Archive for microsoft
Microsoft Kills the Windows Live Name-Changes Coming
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Last week, I wrote about the new improved SkyDrive and was thrilled to see how it integrates with windows explorer. This week, I’ve been hearing and reading about how Microsoft is discarding the Windows Live name and programs in favor of Windows 8 and the Metro Style Apps.
So now everyone (or many of us), are wondering what all will happen with both the ‘live’ name as it relates to our email accounts. There are over 350 million live/hotmail users – with the live name going away and Microsoft 8’s new ‘Mail App’, what will happen with our @live.com mail addresses? You can read Microsoft’s Sinofsky article here.
So why is ‘Live’ going away? According to the article, the Windows Live Essentials family of free software wasn’t all they wanted it to be. It didn’t feel integrated and connected enough and they felt user’s weren’t getting the service and experience they wanted to deliver.
So what do they want to deliver? Apps! It’s more than that, of course, but with the popularity of the iPhone and the burgeoning App popularity, Microsoft has also gone to Apps, both with its Windows Phone and with Windows 8. So you can see from the chart below that email will be called ‘Mail App, our calendars will be a ‘Calendar App’, and so on. SkyDrive will become a big part of where everything will be stored, accessed and fetched, thus the recent upgrade of SkyDrive.
Not everything has been worked out yet and people still have a lot of questions about how our favorite Live Essential programs will function with Windows 8. I’ve been using most of them and wonder what’s ahead. Perhaps more information with be coming soon, but I anticipate many of the changes will happen when Windows 8 is released around October, 2012. Change is hard, but it’s here.
There’s a chart supplied that is a bit confusing (at least to me).
-published May 11, 2012
New Outlook Social Connector & Why You Should Use It
Posted by: | CommentsMany people are using a web-based email, but for those of us who still live and die using Outlook, (like me), I want to talk about Outlook Social Connector, why I use it and some steps to get, install and what it looks like.
1. I can easily search for email, appointments, attachments and updates from each of my contacts when using the connector. If you’re like me and don’t get to LinkedIn and Facebook enough, you can catch up on clients’ updates from within email.
2. I’ve noticed that even if I’ve not connected with some of email contacts, sometimes their photo will pop in anyway. If their Facebook profile is public, then it should pop in (or so I’ve read). Conversely, if someone has mega privacy settings, then you may not see much of them. So having a face to put with a name is nice (but sometimes disturbing-haha).
3. If you live in your email all day, you’ll be more up to date with what’s happening with your clients. If you see an achievement, you can quickly send an email or go make a comment on their social media page.
4. It’s just a cool thing to have and really brightens up my email. You can adjust the size of your social connector to stretch the entire width of your screen and pull it up near the top of your screen to get a great view of what’s going on with people you care about.
Steps for Downloading, Installation & Use of Outlook Social Connector
Outlook Social Connector has been around for a couple of years, but there’s been a recent update (April, 2012), and if you don’t download and install it, some of your components will stop working effective May, 2012.
Outlook Social Connector – Separate Components
First, you’ll need the connector itself – find it here. If you don’t need to update, it won’t install.
Next, you’ll need to get the components or pieces of the social part you want. Below are the five currently available. (So glad they took MySpace off). All these components can be found here. There are separate downloads for each piece.
Have Outlook closed when installing – but it’s OK if it’s open, you’ll be prompted to restart upon installing the components.
Restart Outlook and get going
When you start Outlook, you’ll be presented with this pop-up where you can choose which components you want to use. The My Site is for people who use SharePoint.
You’ll be prompted to enter your username and password for each site you want to add, then you’ll see the checkmark when you’re connected – that’s it! Start scrolling through your emails and watch your email pop with photos and updates. If you’re connected to someone in multiple ways, you’ll see all the updates if you select ‘all’.
If you don’t get the above screen, you can get to it by going to ‘View’ then look over to the right where it says ‘People Pane’, open it and then you’ll get the accounts screen. Make sure you have the people pane ‘on’ or you won’t see it.
