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Tip o’ the Week #275 – Prioritising External Email

Posted on (Updated 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 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_image003bore-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_image005Symbol 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 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:

  • clip_image003Try 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. clip_image001

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

Posted on 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_image003What 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_image004You 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_image007The 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_image006If 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 by ewand

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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 clip_image003info 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.

Thereclip_image005 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 clip_image007Calendar 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.

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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 clip_image004given 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 by ewand

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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 deviceclip_image002. 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.

clip_image003Keeping the travelling public on their toes

The device name only really shows up when clip_image005you 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?

Tip o’ the Week #269 – Clip to OneNote, once more

Posted on by ewand

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Time moves on. Things that are news soon turn into things in history: 20 years ago, Microsoft Bob came into the world. Bob was ahead of its time in some ways, foretelling some UI principles and ideas that later became more refined. It also indirectly gave us Comic Sans, too (though the font never shipped with the software – it was too late).

clip_image003Bob featured an animated mutt, the precursor to Clippy, aka the greatly-maligned Office Assistant.

Recalling Clippy, ToW has covered a few clip-related topics before, notably #219 (almost a year ago), which included a section on a new tweak that could grab web pages into OneNote notebooks.

clip_image004Well, the OneNote Clipper v2.0 has just been released, and is much-updated – the point being that you can easily add a “Clip to OneNote” button to your browser (drop into desktop IE or Firefox, addin to Chrome).

Use the shortcut to quickly clip whole pages or, new in this version, sections of web pages, to a location in your OneDrive storage – offering the choice of the multiple OneNote notebooks that you may have saved there.

You can clip “products” too – handy as you do shopping or browsing and want to remember what you’ve been clip_image005looking at.

It also recognises recipes as a specific content type, so you don’t need to snap all the clutter that might be on the web page, instead only grabbing the detailed instructions.

This is a great bit of non-work productivity software that really showcases the power of OneNote and OneDrive. Installation is a breeze, over at http://www.onenote.com/clipper.

Tip o’ the Week #267 – Synchronising Outlook Signatures again

Posted on by ewand

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Hot on the heels of last week’s missive about how to snaffle more storage space, once again we turn to OneDrive to solve a problem. First, let’s journey back in time to recall some previous tools.

Once, there was a peer-2-peer (P2P) file sychronisation product called FolderShare which was acquired by Microsoft nearly a decade ago; it allowed files and folders to be replicated amongst multiple machines, essentially for backup or for making sure you had your stuff (music, pictures etc) everywhere you needed it.

FolderShare begat Mesh or Windows Live Mesh, which became Windows Live Sync and eventually all became part of SkyDrive, as the latter became less of a simple place-to-put-stuff-in-the-sky/cloud and more of a storage mechanism with a means to sync and replicate it onto multiple places. Now OneDrive is part of Windows, and as well as giving away oodles of online disk space, it’s the mechanism by which Windows 8 and 10 users can synchronise settings between computers. It’s getting better and more granular all the time, too.

One of the nice features of Live Mesh/Sync was the ability to automatically keep several settings on multiple PCs in sync with each other – like IE favourites, or settings from Office like dictionaries, templates and email signatures. Though it’s now obsolete, this was first covered in ToW #69, back in 2011. Email .sigs used to be a big deal.

Windows manages to do a good job of keeping PC-specific settings in sync between machines, or even just backing up settings from one machine to the cloud using OneDrive – so once you’ve signed in to your shiny new machine with your MSA, then it’s quite amazing how much of your stuff just appears. But one thing that doesn’t is your Outlook email signature. If you want to back up your .sig and also make it/them available on multiple PCs, you need to work a bit harder.

The Dark Art of Symbolic Links

Worry not, however. Through a cunning bit of sleight of hand, it’s possible to fool dusty old Outlook into thinking that its Signatures folder is stored in the usual place, however we all know it can be moved into OneDrive and therefore made available to multiple machines. This is similar to the technique of replicating Desktop which was covered a little while back, except that instead of changing a registry setting to tell Windows where the folder is, we need to create a special kind of folder, which is really just a redirection to somewhere else.

Here’s the method – it’s best to close Outlook while doing this.

  • Find your current Signatures location – try pressing WindowsKey + R then paste into the run box, %appdata%\Microsoft (which opens the special location that many applications will use to store files that clip_image003pertain to how they work).

  • Then look for the Signatures folder – select it, copy it and paste into your OneDrive folder (in Explorer; paste it into the OneDrive\Documents folder, for example).

  • … rename the original Signatures folder to something like Signatures.old

  • clip_image005Now, we need to create a Symbolic Link to make something that looks like a folder at the same location, but points elsewhere – start an elevated command prompt (on Windows 8 or 10, press WindowsKey-X then press A to start an admin command prompt).

