Microsoft on Much Ado About IT

OneNote Missing Features

Julian Knight — Thu, 19 Jul 2018 12:31:45 +0000

Microsoft have announced the deprecation of the desktop version of OneNote. They claim that the Windows Store version is as good or better. But it really isn't! Here I try to list the missing features. I will update this post as things change.

Office 2019 (due for release late 2018) will no longer contain a desktop version of OneNote. Microsoft are telling everyone to move over to the Windows Store version (AKA “OneNote for Windows 10”), also seen in this blog post by William Devereux.

Microsoft claim that OneNote for Windows 10 is the only one now getting development other than fixes & that it is already “better” than the desktop version in “many” areas.

OneNote 2016 (the full desktop version) will continue to be available separately but will stop receiving any updates in 2020.

You can also keep track of what has been updated in OneNote for Windows 10 in the What’s New post.

However, there is a LOT missing from OneNote for Windows 10 - I’ve compiled this list in order to track what is missing and whether anything is done about it.

The marketing post by Microsoft “What’s the difference between OneNote and OneNote 2016?” gives Microsoft’s official view on which is best.

I’ve tried to be accurate but if you see anything wrong or anything missing, please leave a comment below.

Tell Microsoft what you want!

If you want Microsoft to fix some of these missing features:

Vote or raise feedback on the OneNote UserVoice site
Contact them directly if you are an enterprise customer. You should have access to a Technical Account Manager at least, possibly also an industry sector technical lead, and industry sector account manager.
Join the OneNote Group on LinkedIn
Try the UserVoice suggestions site
Take to Twitter, copy in @msonenote and William Devereux (@MasterDevwi)
Use the Give Feedback link and/or give feedback via Windows 10
Leave a review on the Windows store.

They do generally listen. They don’t always do what you want of course!

Missing Features

Revision History
- ~~No page versions view~~ Finally found this hidden under the RMB menu in the page list. Very poor UX though, to be fair, this option is in the same place in ON 2016. It’s just that isn’t the only place, it is also on the Ribbon.
- No recent edits view
- ~~No recycle bin view - to allow recovery of accidentally deleted items~~ Yes, this is present, just well hidden again. RMB over the notebook in the notebook list - which is probably normally hidden for you as it ends up taking up too much horizontal space.
UI/General Usability
- ~~No Insert Date/Time/Date & Time~~ You can, in fact, insert date and time. But don’t bother looking for something simple if you aren’t using a keyboard, it is only available via a keyboard shortcut. Insert Date = Alt+Shift+D, Insert Time = Alt+Shift+T, Insert Date & Time = Alt+Shift+F. Really not very helpful for mobile/tablet users!
- No symbol insert (Coming soon)
- No page templates - no way to create a boilerplate template - e.g. for meetings
- No custom ribbon or quick access toolbar - giving quick access to tools relevant to users workflows
- No way to change paste option after pasting
- No quick way to flip between notebooks without taking up half the screen. You have to click back to get to the list then select. On desktop, you can quickly switch between notebooks using a pop-over. The only alternative is perhaps to create separate tiles pinned to the start menu and then have multiple notebooks open at the same time.
- Inefficient use of screen space - all navigation is forced to the left-hand side of the screen. On desktop, notebooks can be in a drop-down and tabs go across the top, this is a lot more efficient.
- No way to change paragraph and line spacing - I find that the default text layout has too little white-space, especially between paragraphs. This makes large blocks of text difficult to read unless you manually include empty lines - which, in turn is not helpful if you later paste into other tools.
- No “Record Video” feature
- No control over audio recording quality
- No internal control over audio recording device selection - can only use the Windows default
- Uncertain whether recognise text in recordings is available or working
- No ability to move navigation sidebars to other side
- No floating new page button for note list so no way to create a new page in a chosen location without using the mouse/long-touch - which also changes the page
- ~~No way to turn off or correct auto capitalisation~~ - immensely annoying when using OneNote for keeping technical notes (e.g. Programming). UPDATE: OK, not quite true, you can turn it on/off in settings but you can’t turn it off temporarily - for a single instance - like you can in the desktop. (thanks to Albin, see the comments)
- Fewer size options for drawing pens
- Only limited example equations for insert
- Even less ability to automate than before
- ~~No way to set the language for text~~ - you have to change the input keyboard to the language you want before typing, a terrible experience for multi-lingual use. UPDATE: Also not quite true, you can select some text and right/long click then you get an option to change it. (again, thanks to Albin)
- No way to translate text (Coming soon)
Integration
- No integration with Outlook or other Office applications - you can only integrate with Outlook.com or O365 so if you have a different Exchange email service as your default, there is no integration.
- No Outlook task integration - I know some people use this extensively so that they get reminders in Outlook for expiring task dates
- Why does meeting integration to outlook.com/O365 require me to log in again? I’m already logged in.
- No integration with Office(?)
- No office autocorrect.
- No grammar checks
- No access to custom spell-check dictionaries
- No Thesaurus
- No docked note taking with linked notes
- No Very limited addins/extensions - not even from the Office Store
  