Below is an example of someone I’m connected with on LinkedIn & Facebook. You can see she’s active and uses social media a lot! The icons I’ve circled are very helpful because I can choose to show only emails I’ve received, or only appointments, only attachments or only updates. It saves time.
If you have questions or need some troubleshooting, here’s the FAQ on problems with social connector. Not everything works all the time, they still seem to be working bugs out. If you’re using it, how do you like it? If you’re not, do you think you’ll install it?
New SkyDrive App-Cloud Storage & Desktop Sync
Posted by: | CommentsI wrote about some new SkyDrive features on 4-13-12 and now the remaining newest features were released the week of 4-23-12 and they are great! If you have Dropbox, it’s very dropbox-like, only you get 7GB of free storage (25GB if you act quickly). I think I mentioned in my last SkyDrive article that I wished they would make it more like Dropbox as it’s rests in your system tray and is easily accessed. Now SkyDrive has finally made this change!
What the new SkyDrive Does
instant access to your SkyDrive from your computer on windows explorer or you can go to SkyDrive in the cloud- back-up and sync of your documents, pictures, videos, etc. across all your computers
- ability to access your files from anywhere – just log in with your Windows Live ID
- make a change on a document on one computer, save it and SkyDrive immediately syncs the document with the SkyDrive folder, making the updated document available
- apps are available for Windows, Mac, Android phones, iPhones and of course, Windows Phones
- SkyDrive icon rests out of the way in System Tray
- my SkyDrive icon is on the last row, last icon on the right. You can see my Dropbox icon in the third row, first one on the left.
Get SkyDrive for Windows
You’ll need to go here and get your Windows or Mac download.
Follow the steps – download
SkyDrive is being installed on your computer
You will need to sign in with your Windows Live ID. Do you have more than one ID? I do and I’m still working on some questions I have about that, but for now, having my data and pictures from my three computers in one place seems like a smart thing to do.
The install goes pretty fast, then you’ll need to start copying folders over to your SkyDrive through Windows Explorer. Make sure you copy folders – don’t move them. I’m keeping the same folder structure on SkyDrive and in Windows Explorer – makes sense. The actual copying and syncing process can take awhile depending on how much data you have. There is a limit to the size that can be uploaded. 
Once it’s finished, you’ll see the green check mark, indicating it’s synced from your local machine to the SkyDrive in the cloud.
Upgrade to 25 GB free to loyal customers
To get this free upgrade, simply right-click on the SkyDrive icon in your system tray and select ‘Manage Storage’. You’ll be taken on-line where you can get your free upgrade to 25GB. I don’t know how long this will last.
Now you can see everything on all your connected computers
The view below is from SkyDrive. I clicked on Lynn-DellPC and instantly see everything on my computer. It’s like having it on a drive. To get to music, pictures, etc. just click and navigate to where you need to be.
This is So Cool
It took quite awhile, but I think I have everything I was longing for to make SkyDrive robust, usable and easy. These new features might make it possible for home computer users to utilize SkyDrive as their backup. You may not need to pay for a backup system any more – something to think about.
Be Productive with Windows Live Mail Instant Actions & Recover Deleted Mail Items
Posted by: | CommentsWindows Live Essentials just went through some upgrades. I’ve been pretty happy with how they’ve been consistently making improvements over the last 2-3 years. Today we’ll talk about a couple things to make you more productive while in email and a tip on getting back deleted items. These tips are for the web-based Live/Hotmail, not the desktop version.
Be More Productive With Instant Actions
There are four instant action categories we’ll talk about that will save you time while working with your mail. As mentioned, it’s called Instant Actions and is available only while using Hotmail or Live mail on the web. Here’s how to get to it and what you can do with it:
To get there, be signed into your Windows Account, go to the upper right below your name and click on ‘Options’, then click on ‘more options’. You’ll get a screen full of choices. Look for the ‘Customizing Hotmail’ section on the right and then finally locate ‘Instant Actions’ and click on it.
