaborate with them. All it would take is some eejit to invite you to their holiday, marking the time as out of office and therefore obliterating your own F/B status for people looking to book you for meetings.

Free/Busy is basically rubbish – it doesn’t let anyone know where you are, how likely you are to be available in a given location, etc. So, if you regularly get meeting requests from people expecting you to be in one place when your calendar shows you’re somewhere else, then maybe you should share your calendar better, and tell them to look in your calendar before emailing to ask if you’re available.

There are a few options for better calendar sharin: if you look on the Share tab when looking at the Calendar in Outlook 2013, you’ll see a Calendar Permissions option, which will let you set the default permissions on your calendar, and see/set it you’ve granted more rights to certain folk – so you could allow everyone to see basic info, and your closest colleagues can be given the right to see everything.

Unless you’ve got something to hide (and if you do, you can always set those appointments as Private), then set the defaut sharing level to be Full Details – in which case, people will be able to see where you are, and who else is supposed to be at your meeting. If you choose any other option, then others won’t be able to open your meeting, so they wouldn’t see body text (like agenda, directions etc) or the attendee list.

FindMe – a Microsoft internal tool

There’s a snazzy tool developed by a group of Microsoft staff (in an internal development effort akin to the Garage), called FindMe. There are two parts – the installable software agent sits in the PC’s system try and provides your whereabouts to friends who you want to allow to see your location, and there’s a web front-end which will show you where your friends are.

The killer app part of FindMe is its ability to see the meeting rooms located in your chosen location – you can use it without needing to install the agent, and in supported locations you can see the floor layout, and a colour-coded view of the meeting rooms to show availability at a given date and time (and a one-click link to make a booking).

As for finding people, if they have the agent running and if the location services detect that they’re sitting in a supported Microsoft building, you’ll see them on a floor plan, otherwise you’ll be shown a world map.

The software can use triangulated positions against known Microsoft WiFi network points, to show not just which building someone is in, but potentially right down to which desk they’re sitting at – it’s brilliant, but it needs a good deal of work in surveying the buildings to make it useful – but the team is working on how to make it available to customers as part of a Microsoft Services engagement. If you’re interested in learning more, ask your Microsoft contact to get in touch with the FindMe team (just send mail to the DL with alias findme).

Tip o’ the Week #270 – Renaming Windows Phone

Posted on March 20, 2015 by ewand

No, we’re not talking about the rumoured change of brand from Windows Phone to simply, Windows 10. This week’s tip is inspired by Edward Hyde, whose several-phones-in-one-family position meant that it was difficult to tell one from the other when referring to them by name.

Edward’s specific scenario is when you’ve paired the phones to a car’s Bluetooth setup, and particularly if you’ve had the car longer than your current phone, you may end up with multiple “Windows Phone” pairings in the list on-screen.

Not that we’re suggesting your phone is developing sentience, but to see what it calls itself, look under Settings -> about (quite far down the list… keep swiping…) and you’ll see what name it has taken or been given. If you’d like to personalize it, first you’ll need to connect to your PC using a micro USB cable.

After the phone has connected (and if it’s your first time, you might need to wait for it to install a driver or two), then look in Windows Explorer and you should see it appear as a storage device. Select it, tap F2 or click the Rename icon in the ribbon, and you can give your device a better moniker. Better still, if you use the Windows Phone app on your Windows PC, you’ll be more easily able to name and put content like ringtones & music onto the device, and manage other stuff like photo libraries.

Keeping the travelling public on their toes

The device name only really shows up when you connect the phone to something else – whether via a cable or long-dead Danish King, but another identifier is probably more visible to other people – the name you give the WiFi hotspot created when you enable internet sharing.

Why not, just for giggles, give your device a name that stands out from the crowd of “Steve’s iPhone” etc that you’ll see from a PC when looking to connect to your own device?

Now that Bluejacking is largely a thing of the past, how else will you keep yourself amused on the grind into the smoke?