  Albin points out in the comments that this is not quite true. There is a version of the GEM addin for ON UWP. It is US$18 which may be too steep for some but it does add one or two useful things such as inserting a horizontal line and coloured code syntax. Mostly seems to make up for some of the issues listed here though. Uses a Windows menu overlay.
- No “Insert Excel Spreadsheet” or “Insert (Visio) Diagram”. UPDATE: According to Albin, this is coming in a future release.
- No way to access notebooks on local or network drives
- No way to export notes - e.g. to a .one file - even the Surface Hub lets you do this.
- No way to share just a page or a section, only the whole notebook
Tags
- No custom “tags” (on roadmap?)
- No text style tags
- No “Find Tags” feature
- No “Create Summary” feature, allowing tagged paragraphs from different pages/notebooks to be pulled together on a single page.
Search
- Much more limited search view - no visibility of “recent” ~~nor of the difference between search terms in titles vs page~~
  
  So it seems that the search results do differentiate between results in the title from the body. You wouldn’t be able to know this without reading the help though since the difference is that a search term found in a title is highlighted in bold+purple. Hmm, very intuitive - not.
- No pop-over - results limited to same width as current sidebar so a lot less usable unless you change the width - which you then want to change back afterwards
- No control over searching AV for words - can it even be done?
- You cannot search closed notebooks - I suppose this is because it now only supports OneDrive, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online for storage.
- No search and replace. To be fair, this is a failing of ON 2016 as well.
Tables
- No convert to excel for tables
- No way to include/exclude heading row for table sort
- No way to create a table with a specified number of rows/columns (by number)
- No way to hide the borders of a table (Coming soon)
Security
- No notebook local backups
- No control over cache file location
- ~~No page password protection~~ Eventually found this under the RMB menu for a section. Poor discoverability.

Other Issues

Drag and drop from Outlook is SLOW, have to keep the mouse over OneNote with the LMB pressed for an appreciable amount of time

What do we get that is “Better”?

May start faster on many systems.
Insert an image from your PC’s webcam - use the intelligence of MS Lens to improve document and whiteboard captures.
More colours for the pens - pen colours may be retained when converting to text.
A ruler.
Marginally better touch/pen handling.
Dictation.
Stickers(!)
Pin to start - you can pin Notebooks, Sections and Pages to the start menu. You can also have a transparent start menu entry. Note that “recent” entries in the jump list don’t work properly on the UWP version and not at all on the desktop version.
Uses system “share” capability to more easily share notes to other apps and share info from other apps to OneNote.
Built-in accessibility checker - be kinder to colleagues with accessibility issues.
Use the Immersive Reader for focused reading and improved comprehension.
Some simple equations can be charted or “solved”. You aren’t always given an option to chart however - such as for the desktop app’s example “A=πr^2” equation. Make sure you use “x” and “y” as variables to get round this limitation.
Use the pen to take a note even if the PC is locked.
Use the Edge browser to ink over a web page and save to OneNote.
Use Cortana to add a note.
“Better” sync engine is “coming soon” - though honestly, we may have to take MS’s word for that at the moment. The current sync engine seems to be the best one MS have in my view. However, it does start to struggle on mobile devices if your notebook gets too large, especially with embedded files.

Updates

2018-07-31:

Updated the “better” list following the comment from @DragosStefan. Also added further entries to that list based on the Microsoft blog posts.
Cross referenced to MS Power User blog post.

2018-07-26:

Many thanks to Albin LABELLE who has provided some really useful updates. Do check out his OneNote blog, especially his Closing the Gap post, he is keeping an eye on changes there. He also has some great OneNote tweets.
Twitter link from OneNote Central

A long-time fan of the desktop version of #OneNote for Windows, IT pro Julian Knight is taking a closer look at where the current feature set of the OneNote for #Windows10 app stands compared to his favorite version. https://t.co/b0FUEQq4LA
by @knightnet pic.twitter.com/1GvNEAux8O
— MSEdu Central Marjolein Hoekstra (@MSEduCentral) July 26, 2018
Twitter question from @msonenote

What could we do to make it better? We're always open to feedback. 🙂
— Microsoft OneNote (@msonenote) July 26, 2018

2018-07-21:

Many thanks to Kjell for the comments via Disqus. I’ve updated the entries for the Recycle Bin and Insert date/time.