Below you’ll see the instant actions box where you’ll configure what you want to do. Once you’ve configured/chosen or removed an action, then when you are going through all your mail you’ll have the choices you’ve configured ready to be implemented with a single click. For example, if you have ‘Delete’ as one of your instant actions, when you’re looking at email, the delete icon (the ‘x’) will appear when you hover your mouse over the message. Click the ‘x’ and it’s gone.
If you choose ‘Categorize’, you’ll select a color and then you’ll select a category from the drop down (you can’t make your own). For example, I made a category for ‘social updates’. I receive several reports from Facebook and HootSuite via email. Now I can categorize them while reading them and afterwards, I can click on the ‘social updates’ category at the top of my email and all of the emails I’ve categorized will appear.
‘Move to’ is another handy action. With this you can move a particular email instantly to a different folder. This saves time – no more dragging your messages over to a folder. You’ll specify which folder a message will go to during the set up.
‘Mark as Read/Unread’ – self explanatory.
Flag – this is always shown and one of the newer features. Flag something and it will stick to the top of your mailbox until you unflag it.
There’s a limit of four actions that can be set up (I’m not including the flag since that can’t be taken out). So choose wisely. For example, you could have four ‘Move to’ actions and none of the others if that suits your needs better. Perhaps there’s a limit of four because there’s not much real estate!
Get Back Deleted Messages
Did you delete something and wished you could get it back? Windows Live Mail has made it easy to do. Simply go to your deleted items and scroll way down to the end. You’ll see the following message:
Be warned that all your deleted messages will be restored to your deleted folder. I haven’t even wanted to try this out since I didn’t want to go through them again. However, this is a nice feature to have and they’ve made it very easy to get messages back. They don’t guarantee they can get all, but they do their best.
I hope you’ll try out some of these tips to make your work or personal mailbox a little more productive and easy to use. If you come across any time-saving tips, please post them in the comment section.
New SkyDrive Features
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Microsoft has been quietly making SkyDrive easier to use. If you have a Windows Live ID, then you automatically get 25GB of free storage courtesy of Microsoft. If you don’t have a backup system on your computers, this is perfect for that. In addition to back-up, you can easily share documents, photos and videos with any one or group. You can instantly publish pictures or documents to your social media circles or on your website.
To get to your SkyDrive, simply sign in using your Live ID – go to http://skydrive.com and sign in.
Your documents are filed in alpha order and can be viewed all together, or you can click on ‘Photos’ or ‘Documents’ and they’ll be separated. A new feature is the ability to right-click on a folder or document and instantly share it with anyone – you’ll just need their email address. Your recipient doesn’t need to have a live account in order to retrieve and/or look at the document. Other actions you can do with a right-click are:
edit in your browser
open in Word/Excel, etc.
view version history
download it
move it
copy it
delete it
rename it
I’ve circled the other ways you can share. On the social side, you can share your photo or document to Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace. Your document or photo is instantly published. If you prefer, you can ‘get a link’ and put your link in an email that you send from your email program.
Do you want to make a document or photo available on your blog or website? That’s a new feature too. To do this, click on a folder, photo album or document and you’ll see the option to ‘Embed’ (see illustration below). Click on ‘Embed’ and then you’ll get the pop-up to generate the code. Then copy and paste the code into your blog or website. Cool!
SkyDrive is getting easier to use and navigate – faster too. If you haven’t checked it out, give it a try. What cool tricks have you discovered while using SkyDrive?
(Republished on 4-26-12)
Excel Tips on Formulas & Circular References
Posted by: | CommentsThis week I have some video tips on some things I recently figured out while using Excel and I thought I’d share them on my blog.
Some spreadsheets I use daily gave me an annoying message every time I opened them about a circular reference error. A circular reference is created when you refer to same cell either directly or indirectly. For months I never stopped to figure out exactly where it was as I thought it would be too time consuming since my spreadsheets have multiple formulas in them.
I use Excel 2010 and it’s ridiculously easy to fix a circular reference. It’s up first here in the video.
Check your Formulas
When in Excel, click on the ‘Formulas’ tab at the top and you’ll find some very useful functions. In the video, I demonstrate how to ‘Trace Precedents’ and ‘Trace Dependents’. These tools tell you what cells are included in a formula and tell you what cells are affected by the value of the currently selected cells—well, it all makes more sense when you watch the video!
