Tip o’ the Week #28 – Windows Key is your friend

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Some people love keyboard shortcuts – producivity guru David Allen (not to be confused with the the late comedian) recommends, as part of his Getting Things Done methodology, that learning a few keyboard shortcuts will make everyone more productive in doing routine things more quickly. ToW #10 highlighted some Outlook shortcuts that can make everyone’s life better, but there are many that apply to Windows and other applications that are worth remembering.

Using the clipboard
Let’s start simply – copy (CTRL-C), cut (CTRL-X) and paste (CTRL-V) apply to pretty much every application in Windows. There’s no need to take your hand off the keyboard and go for the mouse right-click if you’re looking to manipulate text. These key combinations can trace their lineage all the way back to Xerox PARC, where pretty much everything we understand as the modern computer was invented or perfected and implemented (graphical UI, mouse, network, laser printer…)

Did you know you can also use CTRL-Insert for copy, SHIFT-Insert to paste and SHIFT-Del for cut? The handy thing there is that most keyboards have a shift and control key on the right hand side, near INS and DEL keys… so you can cut, copy & paste with your right hand only… add to that the standard commands to select text – CTRL <– and CTRL –> moves the cursor one word backwards and forwards, and holding shift down at the same time selects the text from where you were starting from. So, holding shift, and selecting a few words, followed by CTRL-C or SHIFT-Insert, and you’ve copied them to the clipboard. SHIFT-Home selects everything to the left of the cursor on the current row, & SHIFT-End selects everything to the right.

Windows Key in Windows 7

But Windows 7’s got a whole host of shortcut keys that can make life easy, from WndKey-L to lock your keyboard or Wnd-“+” and Wnd-“-“ to zoom in and out. What about:

· Wnd – rightarrow, which docks the current window to the right of the screen 

· Wnd – leftarrow, which docks to the left

· Wnd – uparrow, maximises the current window…

… and the reverse, Wnd–downarrow, restores it again, or minimises it to the taskbar)

· SHIFT-Wnd–rightarrow and SHIFT-Wnd–leftarrow moves the current window between two monitors (if you have them) or between your laptop and the projector (if you have it set to “Extend” rather than “Duplicate”, a choice you get when you use Wnd–P to switch screens).

With a bit of practice on some of these, you can take several minutes off repeated processes like editing a document or an email – just think how much more you could Get Things Done with nothing but some keyboard shortcuttery?

There are many, many other shortcuts – more details here.

Tip o’ the Week #26 – multiple time zones in Outlook Calendar

Posted on by ewand

Sometimes you need to create appointments that will make sense when you’re in a different time zone – it helps to use Outlook, Exchange and its phone integration to put relevant stuff in clip_image002the calendar, so you can make sure you’re in the right place and at the right time.

Now there are a couple of ways to make Outlook more timezone-friendly – if you right-click on the time bar to the left of the calendar detail, then a fly-out menu will let you Change Time Zone. An alternative, can be found in the “Time Scale” option on the View tab when looking at the Calendar. As with many things, there are several ways to skin the proverbial cat…

If you choose to change the time zone, Outlook displays its options dialog, which lets you select the current time zone (and also sets the whole PC into that time zone so you needn’t change the PC clock separately), but helpfully also lets you display a second clip_image004zone, and give both a label so you can see which is which…

If you edit an appointment, it’s also possible to show multiple time zones, and to set the destination time zone for an appointment to take place. In other words, if I’m arranging to meet someone at 7pm in Washington DC, I don’t need to manually figure out what time that is in the UK, I just set the time zone of the appointment to be Eastern Daylight Time.

clip_image006As it happens, Outlook always converts an appointment back to “UTC”* – what we still know as GMT in the UK, is actually the base for all appointments, and then a time offset is applied depending on whether the time zone(s) in question have Daylight Saving Time in effect, etc. So an appointment is never 7pm in Washington DC, it’s actually at 00:00 then -5 is offset, since their time zone is UTC-5.

It’s even possible to have an appointment which starts and finishes in a different time zone. The only example I can think of this is a flight, but there may be others. Suggestions on a postcard please…

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* UTC doesn’t actually stand for anything – the ITU standards body wanted a single worldwide abbreviation; English speakers wanted “Coordinated Universal Time” or CUT. French speakers wanted “temps universel coordonné” or TUC. Unable to separate the two factions, they compromised and chose UTC.

Tip o’ the Week #24: Invite yourself to others’ meetings

Posted on by ewand

Have you ever heard that a meeting is happening, that you feel you should be attending, but weren’t invited to? Have you ever asked someone “could you forward me that meeting?” so that it appears in your calendar?

