Now I’ve tested it & I’m ready to use it. I need to grant
the rest of my team rights to modify the form. Click the fallen-over hamburger
menu on the form
Select “Move”
Pick Teams space and click “Move”
Return to your Form – in the URL, look at the Form ID again.
Compare it to the original … they don’t match!
Why do I mention this? Well, if you use a form in Flow … it
is referenced by the form ID. Creating a personal form, building a workflow in
flow, then moving the form to your
Teams space to allow others to edit it breaks
the workflow. When you go into the Flow to add additional owners, you’ll need
to update the Form ID as well. If you don’t
update your Flow, it will start failing. Oddly not at the initial “when a new response is submitted” step where I
would expect it to fail if the Form
ID was not valid but at the “get response details” step.
Looking at the error detail on “get response details”, the status
code is 404 (HTTP error for ‘not found’, so I assumed it was used in the same
context). The result body has an error code 639 which I couldn’t find anyone talking about online.
Anyone who has mis-addressed a message or hit ctrl-enter and
prematurely sent, well, some of a message
has probably found the message “recall” option. Unfortunately, “recall” depends
on the recipient having “Automatically process requests and responses to
meeting requests and polls” enabled, cannot recall the message if the recipient
has a rule that moves the message out of their inbox, and doesn’t work if the recipient
isn’t using Exchange. Many times, your attempt to recall a message yields another message like this:
Which is better than someone thinking I meant to send them half
of a thought that stopped mid-sentence. But it’s not what I expected. You can,
however, configure Outlook to delay sending messages … allowing you a little
time to cancel the message.
Outlook Client:
On the ribbon bar, click “File”. On the ‘Account Information’
screen, click “Manage Rules & Alerts”
Click “New Rule…”
In the new rule wizard, select “Apply rule on messages I
send”
Do not select any conditions – just click “Next”.
You will see a warning that the rule will be applied to all
messages you send – click “Yes”.
Click the check-box before “defer delivery by a number of
minutes”, then in the text below click the hyperlinked ‘a number of minutes’
and enter the number of minutes you want to delay sending messages. Use a small
number – if you close Outlook before the message is sent, it will not be sent
until you re-open Outlook! (Plus it’s confusing if you’re on a call with
someone, tell them you are sending them something, and it doesn’t actually send for fifteen minutes). Click
‘Next’ to continue.
Give your rule a descriptive name, then click “Finish”.
You will be warned that the rule will only run if Outlook is
running – click OK. If you routinely
use Outlook on two different computers, you’ll need to create this rule on both computers.
Now when you send a message, you will see a counter next to “Outbox”.
The message will sit there for the time you specified, then it will be sent. Once
the message is sent, the counter will disappear.
If you want to stop the message from being sent, click on “Outbox”.
Right-click on the message – you can select “Move” and move
the message back to your “Drafts” folder or you can delete it.
Outlook Web:
Click the “Settings” gear in the upper right-hand corner of
your screen.
Click on “Mail” to display the mail-related settings.
Expand “Automatic processing” and click on “Undo send”
Click the radio button to select “Let me cancel messages I’ve
sent for:” then click the drop-down to select how long sending will be delayed.
Pending messages won’t be sent if you close your browser or put your computer to
sleep – they’ll still be there when you open Outlook again. Click save.
Now when you send a message, it will be deferred in your “Drafts”
folder for the selected time period. While the message is deferred, you will
see a “Cancel send” option in the upper right-hand corner of your Outlook Web screen.
If you don’t want to send the message, just click “Cancel send”.
The message will be opened to allow you to continue editing
it. You can save it as a draft or discard it as well.
I upgraded to WordPress 5 back when it was still in preview, and wasn’t shocked to find some issues. When I would create a post, WordPress would go into an auto-saving loop. Now I like the idea of background saves to prevent data loss if by browser falls over … but the instant the auto-save would complete, another would kick off and the editor was basically unusable (copy content / refresh page / paste content / cross fingers that the auto-save loop didn’t happen that time). I tried setting the auto-refresh interval in the config file, but that had no impact.