I hope you enjoy and please stop over at my YouTube channel as I have more short videos with tips and shortcuts that may be helpful to you.
How To Close Your Microsoft Small Business Live Account & Transfer Your Data
Posted by: | CommentsIf you are one of those small business people who took advantage of Microsoft’s free website tools and hosting, you’ve certainly heard Microsoft
is discontinuing these services effective 4-30-12. I found the Microsoft Small Business Live free website and hosting irresistible, so I built one for myself as well as several clients. This was before I found WordPress. Now I exclusively use WordPress and the great themes, plugins and support from iThemes.
Steps to Close Down Microsoft Small Business Live
1. Before your account closes, take the time to export your email, contacts and calendar. If you’re going to move your account to Office 365, then the instructions are here. I transitioned one of my email accounts to O365 and for $6/month, it’s wonderful to have Exchange email for one person. If you don’t want to move to O365, how will you save your email from your Small Business Live Account? It depends on what mail client you prefer. We’ll look at transitioning to a free Hotmail/Live account or a Gmail account.
Transfer to a free Live/Hotmail account using Outlook
This is how we accomplished this for my daughter who opened a new, free Live mail account with Microsoft. She has Outlook 2010 and already had her Office Live Mail coming into Outlook 2010 via the great Outlook Connector.She added her new Live account into Outlook and then made sure she had the same folders in that account and simply copied them from the old folder to the new one. For me, I moved my personal domain to hover and set up my email account with them. I then added my Hover email account to Outlook and did the same copying over of the emails, making sure I made the same folder over in my Hover account. To make a new folder in Outlook, simply right-click on your email name and scroll down to ‘add new folder’ and do so. Contacts – go back to your Office Live account and click on ‘Contacts’, then click on ‘Manage’, there you will see the export option, click on that and you’ll most likely want to export to a .csv file. Then in Outlook, import them by clicking on ‘File’, ‘Open’, then a box will come up and select ‘import from another program or file’, click ‘Next’ and select ‘Comma Separated Values’, locate your exported file and import it. I just used the defaults and didn’t try to do anything fancy.
Calendar –here are instructions from Microsoft:http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980534
Exporting Calendar from Windows Live Mail to Microsoft Outlook 2010:
- Open Windows Live Mail.
- Select the Calendar folder and make sure that you are logged in by using your Windows Live ID.
- Click Send/Receive to sync your calendar.
- Close Windows Live Mail.
- Visit the Windows Live Calendar webpage http://calendar.live.com and logon by using your Windows Live ID.
- Click the “Share” button and select the calendar that you want to export.
- Select the option “Share this calendar”.
- Put a check mark in the item topic “Send people a view-only link to your calendar”.
- You will see some links to share your calendar. If the links are not displayed, click “Get your calendar links (this will also save your settings)” and then click OK to confirm.
- Under the category “Links that show event details”, click “ICS: Import into another calendar application”.
- Select and copy the URL displayed without the webcal:// prefix.
- Open a new Internet Explorer window, paste the URL without the webcal:// prefix in the address bar and press Enter.
- Save the calendar .ICS file on your Desktop.
- Repeat the steps 5 to 13 for each calendar that you want to export.
Note: After complete these steps your Windows Live Calendar settings from the webpage are saved as Shared. You can make the calendar private again following the steps 5 to 7 above. Select the option “Don’t share this calendar (keep it private)” and then click Save.- Close the Internet Explorer window after you save all the .ICS files that you want.
- Open Microsoft Outlook.
- Click File, select Open and then the Import option.
- Select the option “Import an iCalendar (.ics) or vCalendar file (.vcs)” and then click the Next button.
- Select the .ICS calendar file in your Desktop folder and then click Ok button.
- Click the “Import” button in the dialog box and wait for the import process to be completed.
- Repeat steps 17 to 20 for each calendar that you want to import.
