Exciting tips

Audio video calls have changed the way we communicate. A few years ago, Skype was the only app that could reliably make both audio and video calls but since then, a whole host of other messaging apps have joined the fray and are actually doing better than Skype. Skype has been working to make its call feature stand out from other apps. It has added a code editor that can be accessed during a call, and it’s also added subtitles though, by default they aren’t enabled. Here’s how you can enable subtitles for Skype calls.

Enable subtitles for Skype calls

This a new feature and it’s available on the UWP Skype app and the iOS and Android apps. Make sure you’re running the latest version of the apps. Subtitles can be enabled on a per-call basis, or for all calls.

To enable subtitles for a specific Skype call, initiate the call or accept an incoming call. When the call connects, click the plus button at the bottom right and select ‘Turn subtitles on’ from the menu. This will enable subtitles for that call only. If the call disconnects or you hang up and call again, you’re going to have to turn subtitles on again.

To enable subtitles for all Skype calls, open the Skype app and click the more options button at the top right of the column on the left. Select Settings from the menu.

On the Settings window, go to the Calling tab, and select Call Subtitles. Turn on the ‘Show subtitles for all voice and video calls’ switch.

The feature has also rolled out to the Skype iOS and Android apps. To enable subtitles for all calls on the Skype app, open the app and tap your profile thumbnail. On the profile screen, tap Settings, go to Calling, and select Call subtitles. Enable subtitles from the switch and they will show up for all calls.

To enable subtitles for specific calls, initiate a call and once it’s connected, tap the plus button at the bottom. In the overlay menu, tap the Turn subtitles on button to enable subtitles for that call. Like the desktop version, the subtitles will only be enabled for this call. If you end it, and start a new call with the same contact, you will have to enable it again.

Subtitles aren’t enabled for all languages. They’re specific to a select few languages and only time will tell how good they are. It’s worth mentioning that YouTube has auto-subtitles and they are terrible. Let’s see how well Skype handles them.

MS Word lets you create documents with pages that are in landscape or portrait view. You can change the orientation any time you want but it applies to every single page in a document. There is no option to change the page orientation for a single page in MS Word, at least not an obvious one. You can set a different orientation for any page within a document if you know which option to use.

Page Orientation For A Single Page

Open an MS Word document and go to the page you want to change the orientation for. Make sure there’s text on it and select the text. With the text selected, go to the Layout tab. On this tab, you can see a button labelled ‘Orientation’. Ignore it however, look at the toolbox that it is a part of.

Click the little arrow button at the bottom right corner of the Page Setup toolbox. Go to the Margins tab of the Page Setup window and choose the orientation you want to set for the page. Under the ‘Preview’ section, open the ‘Apply to’ dropdown and select the ‘Selected text’ option.

That all you need to do. The orientation for the page with the selected text will change to whichever one it is you selected.

You can apply this to several pages in the document and they don’t have to be contiguous. It’s really useful for when you have a table with lots of columns that refuses to fit in a portrait oriented page. Likewise, for images and charts, this is a great way to add them without shrinking them down to an unreadable size.

Limitations

There will be formatting problems and some text that originally fit perfectly on a page in portrait mode may overflow onto a second page when it’s in landscape mode. You might think a wider page means there’s more room for text but a wider page has room for fewer line breaks.

The page orientation will follow the text so any time you move snippets of text, it can upset the formatting of the rest of the document. Finally, if you plan on sharing the document with someone, it’s best not to share an editable version unless absolutely necessary. This isn’t a commonly known MS Word trick and if someone does have to edit your document they will not be happy with what it does to the document’s layout or its formatting.

Social media apps have become something of an addiction. Excessive use of social media isn’t good and if you own an iOS device you can limit it with Screen time. That said, not everyone uses an iPhone which is why it helps if social media apps have a way to limit how much time you spend on them. Instagram recently added a feature that can track and limit your Instagram Activity. Facebook has followed suit and you can monitor time spent on Facebook via its mobile apps.

Time spent on Facebook

This is a fairly recent feature that was added to the Facebook apps but it should be available to all users by now. It doesn’t seem to have been added to the web version though so it’s hard to say whether or not time spent on the Facebook web version will also be taken into account.

To monitor time spent on Facebook, open the Facebook app and go to the hamburger tab. Scroll down and tap on Settings & Privacy. When the option expands, you will see a ‘Your Time on Facebook’ option. Tap it.