With the 5.0.0 release, I was dismayed to find the problem lingering but 0.0 releases usually have some quirks too. But two dot-dot releases later, and a lot of frustration that auto-save has caused waaaay more data loss in six months than years worth of browser glitches ever managed, I started researching the problem to find a solution other than “wait for the next release to fix it”.
I came across an issue on GitHub which not only reports the same issue, but included a bit of code to add to the theme functions.php file:
add_filter( 'block_editor_settings', 'jp_block_editor_settings', 10, 2 );
function jp_block_editor_settings( $editor_settings, $post ) {
$editor_settings['autosaveInterval'] = 2000; //number of second [default value is 10]
return $editor_settings;
}
Sometimes it is easier to take a few minutes, get everyone together, and talk about something. Switching from an e-mail thread to a meeting invitation, though, means you’ve got to copy/paste all of the recipients and provide a message summary so attendees have a clue about what you want to meet. Did you know that you can reply to a message with a meeting request? All message recipients are included in the invitation, and the message content is copied into the meeting request.
Web Mail:
Click
the drop-down next to reply and select “Reply all by meeting”
A new
meeting request will be constructed – complete with attendees (addresses in he ‘to’
line become required attendees, cc’s become optional attendees), a meeting subject,
and the entire e-mail thread in the meeting body.
Outlook:
In
Outlook, click on the “Meeting” button in the ‘Home” ribbon bar.
Again,
a meeting request is created with attendees, subject, and message content.
Anything
you can do in a manually created meeting request can be done here – if you want
to add a Teams meeting space or set up recurrence … this is a normal meeting
request, it’s just got a lot of information pre-populated.
Using Styles in Word has some advantages – one-click to
apply a variety of format options, the “Navigation” tool provides quick access
to “heading” items, the automatic table of contents uses “heading” items too
(and you can instantly update automatic
table of contents data as new content is added and page numbers change) – but
what can you do if the predefined text format doesn’t fit your document?
Themes
Under the “Design” ribbon bar, you will find an array of
themes.
Selecting a different one changes the colors, font faces, font
weight, and font sizes used throughout the document. You can change your document
to look like this
Or this
Customize Styles
What if the styles still
don’t fit your document? I, as an example, prefer my headings bolded and
sub-headings both bolded and italicized. You can customize a theme to match
your specific preferences.
On the ribbon bar, select “Home”. In the “Styles” section,
right-click on the style component you want to change and select “Modify”.
Modify the style component as desired – change the font face,
make it bolder, change the size, change the color, add a little more space
between lines, whatever you want. Click the box to ‘Update Automatically’ and,
if you want to use this customization in other documents, select the radio
button that says ‘new documents based on this template’. Click “OK”.
Sections of your document using that style component will be
updated. I have customized all of the
style components – normal, headings, title and subtitles, quotes, etc.
On the ribbon bar, select “Design”. Click the “Themes”
drop-down and select “save current theme”.
If you want to use your theme on every document you create,
click “Set as Default”.
In one of my prior jobs, I worked in Boston. I had
colleagues in Hawai’i. Scheduling a meeting was a mental undertaking – 8AM in
Honolulu is 1PM in Boston (and I had to count through Alaska, the west coast,
the mountains, the next one over, and then me all.the.time). Beyond the time
wasted figuring out what time it is elsewhere … you forget to think about it
when you’re in a hurry. I’d book the guys in Hawai’i for mid-morning meetings
at dark-o-clock, and the guys in Hawai’i would schedule mid-afternoon meetings
that were 8PM for me. The Outlook calendar can show two time zones concurrently
– both reminding you that time zones are a ‘thing’ and quickly showing you what
time it is over there.
Click “File” on the ribbon bar
Select “Options”
Select “Calendar” from the left-hand navigation bar. Scroll down and find the ‘Time Zones’ section. Check the box to ‘show a second time zone’, and select that other time zone. I add a label both to my time zone and the secondary one. Click OK. If you have the monthly update channel, you’ll be able to select a third time zone too.