Transfer Your Live Mail to Gmail
Perhaps you don’t want to use Microsoft mail anymore and you have a Gmail account. You may know that you can import mail from IMAP and POP mail into Gmail and have it integrate with your main inbox, or make a filter and have your Live Mail go into a folder. The best instructions I’ve ever found is from the How-To Geek website. So I’ll just provide the link and you can follow those instructions. Once you have your mail, contacts and calendar transferred to Gmail, that will serve as the backup for your live mail. Then when you cancel your account, you know you have a copy of all your email, contacts & calendar over at Gmail.
What Happens To My Old Email Account and Website in Small Business Live?
From what I’ve been able to find, your website, contacts, email and calendar will all cease to function as of end of 4-30-12. I’m assuming it’s not accessible, but they don’t say. I’ve also read that your free fourth-level domain will still exist and in fact, they’ve said it can’t be canceled (don’t know why). A sample of a fourth-level domain would be – skipchilcott.Web.officelive.com. So don’t cancel your account before you take action to keep your email, etc. that was mentioned above. If you have a website, you can export it, but it really won’t do you much good because from what I’m reading, it can’t be imported into Dreamweaver or really any other program that I’ve found. It can not be exported as an .html or any other kind of website file either. I exported mine, but it’s most likely worthless.
Now On to Canceling Your Small Business Live Account
You’ll sign into your Office Live account and click on ‘Account Management’, then you’ll see the choice to ‘Cancel Account’ over on the left. When you click it, it’ll bring up details and ask you to make sure of the account you’ll want to cancel.
If you click the ‘Keep the account…’, it’ll just take you to the O365 offer. I did have a custom domain on my account and they didn’t send me any information, but I had already taken my custom domain off the site and transferred it to Hover, so perhaps that’s why.
You’ll get a warning of what will happen when you close your account. When you click the ‘cancel’ button, I think they even sent me an email to make me confirm I wanted to cancel, so you will have several opportunities to change your mind.
Here’s one of the final warnings!
Success!
Conclusion
I hope my experience helps you navigate through what you’ll need to do to close down your account. There is a pretty good community over at Office Live, where you can read and search for answers. If you register, you can post questions. They’ve been good at getting back to me. Good luck with your transition and if I can answer any questions, leave a comment or email me directly at lynn (at)extremevirtualsupport.com. If you find yourself in need of a new website, I’d certainly like to visit with you about that too.
Get Free Windows Themes
Posted by: | CommentsIf you have Windows 7, you probably noticed a big improvement in screensavers, desktop themes, wallpaper – whatever you like to call them. They brighten up our screens and days with the different sceneries and themes offered.
Microsoft offers free themes (a series of pictures), or wallpapers (one picture suitable for your desktop) to continually refresh your desktop. They’ve continued to bring new themes out since the release, so you’ll find quite a selection. Some categories include:
- animals
- movie themes
- branded themes
- holiday and seasons
- cars
- nature
- landscapes
- from the community (you can submit your own photos for consideration)
How to Download & Install
It’s easy to download and install the theme. I chose to ‘Open’ the download from Internet Explorer – it’s the quickest way, rather than saving the themes and going to find it and installing. So click on ‘Open’ and it will unpack it.
After it’s installed, your Control Panel ‘Appearance & Personalization’ will come up and you’ll see your new themes installed and it’s also been selected and applied to your desktop. So minimize your windows or go down to the lower right part of the window and click in that rectangle and check out your new theme.
If you use Firefox, then click to ‘open with’ and it’ll unpack and install the theme for you – pretty much the same process as IE.
Go check it out and spiff up your desktop.
Get Genuine Windows Kit (get a legal copy of Microsoft Windows)
Posted by: | CommentsToday we’re going to go over how to make your copy of Windows legal (assuming it isn’t). Perhaps you bought a computer from Ebay or Craigslist or a friend or family member ‘worked’ on your computer and installed a bootleg copy of Windows from a shady site.
The latter happened to a client of mine and she called saying she was getting pop-ups (from Microsoft), letting her know her copy of Windows wasn’t valid.