2018-07-19:

Updated the list after publishing today when I went through some other posts and through the OneNote for Windows UserVoice site
Blog post by William Devereux, OneNote product manager, who has been kindly communicating with me and the OneNote LinkedIn Group. Detailing some new updates (actual update on his Twitter feed).

Hey OneNote fans! We just released a new update on Windows 10 (version 16.0.10325.20049) with a number of features based directly on your feedback. As always these features are rolling out, so if you don't see one of them yet then check back soon. Here's what's new for everyone:
— William Devereux (@MasterDevwi) July 18, 2018

Windows 10 1803 Timeline Feature

Julian Knight — Tue, 29 May 2018 09:42:53 +0100

The May 2018 version of Windows 10 has an updated alt-tab view called the timeline. While it will eventually be more useful, its current implementation is poor.

When you press win+tab, you used to get a sticky view that showed all of the open application windows for each monitor with a miniature picture of the window.

As of the 1803 update in May, this view has slightly changed so that view now includes a timeline that you can scroll through rather than just a list. There is also a search box to make it easier to find what you want if you have lots of windows open.

The new view also includes application tabs as well as windows. But only if the application has been adapted.

I have to say, though, that the feature has been very poorly implemented so far:

Tabs only show if the application has been altered to make use of the new feature.

Currently these mainly seem to be Microsoft applications such as Edge and the Office 365 versions (Click-to-run) of Office applications.
Search only works with applications amended to work with it as above.

This is especially annoying as it should give a nice way to quickly search through all of the open window titles at least. That information is clearly shown above each window in the list but you can’t search it. Seems like a petty limitation.
Windows opened on a secondary monitor for applications not adapted to timeline don’t appear in the main timeline display (on the primary monitor) but applications that have been adapted do appear.

This is, in my view, a poor UX decision since it is confusing to people.
The search function is only available on the primary monitor even though it searches applications on other monitors (though only if they have been adapted for the timeline as already mentioned).

Again, this is unnecessarily confusing to users.

Office 365 Autosave

Julian Knight — Tue, 08 May 2018 10:20:16 +0000

I am sure that whoever in Microsoft came up with the idea of an autosave flag, they thought it was a great idea. And indeed it is. **However**, when they made it default to _on_, they made a logistical nightmare for the majority of users. This post discusses why and what you could do about it.

With autosave on by default, every shared document that you open in Word, Excel or PowerPoint is subject to the whims of the Office client software. This means that it is all too easy to accidentally make a change that is then autosaved changing a shared document, throwing out version control processes, possibly approvals, etc. To say nothing of annoying other colleagues with random changes.

When the “feature” was introduced at the start of 2017, Microsoft gave no way to change the default from on to off. By the middle of the year, however, they introduced a set of registry settings.

Somewhat inevitably for a poorly thought through feature, they compounded the issues by making these registry flags permanently disable autosave instead of allowing a change to default to off. :sigh:

Well, for what it’s worth, here are the registry codes you need to permanently disable autosave in the three client applications:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Excel]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\PowerPoint]
"DontAutoSave"=dword:00000001

You can save the above code to a text file ending in .reg. Then right-click on the file in Windows File Explorer and chose the merge option to turn off autosave.

If you want to undo the change, set the values to 0 instead of 1.

Macro to open a web URL from Outlook

Julian Knight — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 10:31:45 +0000

Many of us spend most of our work time in a few applications such as Outlook (email) and a web browser. This example macro for Microsoft Outlook will let you add a button to the Outlook Ribbon that will open a specific website URL.

To use this macro:

Open the VBA Editor window (ctrl-F11)
Double-click on Project1 > Microsoft Outlook Objects > ThisOutlookSession in the Project pane (top-left)
Paste the code below
Customise the Ribbon
Add a new Group (you can’t add your own entries to the standard groups)
Add the openGoogle macro (or whatever you’ve added), rename and change the icon if desired

Note: This version will only work for the 64-bit version of Microsoft Outlook. To use on the 32-bit version, remove the word PtrSafe.