Well, there’s no need to place the action on the other person – with Outlook’s side/side calendar view, you can do it yourself.

image001In the example here, Andrew has a meeting I want to attend. If I view his calendar side/side, and simply drag & drop the meeting to the left, it will add it to my own calendar.

At the point of “dropping” the meeting, Outlook will prompt if you want to send an Acceptance (just like if you’d opened a meeting request you’d been sent), and you’re added to the list of attendees so the originator of the meeting will see that you’re now joining them.

So no surprises when you walk into the room.

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Tip o’ the Week #23: Viewing Excel sheets side by side

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Toni Kent from Microsoft UK’s partner group once again provides the inspiration for this week’s tip.

Everyone loves the side-by-side windows feature of Windows 7, where you can dock windows to the sides of your monitor by dragging them (or pressing ÿ+? or ÿ+?). But sometimes it doesn’t appear to work if you have several documents open, and want to compare them side by side, particularly if they are spreadsheets.

It’s all to do with how applications open multiple windows. Microsoft Word, for example, opens each document in a separate instance of Word, so if you have two docs open, it’s a snap to show them side/side. Excel, by contrast, prefers to open each new worksheet within a single “Excel” application.

So, whilst Windows 7 will show previews of multiple windows, they’re actually just multiple documents opened within Excel.

If you want to see Excel windows side by side, try going into the View menu in Excel, and click on the View Side by Side option on the Ribbon, then choose which of the additional open worksheets you’d like to compare the current one with.

There’s also the option in Excel to “tile” open worksheet windows, so you could have more than 2 arranged side by side or one above the other.

Tip o’ the Week #22: Sync SharePoint data into Outlook

Posted on by ewand

This week’s tip comes from a reader: over to Microsoft UK’s Rob Orwin…

clip_image001In order to help my forecasting, I synchronise the appropriate documents to my Outlook so that when I send and receive they are automatically updated.

To do this I simply:

1) Go to the SharePoint site where the documents are held

2) Click, “Actions”

3) Click Connect To Outlook – As per screenshot

4) The spreadsheets magically appear in my outlook folder, cunningly named TPAM ISV as per screenshot
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5) Whenever I hit “Send & Receive” I get the latest version

Net result: This means that when I’ve no access to SharePoint, I can quickly get the latest, synchronized copy of the forecast spreadsheet and have up to date info at my fingertips giving my notably more time to work on my excuses …

clip_image004Rob’s highlighted a great way of taking SharePoint files offline, which not only makes them available when you’re not connected, but also speeds up opening them if they’re big files… since you’ve already got them on your machine, in Outlook’s data files. The one downside is that they’re read only if using SharePoint 2007 – thought SharePoint 2010 gives the ability to do bi-directional…

There are other areas of integration that you might be aware of, too… like taking a SharePoint calendar or contacts list, and exposing it in Outlook – but this time, you can can edit the data in Outlook and it flows back to the SharePoint 2007 site…

Tip o’ the Week #20: Outlook date cleverness

Posted on by ewand

Here’s a quick Outlook tip that some long term users may know but might have forgotten. Ever since the first very of Outlook was released more than 14 years ago, it’s had a surprising capability to handle dates using natural language descriptions.

Whenever Outlook prompts you to enter a date (and allows you to type a date in rather than have to choose from a calendar), you can give it dates that are relative to today, eg “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “Friday” etc.

Eg – for a date field in a new calendar invite or a “do not send email before” field, you could simply put “tomorrow” and it will figure out the literal date for you. There are plenty of others too, eg:

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… (which would change the reminder in the above dialog from the coming Friday to the next one after that).

There are hosts of others – “in 3 days”, “6 months”, “third Wednesday”, “Chrismas eve” etc etc.
See how many you can spot…

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Tip o’ the Week #19: Navigating multi-sheet Excel workbooks

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Here’s a quick tip for Excel junkies. If you are using workbooks with many sheets, or where tab names are long, it can take a fair bit of scrolling around at the bottom of the Excel window.

If you right-click on the navigation buttons shown to the left of the tabs/sheets, Excel will throw up a list of all the sheets, and you can jump to the appropriate one with a single click.