On the Your Time on Facebook screen, you will see how much time you’ve spent using the app. Judging by my own personal time graph, it doesn’t seem to factor in the time I’ve spent on the Facebook website.

You can limit how much time you spend on Facebook by tapping the ‘Set Daily Reminder’ option on the Your Time on Facebook screen. Select how much time you want to spend on Facebook, and tap Set Reminder.

If you’ve used this same feature that Instagram has implemented, you know that the reminder will not lock you out of Facebook. It will tell you that the time you’ve set for yourself has expired but you can dismiss it easily enough and continue using the app.

If you use the Facebook apps on different iOS (or even Android) devices, your activity ought to sync across the apps at the very least. I haven’t been able to test that but that’s how it should work.

It goes without saying that a time limit imposed by your OS is better because it can restrict you when you use certain apps too much. The Facebook and Instagram apps could lock a user out if they used it too much but the feature is more a check than a restriction. Screen Time is better if you want to control social media use but it’s only an iOS feature and Android needs something similar.

Where would we be without meetings? Probably getting more work done but once the number of people you work with reaches a certain number, meetings become necessary. Scheduling a meeting isn’t easy; you have to check and make sure everyone is available, make sure they know when the meeting is, and send out an agenda. If you work with geographically dispersed, remote teams, it’s even harder to manage with different time zones. Outlook isn’t much help with time zones but it does let you send out meeting invites, and see who’s accepted or declined a meeting. Outlook users have the option to automatically accept or reject meeting invites based on their availability.

Outlook can warn you when you have a meeting clash so it stands to reason it knows which of your time slots are free. If you want Outlook to automatically accept and reject meeting invites, you’re going to have to enable the option.

Accept And Reject Meeting Invites

Open Outlook and go to File>Options. On the Options window, select the Calendar tab from the column on the right. Scroll down to the ‘Automatic accept or decline’ section, and click Auto Accept/Decline.

A small window will open with three options; the first will accept meeting requests, the second will decline the ones that conflict with existing invites, and the third will automatically decline meeting requests for recurring meetings.

Limitations

You an enable all these options but make sure you maintain your schedule religiously in Calendar. If you have unplanned time set aside for working on something, Calendar will treat it as ‘available’ time and accept meeting requests for it.

If you don’t feel like filling out every aspect of your work day in the calendar, you should only enable the option to decline meeting requests that clash with other commitments, and to decline recurring meeting requests. You will want to have more control over which invites you accept.

Outlook doesn’t let you set acceptable times or available hours that other people in your organization can see when they invite you to a meeting. If it did, you could use those to automate accepting invites. If you still want to automate accepting meeting invites but can’t be bothered filling in your schedule, add unnamed events in Calendar for the hours that you plan to spend on work. Outlook isn’t going to verify if you’re adding a real event or task so just add anything and make it long enough to cover the time you can’t attend a meeting. This is shoe-horning it a bit but it is the simplest solution there is.

You can use speech recognition in Windows and dictate a document in MS Word, or an email in Outlook. Windows’ dictation feature isn’t the greatest tool for this purpose. MS Office apps don’t have a built-in dictation feature so that’s really all you can use. If you’re not averse to using add-ons though, give Dictate by Microsoft a try. Dictate by Microsoft is an experimental project just released by the tech giant. It lets you dictate text in MS Office. The speech recognition is pretty good even if you have an accent.

Install Dictate By Microsoft

Visit the link at the end to download Dictate by Microsoft. It’s basically an add-on but you need to be mindful you download the correct version i.e., 32-bit or 64-bit for your system. Once you download it, install it like you would any app.

Dictate Text In MS Office

After you install Dictate, open any MS Office app. You will see a new tab on the ribbon called Dictation. Select this tab.

You can start dictating text right away. There aren’t any settings that need tweaking. Just click the Start button to dictate text. The add-on needs an active internet connection to work. It will detect your mic and you can start dictating.

By default, the add-on adds punctuation marks itself. This means every time you pause, it’s going to add a period. You can turn this off by clicking the ‘Manual Punctuation’ button before you begin dictation.

The add-on is responsive to some commands. For example, if you’re speaking and say ‘comma’, it will insert a comma instead of typing the word. At present there is no list of commands that the add-on will respond to so you’re going to have to discover them as you go along. We’re still searching for the command to delete a word.

Dictate By Microsoft has support for twenty-four input languages including French, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. It also has a live translation feature. When you speak something in one of the supported languages, Dictate by Microsoft can translate it on the fly to any one of the supported languages in MS Office. The translation isn’t the greatest.