Option Explicit

Private Declare PtrSafe Function ShellExecute _
 Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "ShellExecuteA" ( _
 ByVal hWnd As Long, _
 ByVal Operation As String, _
 ByVal Filename As String, _
 Optional ByVal Parameters As String, _
 Optional ByVal Directory As String, _
 Optional ByVal WindowStyle As Long = vbMinimizedFocus _
 ) As Long

' WARINING: THIS MUST ONLY BE GIVEN SAFE URLs!
' DO NOT USE WITH DIRECT USER INPUT
Private Sub openUrl(url As String)
 Dim lSuccess As Long
 lSuccess = ShellExecute(0, "Open", url)
End Sub

Public Sub openGoogle()
 openUrl "https://google.com"
End Sub

Presentation: Security and Governance in the Cloud

Julian Knight — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 12:54:25 +0000

Here is a presentation that I did recently for NHS CIO’s and CCIO’s. It is all about how NHS England has followed a journey to cloud services and the IT Security & Information Governance issues we had to deal with along the way. It tries to also show other NHS organisations how they might work towards similar aims.

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

Julian Knight — Sun, 19 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Like many people I receive an unmanageable amount of email each day. Many days I get through only around 1/3 of the email I receive.

However, the role I am in professionally requires me to retain a large proportion of correspondence. Some because it relates to ongoing projects, other because of security, audit or compliance reasons.

In addition, I work across many projects. It isn’t unusual for me to be involved in two dozen or so projects at any one time on top of my day-to-day management work.

So I have many folders – hundreds in fact – and filing email into the right folder has become a real drag. It can take an appreciable amount of time to hunt down the correct folder and Outlook does not provide any way to search/filter folder names in the UI.

Thankfully, I have access to VBA macros in Outlook. While the experience of using VBA macros to control Outlook is rarely pleasant, it does get the job done – mainly.

My requirements for the utility were as follows:

Must let me select multiple emails, if any have already been filed, show me the folder(s) so I can quickly file new email to the same folder as the rest of the conversation.
Must give me a list of all my folders with a simple way of filtering the list by typing a few letters.
Must also let me open a folder for viewing instead of filing or cancelling.

A couple of hours later, I was able to create a new utility which you can grab the code for from my GitHub repository: https://github.com/TotallyInformation/outlook-filer

There are a few tweaks I’d like to incorporate but as it is, it is highly useful and I use it many times a day.

DSC vs. GPO vs. SCCM vs. MDM (Intune)

Julian Knight — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 17:42:13 +0000

Microsoft Windows administrators now have a number of ways for managing their estates.

Group Policy (GPO)

Allows very fine-grained control over every aspect of Windows. Primarily aimed at Windows desktops. Requires Active Directory (AD) and very careful configuration. Requires well trained specialist staff to get it right.
System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)

Allows central control over software delivery. Also requires AD. Configuration of delivery packages can be complex and very careful change control is required. Software delivery via SCCM can also be intrusive to users. Requires well trained specialist staff to get it right.
Desired State Configuration (DSC)

Though extended by Microsoft this is actually part of a wider open standard “Open Management Infrastructure” and so applies to other platforms as well including Linux. Mainly aimed at server configurations. Falls into the DevOps camp as it defines server configurations in purely text format and so can be put under source control easily. DSC is typically dynamic and enforces the correct configuration (normally every 15 minutes) which greatly helps ensure secure configurations.
Mobile Device Management (MDM)

Primarily aimed at mobile devices, this style of configuration is increasingly applicable to Windows Desktops with the advent of Windows 10. Microsoft InTune is leading the way with other MDM vendors following on. Not everything on the desktop can yet be controlled this way, even with W10 but many key settings and controls are already available. A much simpler method for enforcing desktop settings than the other methods, it allows fewer administrators and much less specialist knowledge.

The article from FoxDeploy covers the first three of those and lays out the purpose of each. Well worth a read.

What is missing is the 4th method which uses Mobile Device Management tooling. The leading contender for this is Microsoft InTune. However, InTune is really only focussed on Windows 10 (desktop and mobile), it has limited control in other Operating Systems.

Servers only ever exist in a given state. If they deviate or we make changes, we refactor and redeploy. DSC drives it all and the machine will be up and running on a new OS, with data migrated in a matter of minutes.

For all practical purposes, the first true large scale management tool we had for Windows systems in the modern era was Group Policy, or GPO as it is commonly truncated.

Comparatively, SCCM and MDT allow us to we import an image from a Windows install disk and then run dozens of individual steps which are customized based on the target machines platform, model, office location and other factors. The sky is the limit.