If you get WAT (Windows activation tool) popups saying your copy of windows isn’t valid, the fastest and easiest thing to do is click on the popup and then you’ll be taken to a Microsoft site where you can purchase your ‘Get Genuine Windows’ kit. I tried to find a link to the site, but there’s not one that I can find. This may be because the price is less than buying a full version of Windows. (Of course use caution when you click on a pop-up as it could be a phishing scheme. Verify you are at the Microsoft site by looking at your URL.)
There’s a comprehensive site called Genuine Windows, that gives a lot of information on how to tell if your copy of Windows is genuine or not. From what I’m reading, you won’t be given a link to purchase the Windows Kit unless it’s determined your copy is not valid.
After you place your on-line order and pay, you’ll get an email from Microsoft with instructions and your product key – so keep that email!
Next Steps
- You’ can update your existing product key (no DVD needed). This is the quickest way to get your computer going again-no waiting for a DVD in the mail. Keep in mind that you can only use the key to activate the same version of windows you currently have. For example, if you have Windows 7 Home Premium on your computer, and you pay for a Windows 7 Home Premium kit, then you can simply apply the key (again your instructions will be in your email, so keep it), and your computer will be legit. Microsoft states in the email that you must visit the URL they give you to apply the key from the same computer you purchased the kit from. This keeps people from trying to use the key on a different computer.
- You can wait for your DVDs (one 32-bit & one 64-bit) to come in the mail – usually takes a week or so. Put it in and a setup screen will present. Now you can choose to either do a fresh and full install or you can choose to input the new product key.My client wanted a fresh install and I recommend this to blow away all the cruft and start fresh. Before doing this, be sure to transfer your documents and other data to an external drive before doing the fresh install. A complete reformat of your computer erases everything on the drive. If you are just going to activate, I’d still backup everything just to be on the safe side. My client had a bootleg copy of Windows Ultimate, but I easily installed Windows 7 Home Premium in about 30 minutes. Of course, the updates following made it take longer. It should be noted that if you have Windows Vista (or another Windows version), and want to ‘get genuine’ and purchase Windows 7, you must use the DVD to do a full install.
While I was going through the install process, I saw one of the screens said that the copy of Windows could not be transferred to another computer, sold or put on a new computer.
If you’d like more in-depth information, here’s a link to one of Microsoft’s support forums that gives more information on the process from a user who had problems.
If you happen to get a bootleg copy of Windows, I hope this helps prepare you for the process. Yes, it’ll cost some money, but not as much as buying a full version. Good luck and let me know your experience with the Get Genuine Kit.
How To Back Up Windows Live Mail
Posted by: | CommentsIf you have a Windows Live Mail account, have you thought about backing up your mail? Yes, I know it’s in
the cloud, but the unforeseen can happen. Your account could get hacked and you might want to close that account and start over but want to keep your messages. Something could happen with the cloud and your messages could get wiped out. Lastly, it’s your mail, and you need to be in control of it.
Backup Windows Live Mail
If you’re using hotmail or livemail on the web only, you may want to consider getting the free desktop client to install on your desktop. This way, you’ll have off-line access to your mail account and the desktop client has a few features that the web doesn’t. You can get it here by itself, or as a suite of free downloads from Microsoft.
Here’s a quick 3” video that shows you how to export your Windows Live Mail into an .ini file that you can store on your computer or a backup drive. Of course, you’ll want to back up at regular intervals to be as up-to-date as possible.
Backup Windows Live Contacts
Contacts are also important, so there’s a section here on how to export your contacts into a .csv file. This file can be imported into Outlook or Gmail, if you wish.
Windows Live Calendar
Calendar items can’t be backed up at this time. But if you use the web-based calendar along with the desktop client of Windows Live Mail, your calendar items will be synced. If you lose your account though, this won’t help you, will it? There are third party programs (for pay) out there that will back up your Live Calendar if you have that need.
Do you use Windows Live Mail or Hotmail for your business or just personal use? If you are a business, I’d suggest Office 365 at $6/month from Microsoft. For $6/month, you get Exchange mail that’s backed up for you – peace of mind. Read here for other advantages of O365.