  • Now create the symbolic link by entering the following as one line into the command window:
    mklink /d %appdata%\Microsoft\Signatures %userprofile%\OneDrive\Documents\Signatures
    (if you know your OneDrive folder is in a different place, then substitute the 2nd parameter for whatever is appropriate – maybe D:\OneDrive\Documents\Signatures, for example)

  • If you now go back to the %appdata%\microsoft location from the 1st step, you’ll see the Signatures folder clip_image006with a special icon showing that it represents a link rather than a real folder. Open it to check that your signature files – as stored in the OneDrive folder from earlier – are showing up in there as expected. Feel free to close the command window.

  • Now, on each other PC you want to synchronise with, go back to the first instruction and repeat, except that you don’t need to do the “copy to OneDrive bit” since your Signatures folder is already there – in other words, you create the Symbolic Link to the local replica of the OneDrive folder, and Outlook will think that the data is in its own appdata location.

  • Don’t worry if you get to the 2nd step on a destination PC and realise the Signatures folder doesn’t exist – it’s only created when you first set up a .sig

Tip o’ the Week #266 – OneDrive – getting more storage

Posted on by ewand

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OneDrive has been quietly expanding its functionality over the last while, increasingly echoing the UI of Office365 (with the numerous apps shown as tiles on the upper left of clip_image003the screen).

As well as offering a tier of free storage (recently upped to 15Gb), it’s possible to buy additional space for your stuff – from a modest $2/month for an additional 100Gb, to a frankly bonkers offer if you sign up for Office365 Home at $10/month, with copies of Office for up to 5 users, 60 minutes of Skype calls per user, 1Tb of storage each and a bunch more. See here for info.

In the meantime, however, OneDrive has also been falling over itself to give users additional storage in exchange for doing something. (Check out your own storage quota and options here). You could refer your friends (get up to 5Gb free), if you set up your phone to back up photos, you’ll get another 15Gb for nada – plenty of storage for all those photographs you like to take on your handset.

Bing Rewards members can get a whopping 100Gb (cor!) just for signing up. Hint: if you are in a country that gets an error saying “This feature isn't available yet in your country or region” when you try to sign up, you might want to try clicking on the settings cog clip_image005in the top right of that very page. If you happened to temporarily set your Worldwide region to be US – English, then you may have better luck. Just an idea.

Drop the boxclip_image007
If you happen to use DropBox (Win8 app here, WinPhone app here), or more correctly if you happen to have a Dropbox account that you know the logon details of, then you could try visiting here to claim a special 100Gb annual bonus for DropBox users.

All you need to do is sign in and have the web page be able to save a doc to your DropBox account, and you’ll get another 100Gb free OneDrive for a year. Boom!

What to do with all this massive amount of storage? Well, phone pictures might take up lots of space, but what about storing your music on there so you can access from anywhere? Now, wouldn’t that be cool?

Tip o’ the Week #265 – Sorting pages in OneNote

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001As has been mentioned before on ToW, OneNote is the kind of application that lots of people really love; it has a legion of fans who take to getting things done & their stuff in order, and are increasingly able to access it from all sorts of places. OneNote has built-in sync capabilities with OneDrive (in fact, ‘Note was One when ‘Drive was still a figment of SkyDrive’s imagination…). OneNote is also now available on fruity devices, Macs, Googly fonez and of course, Windows Phone and browsers of all sorts.

On the primary OneNote 2013 desktop app on PC, there is a free & fabulous suite of add-ons which has also been covered on ToW passim: OneTastic. Produced by Omer Atay of the OneNote team, but released as his own work, it’s a smörgåsbord of great extensions to OneNote, especially OneCalendar (which shows you which pages you touched and when), and also has a powerful macro language to add functionality.

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After installing OneTastic, you’ll see a bunch of additional commands on the Home ribbon in OneNote, and if you add any others from Omer’s extensive collection of downloadable macros, they’ll show up here (or on a separate tab, if you prefer) – some neat ones include the quick ability to insert horizontal lines across the page.

clip_image005Did you know, to add a quick horizontal line in Word or in Outlook, all you need to do is press the minus/dash key three times (“—“) and press Enter? Well OneNote doesn’t do that out of the box, so you may find Omer’s macros a clip_image007good solution.

Maybe one of the most useful macros, though, fixes something of an annoyance if you take loads of notes in OneNote – maybe a page for every customer you talk to, or every topic in a given section? There’s no built-in way to sort all your pages, short of manually dragging them around.

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If you download the Sort Pages macro from Macroland, the problem is solved with a couple of clicks. The macro will sort all your pages in a given section, and sub-pages under each page too. Perfect for keeping an orderly notebook, and there are other sorting macros that will tidy up the order of sections, paragraphs, to-do lists & more.

clip_image011There are loads of other macros: from setting colours quickly, to creating tables of contents (listing every page in a notebook or section, with links directly to each page). Have a good look through Macroland, and if you’re a OneNote power user, you’ll be like a dog with two tails.