Curated from DSC vs. GPO vs. SCCM, the case for each. – FoxDeploy.com

Update 2018-05-04 - Intune and Autopilot

It should be noted that Intune is now much more capable than when this was originally written.

Intune now has mobile device management that easily rivals any of the other MDM tools across all platforms. It is also well able to manage Apple OS X as far as Apple actually allow remote management of this type (they provide only a restricted set of API’s unlike Windows).

It should now be possible to manage and configure Windows desktops (at least Windows 10) just using Intune via the Cloud without any input from the other tools.

Intune coupled with Microsoft Autopilot provides a massively powerful and attractive set of tools for the deployment and configuration of Windows 10 based devices.

Autopilot lets you ship devices straight from the manufacturer to the end user with no build needed. The user only requires a broadband Internet connection. Devices are unboxed by the user and connected to the Internet. The user logs in with their cloud identity. Intune “knows” which organisation the device belongs to and begins configuration. The whole process takes about 10 minutes to give a device that can browse the Internet and 1 to 2 hours at most before all local client applications are installed and configured (in the background) depending on the complexity of your configuration.

Why I Still Don’t Use Bing For Searching

Julian Knight — Sat, 23 Jan 2016 13:12:13 +0000

Microsoft continue to reinvent themselves for the 21st Century but Bing lags behind compared to its competition.

Whilst Microsoft seem to continue to reinvent themselves for the 21st Century and are coming out with some excellent products and services that are far more reactive to the views of their customers, there is one product that still lags far behind the competition – at least if you are not in the USA.

The Bing search engine.

With my recent move to a Surface Pro 4 and various recent updates to Windows 10, I thought it a good idea to revisit using Edge as my default browser and to try to stick with Bing as the default search.

But I’m sorry Microsoft, it doesn’t work! Even when not logged in to Google, it consistently returns far more relevant answers as evidenced by the following search for the latest Raspberry Pi flavoured version of the Scratch programming environment “NuScratch”

. Search in Google vs Bing

Need to do better!

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

Julian Knight — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 19:56:06 +0000

Like many people I receive an unmanageable amount of email each day. Many days I get through only around 1/3 of the email I receive. However, the role I am in professionally requires me to retain a large proportion of correspondence. Some because it relates to ongoing projects, other because of security, audit or compliance reasons.

In addition, I work across many projects. It isn’t unusual for me to be involved in two dozen projects at any one time on top of my day-to-day management work.

Thankfully, I have access to VBA in Outlook. While the experience of using VBA macro’s to control Outlook is rarely pleasant, it does get the job done – mainly.

My requirements for the utility were as follows:

Must let me select multiple emails, if any have already been filed, show me the folder(s) so I can quickly file new email to the same folder as the rest of the conversation.
Must give me a list of all my folders with a simple way of filtering the list by typing a few letters.
Must also let me open a folder for viewing instead of filing or cancelling.

A couple of hours later, I was able to create a new utility. This has been published to Github and you can find it at: https://github.com/TotallyInformation/outlook-filer

No Code Business Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

Julian Knight — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 22:55:23 +0000

Resources to show you how to create code-free business solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

It used to be that you had to be an expert Microsoft developer to create business solutions in Microsoft SharePoint but that is no longer true. There are many ways for users and power users to create incredible solutions with no coding at all. Here are two resources that show you how:

No-code solutions using SharePoint 2013 Composites

“Let’s not write code, until we have to write code” A handbook showing all of the many different ways of creating no-code business solutions in SharePoint. Includes demos, labs, walkthroughs and tutorials.
Proven Ways to Build Robust, No-Code Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

An hour long video from Ignite 2015 dedicated to demonstrating no-code business solutions.

Slides

Outlook 2013 URL Protocol Handler

Julian Knight — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 21:07:40 +0000

Outlook has a custom URL protocol that allows interaction with different elements such as folders, mail and calendar items and contacts, Since Outlook 2007, this has been restricted for use only within Outlook itself but there are some tremendous opportunities for use from simple web systems. This post explains how to turn it on, even for Outlook 2013 (Office 365 version). It also gives pointers to other articles on how to use the protocol.

Update 2018-04-24: Having changed roles at the start of 2017, I am no longer getting quite the volume of email that I used to. So I no longer need to manage my email in quite the same way. However, the Outlook URL protocol handler remains very useful, especially when creating To Do lists in other tools and linking back to Outlook emails.

One of the nice features about older versions of Microsoft Outlook was that it had a set of URL Protocol Handlers (like [outlook:inbox][1]) defined that could be used system wide to trigger actions in Outlook such as opening a folder, creating or editing an item.