You can! Of course, you don’t want to ignore important conversations; but we’ve all
been accidentally included on message (or been caught up in the dreaded
reply-all blizzard) and been inundated with messages that really can be ignored.
Within the Outlook client, click on one of the messages. On
the left-hand side of the ‘Home’ ribbon, click “Ignore”
Or from within the
message, “Ignore” appears on the left-hand side of the “Message” ribbon bar.
If you haven’t previously selected “Don’t show this message
again”, you will see a warning that the entire conversation and all future messages will be moved to
“Deleted Items” … click “Ignore Conversation”
If you change your mind, all of those messages are in
“Deleted Items” and you can easily move them back.
If someone changes the message subject, those messages become a new thread that you’d need to ignore again.
When you’ve been erroneously included on some message, the subject rarely
changes … but I usually have to block five or six different threads in
reply-all blizzards.
I am a big fan of “undo” – highlighted something to copy it but missed the ‘ctrl’ part of ctrl-c? Undo! Editing an image and drew a line the wrong place? Undo! Change some verbiage and regret the modifications? Undo! (I’ll generally copy the stuff I’ve added into a new document before I start hitting ctrl-z {the keyboard shortcut for undo} and incorporate a few of the new ideas into the original text.) Occasionally, you run out of undo-able operations. If you are saving to OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams, you can use the version history to get back to your original content. But did you know that PowerPoint allows you to increase the number of undo operations available?
Click “File” on the ribbon bar and select “Options”
Select “Advanced”. Under “Editing options”, you will see a
maximum number of undos – this value defaults to 20.
You can increase it up to 150 – although higher numbers can
adversely impact performance, so stick to a lower number unless you really want to undo a hundred operations!
My magic cloudy AD workstation association is screwed up. Doesn’t bother me that much, but as more people are starting to use magic cloud apps … I’m seeing more people with the exact same problem. So I volunteered myself to get it sorted. But the dsregcmd to join again needs to be run as NT Authority\System
There are a lot of tools we use at work that are silly
overkill in your personal life – I don’t want to open a Remedy ticket for every
squeaky hinge! But some of our tools are quite helpful away from work too – making
flyers in Word or using Excel to keep track of the softball league standings. “Is
Teams useful in my personal life” seems like a purely hypothetical question –
it’s not like I can invite the rest of the Parent Teacher Organization to join
us here in Teams (and even if I could, that’s hardly an appropriate use of
company resources!). But did you know Microsoft offers a free version of Teams?
Signing up for a free account, you don’t get access to all of the Teams features we’ve got here
– you cannot schedule
meetings, record
meetings, there isn’t a Planner board, you don’t have access to the full
suite of Office 365 applications. But you do
have a Teams space, can use the integrated apps and connectors, have some file
storage space, have persistent chats in channels, and can even have group
audio/video calls.
Don’t use your company e-mail address to sign up – this will
need to be your personal address.
If you don’t already have a Microsoft account associated
with the e-mail address, you’ll be asked to create a new Microsoft account.
Otherwise you’ll be asked to sign in to your Microsoft
account.
Supply your name, organization name, and country of origin.
Read the terms of use and privacy statement. Assuming your use complies with
the terms of use and the privacy policy is acceptable, click “Next”
It will take a few minutes for everything to be set up. Once
your personal Teams organization is built, you can invite others to join. Click
on your avatar in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and select “Manage
org”
Click “Invite others to your org”
And enter their e-mail addresses
They will get an e-mail message inviting them to join your
Teams org.
You’re ready to start using Teams – add tabs to websites
your group commonly uses, set up connectors, create new channels, chat, video
calls, share files. You can even add new Teams to your organization.
Everyone added to your org is automatically able to access
the default Teams space (the one with the name of your org). Teams spaces you create can be private or public,
just like at work – but you can also select “Org-wide” which automatically
joins any newly-added individuals to the Teams space.