With some phrases, the add-on really struggles to make an accurate translation. It’s not too bad but you can’t use it as a reliable translation tool. It suffers from the same pitfalls as Google Translate.

We have to say, for an experimental project, it’s pretty great. Don’t play music in the background when you’re using it though.

Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet app. It lets you process a substantial amount of data. You can sort it, apply formulas, and use conditional formatting to make it easier to read. Add to this the many types of graphs it supports and you can get a lot done with it. Data sorting options apply to the columns in an Excel sheet. Just about everything  that you can do to sort and filter data, you apply to columns. That’s how data is entered in a spreadsheet. The sorting works with columns by default. That said, you can sort data in rows in Excel. The feature is there and it’s not too hard to use either.

Open an Excel file. Enter data however you like. We’re assuming here that you want to sort data in rows instead of in columns. You can sort data in rows from highest to lowest value and in alphabetical order.

On the ribbon, go to the Data tab. Click the Sort button. A new window will open with several tabs at the top. At the right-end of the tabs is an Options button. Click it.

In this new window, you choose how the data is sorted. Since you want to sort data in rows, select the ‘Sort left to right’ option. Click Ok and return to the previous window.

The previous window will show you three columns; Row, Sort On, and Order. Under each column is a dropdown. Open the dropdown under the ‘Row’ column and select the row you want to sort data in. Open the Order dropdown and select how you want to sort the data in the selected row.

You can sort the data by values, cell color, font color, and cell icon.

Click Ok to sort the data.

This will not change the default sorting criteria in Excel. You will have to repeat the entire process each time you want to sort data in rows. This unfortunately doesn’t work with the Filter feature. You can only apply filters to columns and there’s no option to change it and apply them to rows.

If you need to apply a filter to rows instead of columns, you’re going to have to use the transpose feature and turn your rows into columns. There’s unfortunately no way around this. The filters are neat because you can change them and update the sorted data on the fly. You don’t have to reapply a sorting criteria over and over. Additionally, the filter feature lets you sort the data according to its value and not predetermined criteria like alphabetical order or numeric order.

MS Word has a neat ‘Pick up where you left off’ feature. When you close a document, Word bookmarks the exact location you were last working on within that file. It does so by identifying where the cursor was when you closed the document. When you open it again, Word offers to let you pick up where you left off. This is a pretty neat feature but that’s not to say everyone loves it. If you find it annoying rather than useful, you can disable pick up where you left off in MS Word.

To disable pick up where you left off in MS Word, you need to edit the registry. You will need administrative rights to edit the registry.

Reading Location – Windows Registry

Open the registry and navigate to the following key;

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Word\Reading Locations

The above location works if you’re using MS Office 2016. If you’re on an older version i.e. MS Office 2013, you will need to go to the following location;

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\13.0\Word\Reading Locations

Notice that the only  difference between the above two locations is the 16.0 and 13.0 keys. Adjust this according to your version of MS Office. The keys should all be there. You have to identify them based on your version of MS Office.

This key is where the pick up where you left off location is stored. You will see several other keys under it, all named Document 1, Document 2, etc., None of that matters though. You can delete the Reading Location key but it will come back because it’s auto-generated.

Disable Pick Up Where You Left Off

To disable pick up where you left of for all documents, right-click the Reading Location key, and select Permissions. Click ‘Advanced’.

On the advanced permissions screen, check the ‘Replace all child object permission entries with inheritable permission entries from this object’ option. Apply the change and then reboot your system.

You will no longer see the pick up where you left off option when you open a document in MS Word. It’s unfortunate that Microsoft didn’t add an easier way to turn it off.

The feature has its flaws. If your system is slow, it takes a longer time to load. Often you just scroll to where you want to work and this is another pop-up for you to dismiss. There’s also the problem that it marks you recent location by where you cursor was. If you click anywhere else in the document, the pick-up location is updated.

Perhaps what might have been better is if users could mark their own location to pick up from when they close a document. This would prevent accidental clicks from changing it.

PDF is the format to use when you want to publish documents online. PDF is easily one of the most common file types found online and it’s used to publish not just documents but also presentations, reports, and catalogs. The thing with a PDF file is that while the format is exceptionally popular the app that lets you create or edit it, Adobe Acrobat, is rarely used. For the most part, others apps like Photoshop are used to compose a PDF file and export to the format. Owing to the format’s popularity a lot of apps support exporting to PDF and MS Office is no different. You can easily create a document in MS Word and export it as a PDF file. Likewise you can export an Excel sheet to PDF. If you’re looking to export just a single graph or chart and not an entire worksheet to PDF here’s how to do just that.