Unfortunately, along the way, these got gradually toned down so that they only worked from within Outlook itself.

This can still be useful. I’m not sure how many people realise that you can create “folders” in your Outlook mailbox. Choose Properties .../Home Page and set a URL – maybe your blog or Intranet. Now when you click on the folder, you will see the web page instead of a set of mail items or whatever.

When using this feature to do some more clever stuff such as creating To Do lists from incoming mail, you might choose to use a dynamic web system to handle the list. CouchDB or Node.JS are lightweight web systems that come to mind.

Then you might find yourself wishing that you could create links in your To Do system back to the original email in Outlook. Well you can! Sort of.

It turns out that, although the external use of the Outlook: protocol hasn’t been available since Outlook 2003, it can still be turned on, even in Outlook 2013. There is a useful article on the TeamScope web site that shows you how to turn on the outlook: protocol system-wide.

One minor wrinkle though if you use Office from an Office 365 subscription – the location for Microsoft Office applications is different! You will find them at: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office 15\root\office15.

Here then is the registry code that you need to enable the protocol:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\outlook]
"URL Protocol"=""
@="URL:Outlook Folders"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\outlook\DefaultIcon]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office 15\\root\\office15\\OUTLOOK.EXE\""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\outlook\shell]
@="open"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\outlook\shell\open]
@=""
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\outlook\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office 15\\root\\office15\\OUTLOOK.EXE\" /select \"%1\""

Simply save this into a .reg file and open it to install the changes.

Now you can use the outlook: protocol anywhere on the system, great for dynamic web systems. One minor word of warning though – there are dangers! Don’t open links unless you know what they are, where they go and what they do!

To find out how to use the Outlook protocol handler, try one of the following articles:

Slipstick: Using Outlook Links – articles on Slipstick are always useful and knowledgeable.
What’s new for Outlook 2013 developers
How to hyperlink to Microsoft Outlook messages

One final note. I’m now looking to create some tools that link between Outlook and CouchDB. CouchDB provides a very lightweight NOSQL database that uses JSON and JavaScript to great effect. I’m already using it to track statistics on incoming/outgoing emails, linking the web interface back to Outlook via the home page method mentioned at the start. I’m going to have a go at creating a task monitor too if I get the time. I am currently reading only around a quarter of the emails in my work inbox and I really need some tools to improve the situation. Food for some more blog posts hopefully. [1]: outlook:inbox “Activate Outlook and show the inbox”

New Laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga

Julian Knight — Fri, 02 May 2014 16:02:58 +0000

I have the pleasure of trying a new laptop right now as we consider them for work.

The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga.

We have this configured with an Intel i5, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD with 16GB SDD speed boost, the touch & pen screen. It is a nice laptop with a screen that folds right over so you can use it as a slightly chunky tablet, the keyboard locks in this mode so you don’t accidentally press keys.

It is great to finally be able to afford a laptop with a proper, pressure sensitive pen interface, it is a joy to use with tools such as Microsoft OneNote.

The touch pad is also the best I’ve ever used. The pad itself is a proper mechanical button and once used, you will never want to go back to a trackpad that doesn’t provide such positive feedback and natural feel.

We have Windows 8.1 Pro on it and the usual ups and downs of that operating system apply. Personally, I find W8.1 less reliable than Windows 7 but I suspect that it comes down to the software you use. I can say categorically that the “Modern UI” apps are a disaster. In particular they do not fully close when you think you’ve closed them (check in the Task Manager) and I’ve often noticed a significant slow-down after having started and “closed” several Modern UI apps.

The laptop is certainly nice to use overall, it isn’t too heavy and can be used on one arm for 5-15 minutes without discomfort, longer than that becomes noticeable though. So not a complete tablet replacement. Great when sat however with it perched on a knee or supported with a table. No more scrappy paper notes for me! It is OneNote all the way.

The Good

Pen and touch with Windows 8.1 and Microsoft Office, a great combination.
Fairly thin considering the features available.
The fold-over screen is easy and natural to use.

The Indifferent

The Windows architecture doesn’t handle very high resolution screens well. I blame this on the development tools and Windows graphical UI libraries mainly. Too many applications do not correctly scale.
Only 2 USB ports. About average for a thin laptop but very limiting when there as so many devices needing USB.
After many years, Lenovo have finally changed their power connectors. Annoying though necessary, all those spare power supplies scattered around aren’t so useful now. Fortunately, you can buy a converter cable if you want to.
Some windows behave oddly, changing font sizes drastically for no apparent reason. Not sure if this is Windows or something to do with the laptop.

