Smart(er) Tags

By Adam Cogan in Office 0 Comment

Microsoft Office applications allow you to control when Smart Tags are triggered by using ‘recognizers’. The list of recognizers can be altered, in most cases through the AutoCorrect options dialog. (See screenshot of Word’s AutoCorrect dialog below.)

It would be good if the list box could allow the user to drill down each recognizer item and view sample data (e.g. for ‘Dates’ the sample data would be a date, such as ‘1/1/2003’).

There are two ways in which this could be implemented, namely:

  1. Show it just underneath each item when the item is expanded.
  2. Display a ‘More…’ button underneath each item, which will open a dialog that displays the sample data.
Figure: Smart tag settings in Microsoft Word

Figure: Smart tag settings in Microsoft Word

Getting More Smart Tags

By Adam Cogan in Office 0 Comment

Office could be improved in how it handles extending of its smart tag functionality.

Currently adding a custom smart tag requires editing registry; this should not be necessary. It would be better to implement an “Add Smart Tag” button to the Smart Tags tab of the AutoCorrect dialog.

Also, the “More Smart Tags” button in this dialog should be implemented as a hyperlink, as it links directly to a page on the Microsoft website.

Figure: Smart tag settings in Microsoft Word

Figure: Smart tag settings in Microsoft Word

Highlight button

By Adam Cogan in Office 0 Comment

Users of the Google Toolbar may be familiar with the Highlight option, which highlights all occurrences of the current search keywords in the current document. This is a very handy feature and it would be good to see it in all Microsoft Office applications as well.

Figure: Google highlight option in use

Figure: Google highlight option in use

Readable Settings Files

By Adam Cogan in Office 0 Comment

It would be nice if Office stored all of its settings files in a readable format. For example, if the settings files were stored as XML, then the user could clearly see the settings that were applied, and also be able to import/export parts of the settings files themselves (this is different to the current system where you have an all-or-nothing approach to the import/export of settings).

Figure: Settings files are stored in binary format, they should be XML

Figure: Settings files are stored in binary format, they should be XML

But what about invalid xml?

Just give the user a message something like: “Someone has changed with the xml and now it is invalid. Reverting to default settings.”

Note: Have renamed the file to zzWord11.xml so that they can attempt to fix it if they want to.

I wish Outlook allowed you to have ‘Recurring Emails’ (like recurring appointments)

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

We share our calendars and one of the things that screws scheduling meetings, is because many people put in a non-appointments as appointments (people look busy when they are not). e.g. ‘Pay rent’ when they actually just need an email each Tuesday.

There is another advantage to removing appointments of this type, people get fewer reminders. So they don’t get desensitized to extra reminders that are not time critical.

  1. Do you agree we should not put in non-appointments as appointments?
  2. Does anyone else wish for recurring emails to their inbox?
  3. Is there any solution?

PS: I don’t really want to install an outlook add-in (but I’ll take anything)

Figure:'Pay Rent' just another non-appointment as an appointment - because of missing functionality in Outlook/Exchange

Figure:’Pay Rent’ just another non-appointment as an appointment – because of missing functionality in Outlook/Exchange

IE9 and Rich Text Comment field

By Adam Cogan in Internet Explorer 0 Comment

For the last few years, I have been hoping that Scott Guthrie would give us a rich text field in Silverlight (and supported copying and pasting images on the clipboard)… Like Word gives us today.

Would it be better for IE9 to give us an awesome Rich Text Control that does this?

I am thinking about the use in CRM, TFS and SharePoint; however every blog out there could use it in their comments…
And everyone would want to use IE over the other browsers.

Here is just one example of people kind of requesting this feature on codeplex:
http://codeplex.codeplex.com/workitem/4756
Allow formatting in comments

Here is an other
At http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/community/add/ff400237.aspx

Figure: This does not allow adding an image (ideally you want to paste from the clipboard)

Figure: This does not allow adding an image (ideally you want to paste from the clipboard)

Can we have an official location for Bugs?

By Adam Cogan in Visual Studio Gallery 0 Comment

1. Add a new tab

An example: There is a known issue in the Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW. Where does Microsoft put it? I am not sure, but I expect to find it on the product page.\ The product page in this case, is where I downloaded it.
E.g. http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/59ac03e3-df99-4776-be39-1917cbfc5d8e

Figure: Can we have a 4th tab?

2. Add a record into it

E.g. This is one entry I would like you to add to this new tab:

The Bug

Date format bug in the Sprint Burndown report in Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 RTW.

If you are in a non US locale, this prevents the current sprint being calculated and the report falls over with an error: 

Query execution failed for dataset 'dsSprintsCurrent'.(rsErrorExecutingCommand) The conversion of a nvarchar data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value.

The Fix

The fix is to change the RDL.
Open the Sprint Burndown RDL file.
Change the “Today” parameter from “Text” to “DateTime”:

<ReportParameter Name="Today"> <DataType>DateTime</DataType> <DefaultValue > <Values> <Value>=today</Value> </Values> </DefaultValue> <Hidden>true</Hidden> </ReportParameter>

Make working with Categories better

By Adam Cogan in Outlook 0 Comment

Figure: Using categories is great for mailing to a group of people

Figure: Using categories is great for mailing to a group of people

I want to send an email to those tagged with ‘iphone’…
How would I do it?

Figure: Add an entry after 'Contacts'... As I would expect to find 'Contacts of a certain category' here

Figure: Add an entry after ‘Contacts’… As I would expect to find ‘Contacts of a certain category’ here

Figure: Looking for "Email" option on the right hand side... or it could be called "Send email to Selection"

Figure: Looking for “Email” option on the right hand side… or it could be called “Send email to Selection”

Figure: Bingo... found it on the Actions menu

Figure: Bingo… found it on the Actions menu

So I would change
“Create | New Message to Contact”
to
“Send email to Selection”