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How to Save a File

How to Save a File

Microsoft recently updated their Snipping tool, now called “Snip & Sketch.” You can see a little overview here. What gets me about this new tool is the icon to save the file. It is the usual 3.5″ floppy disk. Like on EVERY program.

But kids today have never even SEEN a floppy disk. I wonder when this icon will be updated.

Oh well. I needed to lean what this means:

They will need to learn what this means:

However, many modern sharing programs, like MS Office 365 Online are doing away with the “Save” feature altogether. Perhaps there is no reason to change the icon, because the feature will just go go away.

Excel Stocks and Geography

Excel Stocks and Geography

Microsoft released an interesting feature yesterday – datatypes called Stocks and Geography. You can see their official notice here. These data types are available in the desktop version of Excel for Office 365, buy I couldn’t find them for Excel Online.

The Stocks data type seems fairly straight forward. Put in a ticker symbol, such as VWELX, and Vanguard Wellinton Inv magically appears. Some of the info doesn’t seem available, yet. And troubling for me is Microsoft notes that the information is “as-is,” in quotes. Whenever I see words in quotes, I always think the “person” doesn’t know what the word “means.” And they want us to “figure it out”, or read their “mind”.

Geography is an intersting data type. Depending on if you put in a municipality or country, you get different options of fields to add. Here are options for New York City:

Here are some geographic names that are or are not recognized (starting on row 13):

Interestingly, when I type USA, I get an auto-correct of Forest Hills. Riddle me that?

Various information shows up in the table, depending on the nature of the geographic type (City, state, country.)

I can see how this is helpful stuff. I took a list of Pennsylvania Counties, and added some fields. Then sorted by largest population. Unfortunately, the data types for counties are somewhat limited. I wanted Fertility Rate, Life Expectancy, and Gas Price, for example.

But this is good stuff. there are lots of interesting ways to start using and manipulating this data. Linking it to additional data sources immediately comes to mind.

Windows Snipping Tool

Windows Snipping Tool

This morning I opened Windows Snipping tool, and got this interesting message that Snipping Tool is moving.

My immediate reaction was “Hmm… I need to take a snip of that so I can come back to it later.” But then… “how do you snip Windows Snipping tool?” Luckily I remembered the old stand-by to screen-shot the active window: Alt-PrintScreen.

I weren’t born yesterday.

Full c: empty d:!

Full c: empty d:!

I bet you ran in to this over the Holidays. “My laptop is SO slow!” When you look at it, you discover Cousin Edith is storing her Documents /pictures/music on the c: partition, which in her lousy laptop was set up to be only for the OS. The user data was supposed to go on the huge d: partition.

If you are lazy, hop over to Active @ Partition Manager and use it to shrink her d: drive and expand her c:.

I know you’re supposed to move her data to d: and do it that way, but who has time? Have at it, if you like.

Remote Access Tools

Remote Access Tools

There are many remote access tools – Team Viewer, Logmein, GotomyPC, and even RDP, VNC and Chrome Remote Desktop.

My recent tool of choice is AeroAdmin. This neat little tool gets it all done. It can be free, if you don’t use it too much. It can be set in always-on listening mode, and it does all the main things you would want a remote access tool to do.

Easy peasy. Try it.

It comes as a little exe file. When you open it, you get a nine digit pin you can give to someone to remotely control your PC, or you can type in the pin of a computer you either set up for connection, or are chatting with a user who just installed AeroAdmin. The PIN for a computer never changes, which is real nice.

Just for old time sake, does anyone remember Symantec’s PCAnywhere? That got the ball rolling, I think. It was like magic back then!