The Bad

The power button is in the wrong place, it gets clicked by mistake too often. It is on the right hand side of the base at the front. Right next to the volume buttons.
No drive LED indicator – really?! When using a PC this is essential if you want to know whether a pause in response is due to disk activity or something more serious.
Mini-HDMI interface. This is not good for a business laptop, we already have full and mini Display Link adaptors and now we need to have HDMI as well.
No native LAN interface. You have to give up one of the 2 USB ports and to get a USB-to-LAN cable if you want a wired connection. Again poor for a business laptop.
The usual pointless spamware is pre-installed. However, Lenovo are better than most, not installing too much and their own wares do seem to actually serve a purpose mainly (I probably kept 1/2 of their own tools and removed everything else). Driver and software updates seem regular.
Windows 8.1 Modern UI apps continue to be a very uncertain proposition with poor quality being rife and even the better quality apps seeming to regularly result in ongoing reduced performance on the PC. (Not Lenovo’s fault of course).

Conclusion

A worthy, flexible tool if you need or want both touch and pen interfaces. If not, save some money and go for a Lenovo X240. Possibly the most affordable convertible with pen and touch, at last such devices are in reach of mortals!

Microsoft 64-bit Application Support (lack-of)

Julian Knight — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 13:08:44 +0000

Microsoft's 64-bit support is still sorely fragmented as we find out with a brand new laptop trying to access Microsoft SharePoint.

The joys of working with Microsoft products!

So I have a brand-new, shiny 17″ HP laptop. 64-bit throughout. 6GB of RAM and comes pre-installed with 64-bit Windows. You would think, then, that you would want to use 64-bit applications right? Wrong!!

I automatically use the 64-bit version of Internet Explorer to access some Microsoft specific sites (Outlook Web Access and SharePoint 2007). I install and use the 64-bit version of Microsoft Office. Does this work well with SharePoint (from Microsoft)? No!

For starters, you cannot upload an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint list like you should be able to. You get an error:

Next you try to switch a list into a “Datasheet” view – which looks a bit like a spreadsheet. Inevitably, you get another error:

To fix these errors, you then have to download and install “2007 Office System Driver: Data Connectivity Components“. And you have to use the 32-bit version of Internet Explorer 9 (IE9).

Microsoft Word Wildcard and Regular Expression Search and Replace

Julian Knight — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 17:20:05 +0000

One often missed aspect of the Find dialog in Microsoft Word is the ability to use wild cards. In fact, Word not only has the simple wild cards (* and ?) but uses simplified Regular Expression (REGEX) searching. In this article, I’ve put together a number of examples of advanced finds and replaces that I’ve found useful. I’ll update it from time to time.

Reference

[], groups (), repeats @, {}, anchors < > and exceptions ! ^p (to find a paragraph mark) does not work when using wildcard searches. Use ^13 instead. But you cannot use ^13 in the “replace with” field, it doesn’t work. Use ^2 to find a footnote mark Word wildcard searches are “lazy” (they stop at the smallest possible match not the largest as most regular expression tools would).

Examples

Don’t forget to turn on “Use Wildcards” to use these examples. It is in the “More” part of the find and replace dialogs.

Remove leading multiple spaces

If you have ever pasted from an email or text document, you may have come across the problem of some indented and manually wrapped text:

You can find the leading multiple spaces with the code (note that there is a leading space):

So selecting some text, putting this into the “find what” box and doing a “replace all” with nothing will remove all of the leading spaces in the selection. Actually it will remove everything that has at least 2 spaces followed by the start of a word.

Remove single paragraph marks to join lines

Search for: >^13 and replace with a single space. Note that you can combine this in a single step with the previous example as (note again leading space):

Though it should be noted that this can fail. For some reason if the last character on the line is a “/”, Word fails to find a match. Unexplained failures in Word’s find feature is not at all uncommon, it is rather buggy! To replace manual line breaks instead of a paragraph mark, use ^| instead of ^13. The special characters can be inserted from the “Special” button but do note the warning in “Reference” above and in “What you cannot do!” below regarding some of the marks you cannot find.

What you cannot do!

Recently, I needed to replace a load of text in a very large table (around 100 pages). I knew that the text to replace all appeared at the end of table cells but I couldn’t immediately work out how to search for this. My first thought was to do:

It turns out that you cannot search for this! Well, not outside of some VBA anyway. The character is actually an ASCII 07 so you should be able to do:

And using Replace to add to the text, you would have been able to use:

Which would have resulted in “Done in 1.4a but there is still more to do” wherever the original text appeared at the end of a cell. Sadly though, wildcard searches don’t find end-of-cell marker. Thankfully, there is another way that works for most searches.