Here’s a particularly large sales spreadsheet, for one:

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Tip o’ the Week #18: Resizing pictures in email

Posted on by ewand

Here’s a simple tip that most people probably know, but I wasn’t all that sure it would behave the way it does, without proving it through trying it out. If you’ve been adding pictures to email (either by Inserting from the new ribbon in Outlook 2010, or by pasting in an image, maybe one captured from the screen), it’s sometimes possible to end up with a huge message.clip_image002

The tip is, if you add your image, then click the “Save” icon in the top left of the mail (which drops a copy in your Drafts email folder), you can then see the size of the message by looking at its properties: open the message up, and look on the File menu/backstage…

The above was from an image added to an email from a SharePoint site storing pictures from an event, and the picture was large – 2,736×3,648 pixels in fact. Now rather than trying to resize such a huge picture in a paint program, just let Outlook do the work by resizing it in-situ. In this example, I simply clicked the image, then dragged the top-left corner of the image down-and-right, since the picture was way too big to even fit on one screen.

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After only 3 resizing drags, the image is now much less wieldy:

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(take a bow, Ana Rosales and Shaun Frohlich, pictured… they were playing the part of the blushing bride and the proud father-of-the-bride in a murder-mystery game).

Saving and re-inspecting the size, still shows up as 4Mb but after sending, I can see it shrunk rather dramatically…

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Tip o’ the Week #17: Broadcast PPT to customers & partners

Posted on by ewand

Many Microsoft folks have experienced the joys of scheduling Live Meetings with customers and partners, where they get an email or meeting request with lots of links, asking them to install software on their PC before they try to join the meeting. How often do the attendees not manage to click the right link, or fail to install the software beforehand, or even when they do, join the Live Meeting and can’t hear audio, or see slides?

Well, thanks to Microsoft UK’s irrepressible John Noakes and courtesy of Office 2010, here’s an easy alternative…

We would like to start using our Office 2010 technology in these meetings now by using PowerPoint Broadcast – a great feature of PPT 2010…

With this technology, all you need to set up is the voice conf call (arranged via simple Outlook addin, using Office Communication Server or Lync Server). See here for Microsoft IT’s own case study on using UC technology to save money and increase flexibility…

clip_image001Once we have the customer on the line we can then broadcast our PPT deck direct to the customer over the web by starting PowerPoint Broadcast on our client. This then generates a simple URL that we email or IM to the customer.

All they have to do then is click on the URL and……… hey presto……….they see the slides and they hear the audio via Communicator!

If you want to try it for yourself, open PowerPoint, go to the Slideshow menu and look for Broadcast Slide Show

From the dialog which appears next, choose “Change Broadcast Service” and set it to Powerpoint Broadcast Service. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, and your URL is generated……… copy, paste, email/IM to recipient. And we’re off. SIMPLE.

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Tip o’ the Week #16: All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

Posted on by ewand

Even the best of us make common typos – “teh”  instead of “the”, “Exchnage” instead of Exchange etc. Microsoft Word’s Autocorrect feature has mopped up a lot of the common ones – have a look if you’re interested, from the File Menu/BackStage in Word 2010, under Options…

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The same options can be accessed in Outlook 2010 from the File Menu / Options / Mail / Spelling & Autocorrect… though if you add something to the auto-correct list in Outlook, it isn’t immediately available in Word.

There are some quite cool little tricks you can type in an email or in a Word doc, to make the content look better or to make it easier for the recipient/reader to consume, and these fall into AutoCorrect although they’re more like mini-macros.

A few examples…

  • Horizontal line – see that line above? Type “—“ and press enter. Great for separating parts of your email, like the “here’s the mail I was planning to send to the partner” type messages… finish your intro blurb with a nice horizontal line and everyone will know what follows is separate…
  • Em & En – As well as being useful Scrabble words, “Em” and “En” are units of typography—an “em” being the same width as a capital letter “M” (and a space, and as the point size of the font), and an “en” being half that—which are used to measure, amongst other things, the widths of dashes.
    Whichever dash you choose is up to you and to the style guide you’re writing for (and both look so much classier than a dull old minus-sign), but the rules on how to involve them are pretty easy:
  • An Em Dash (“—“) is made by typing two hyphens (“-“) without spaces – eg em–dash
  • An En Dash (“–“) is made by typing space-two hyphens-space – eg en — dash
  • URLs with spaces – How many times have you ever received an email with a URL which doesn’t work because it has a space in it? (such as http://sharepoint/sites//TipOWeek/Tip o the Week 15 – Show yourself.msg)? Or a UNC like \\windymiller\Video\MSFT Internal\TR10\Ballmer – Cloud.wmv ?
    If you’re ever pasting or typing in a URL which has spaces, and you want Word or Outlook to treat it properly, start with a “<” then type or paste the URL/UNC then add a “>” to the end. As soon as you press space/full-stop etc, everything between the <>s will be turned into a URL/UNC and the angle brackets are removed.
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