Open the MS Excel file you want to export a graph from or open a new file and create your graph. Select the graph you want to export. You don’t need to select the data columns the graph is generated from but if they auto-select, you need not be worried.

With just the chart selected, go to File>Save As and select ‘PDF’  from the ‘Save as type’ dropdown. Name the file and click Save.

The chart will be exported to a PDF file. You can export multiple charts from Excel to a single PDF file but you must take care to arrange them in the correct order in Excel first. The charts should not overlap each other nor should they be misaligned or they will export in much the same layout.

There’s two ways to spell color, with and without a ‘U’. That’s the case with a few other words; neighbor, favor, etc. The correct spelling is drilled into you in grade school but Microsoft Word generally doesn’t know where you went to grade school. It has spellcheck which tends to underline misspelled words except the words that need a u or don’t need a u tend to be underlined when they shouldn’t be. It’s because your spellcheck is set to the wrong kind of English. Here’s how to switch between British and American spellcheck in Microsoft Word.

British And American Spellcheck

Open Microsoft Word and go to File>Options. The grammar check options are under Proofing but that tab doesn’t deal with language which is what determines the basics i.e., spellings that are to be corrected. In the Word Options window, select the Language tab.

The first section is called ‘Choose Editing Languages’. This is where you can select the language that Microsoft Word uses to reference spellings. Select your spellcheck language here. If you prefer to spell Color without a U, you need to select United States English. If you prefer to spell it with a U, you need to select United Kingdom English.

The language is added only for spellcheck, and not as an input language. If you want to use it as an input language, you need to enable it and that includes downloading an additional language pack. To do that, click the ‘Not Enabled’ link next to the language. This will open the Settings app on Windows 10. If you’re on Windows 7, it will open Control Panel.

Both apps will open the language section. Click the add language option, and add the language pack you need. For example, if you’re adding United Kingdom English, search for it and install it. If you’re on Windows 10 1803, you should make sure you don’t accidentally add the second language as the main display language. The rest is all pretty straight forward. Once you add it, you can use it as an input language as well but it is unnecessary if all you need to do is stop Microsoft Word from underlining words that are correctly spelled.

We should point out that while you can use two different languages for spellcheck, you shouldn’t. A document, especially an official or academic one, should use consistent formatting, consistent fonts, and consistent spellings. Using a mix of spellings isn’t a good idea and if you’re going to have a mixed audience reading the document, it’s all the better to stick to one type of spelling.

Facebook announced it would add a feature to its Messenger apps that would allow users to unsend a message. There was no real ETA on when the feature would roll out but the feature has now rolled out to all users, worldwide. You can unsend messages on Facebook Messenger within a certain time period. Unsending a message allows you to remove a message from both your and your recipient’s side however, it does leave a trace.

Unsend messages on Facebook Messenger

This feature is available on the Facebook Messenger apps for both iOS and Android. Make sure you update the app to the latest version that’s available.

Open Facebook Messenger and send a message. Tap and hold on it until you see the reaction bar. At the same time, you will see a bar appear at the bottom with options to copy, forward, and remove or delete the message. Tap the Delete or Remove option (whichever one you get).

A menu will open listing two options; Remove for everyone, and Remove for you. To unsend the message, you need to tap Remove for everyone. This will remove the message from both your side and from your recipient’s side.

The message being unsent isn’t going to leave without a mark. Your recipient will know that a message was removed from the conversation. The feature, like those similar to it on other messaging apps, has limitations. For example, you will find that you cannot go back and unsend older messages. There is a limit to how old a message can be for it to be unsent. If a message is too old, you cannot unsend it.

It also goes without saying that just because you can unsend a message doesn’t mean that your recipient will not have read/seen it before you get the chance to remove it. They may take a screenshot of it as well before it’s removed so remember that unsending isn’t a fix for bigger messaging problems.

WhatsApp has a similar unsend feature which allows you to unsend messages that are no older than 7 minutes. There’s no word on how old is too old for a message to be unsent on Facebook Messenger but you can take a hint from WhatsApp and expect similar time limits.

It’s interesting to note that the feature was initially something that was used internally at Facebook to protect its executives’ communication from leaking. It was only when this information became public that Facebook announced it would roll out the feature to other users as well.