Will find that text at the end of a cell. The leading * consumes all of the leading text in the cell forcing the search to occur at the end. Putting the * in brackets instead of the search text would allow the leading text to be retained in a replace. Putting both in separate brackets would allow the end text to be moved to the start of the cell with a replace string of:

Links to more information

Microsoft’s Facebook Docs.com fails at the first hurdle

Julian Knight — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 19:00:23 +0000

Had my first test for Microsoft’s new [docs.com][1] this week – and it failed badly. In case you don’t know, Microsoft recently announced a new beta [Office Live link-up with Facebook][1]. You can log in using your [Facebook][2] login instead of a Microsoft Live Id. So you would think that it would be possible to use [docs.com][1] as a collaborative document editor and I suspect that you are supposed to be able to – as long as your documents don’t contain anything complex – such as comments! My wife wanted to share a spreadsheet with some friends – very simple – just a few lines to help them schedule some transport for the kids during an upcoming dance show. [Docs.com][1] seemed ideal for this as they are all on [Facebook][2] so it should be much easier than using [Google docs][3].

The first problem is that [docs.com][1] doesn’t always pick up your existing Facebook login so you have to log in again.
The second problem is that even when you are logged in, there is a large banner asking you to sign up for the Beta programme – very confusing.
The third problem is that the interface does not work correctly with [Firefox][4] – there is no warning of this but there are some things, such as adding viewers and editors, that fail with no proper explanatory error message.
The fourth problem is that only the original creator can add other editors or viewers, there is no way of delegating this.
The fifth, and most serious, problem comes from using cell comments to annotate cells. Apparently Microsoft’s shiny new [online Office suite][5] cannot cope with this. Not only does it not show them on the web page, it will no longer let you edit the spreadsheet online! To compound the problem, when someone else (who has been given edit rights) then downloads the sheet as instructed – there is no way to get the edited sheet back online!! OUCH – it is, in fact, much easier to simply email the document back and forth. Of course, we could have used [Google docs][3] for this. In fact, [Google docs][3] seems to have much better compatibility with [Microsoft Office][6] than Microsoft do!! It had no problem with cell comments. You can also set the document to not require a login, handy as many people don’t have Google logins. But by this time, the audience had lost patience with the technology and done things a different way. It may only be in Beta but Microsoft seem to be determined to demonstrate that they don’t understand user interactions in a collaborative sense nor do they have any comprehension it seems for the need for simplicity. 1 out of 10 for [docs.com][1] then – must try better! UPDATE 2010-06-18: Tried again, this time with [Google docs][3]. I set the document so that anyone can edit it (without needing a Google login), shared the link using Facebook messages and everyone is happy. You can even work on the document together, you actually see other people updating the document. Given that it also supports more useful features than docs.com, [Google docs][3] gets the thumbs up – 10/10 PS: Sorry about comments, I’ve updated the [Blogger][7] theme and it seems to have broken the old comments. If you are desperate to get in touch, feel free to use my [comment form][8]. I’ll put any comments on here manually. [1]: http://docs.com/ [2]: http://www.facebook.com/ [3]: http://docs.google.com/ [4]: http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/ [5]: http://www.officelive.com/ [6]: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/muadabit-21?_encoding=UTF8&node=4 [7]: http://blogger.com/ [8]: http://www.knightnet.org.uk/comment.html

Microsoft on Much Ado About IT

OneNote Missing Features

Tell Microsoft what you want!

Missing Features

Other Questions

Other Issues

What do we get that is “Better”?

Updates

Windows 10 1803 Timeline Feature

Office 365 Autosave

Macro to open a web URL from Outlook

Presentation: Security and Governance in the Cloud

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

DSC vs. GPO vs. SCCM vs. MDM (Intune)

Update 2018-05-04 - Intune and Autopilot

Why I Still Don’t Use Bing For Searching

A simple mail filer for Microsoft Outlook (VBA)

No Code Business Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint

Outlook 2013 URL Protocol Handler

New Laptop: Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga

The Good

The Indifferent

The Bad

Conclusion

Microsoft 64-bit Application Support (lack-of)

Microsoft Word Wildcard and Regular Expression Search and Replace

Reference

Examples

Remove leading multiple spaces

Remove single paragraph marks to join lines

What you cannot do!

Links to more information

Microsoft’s Facebook Docs.com fails at the first hurdle