Category: Technology

WordPress 5 AutoSave Issue

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;
}

And my WordPress is usable again!

Did you know … you can reply to an e-mail message with a meeting request?

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.

Did you know … you can change Word’s built-in Styles?

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”.

Click ‘Yes’ to confirm the change.

Did you know … Outlook can display the time in multiple time zones?

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.

Now check out your calendar:

Did you know … you can ignore entire conversations in Outlook?

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.

Did you know … you can increase the maximum number of “undo” operations in PowerPoint?

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!

Did you know … you can use Microsoft Teams outside of work too?

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.

To sign up for a free Teams account, visit https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/free

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.

Did you know … you can search chats, files, and people in Microsoft Teams?

One drawback to retaining all of your chat and team discussion content is that there’s a LOT of content … which makes it challenging to find a specific discussion or comment. Luckily, Teams data is easily searched. At the top of your Teams application (or website), there is a long gray bar. Click in it and type a word or phrase to begin searching. Using multiple words will find conversations containing both words, to find a phrase place the phrase “in quotes”. Hit enter.

You’ll see messages that contain the words or phrase – notice this includes both chat messages and channel discussions. Each search result has a reference letting you know where the discussion is located, and you can click on the item to switch to the chat or channel discussion.

If your search returns too many results, click on the little funnel – you can refine your search results with a filter – a specific individual, a time frame.

In addition to searching chat messages, you can search files. Just click on “Files” and you’ll see files with names or content that contain your search terms. Again, you can see where the file is located, and you can click on the file to preview the file.

Click on “People” and you’ll find, well, people who work here. This is a name search – you cannot search for “stats” and see people with whom you’ve had discussions about statistics. Search for a last name, a first name, or a name in “last, first” format.

If you click on a person, you’ll see the conversations you have had with them, as well as any shared files, an org chart for their position in the company, and their channel posts for the past two weeks (‘Activity’).

If you haven’t chatted with them before, you can start a new conversation too.

Ugh! MFA

I am trying to use Microsoft Graph to read/write an Excel spreadsheet stored in SharePoint. It’s an ugly process to start with — they don’t exactly make it easy to find the right ID numbers so you can reference the spreadsheet in the first place, but I finally got the proper URL. And then I tried to do the password-based token authentication.

{“error”:”invalid_grant”,”error_description”:”AADSTS70002: Error validating credentials. AADSTS50126: Invalid username or password\r\nTrace ID: b43d1973-c253-4889-8756-354e5bd77200\r\nCorrelation ID: 9cf94602-9d72-4790-8dcc-6cf0471058f9\r\nTimestamp: 2019-01-08 00:01:47Z”,”error_codes”:[70002,50126],”timestamp”:”2019-01-08 00:01:47Z”,”trace_id”:”b43d1973-c253-4889-8756-354e5bd77200″,”correlation_id”:”9cf94602-9d72-4790-8dcc-6cf0471058f9″}

Hint: the password isn’t wrong. I’ve seen a lot of comments online about this meaning the secret is wrong — which seemed reasonable, since I’m not seeing any auth traffic against the user account. But if you put in a known bad secret, there is a different invalid secret error.

{“error”:”invalid_client”,”error_description”:”AADSTS70002: Error validating credentials. AADSTS50012: Invalid client secret is provided.\r\nTrace ID: 59f4c7c8-73ab-4adb-bf15-10250a190d00\r\nCorrelation ID: 0a95810c-19e2-4fc6-a7be-c0ca7235d824\r\nTimestamp: 2019-01-08 00:00:37Z”,”error_codes”:[70002,50012],”timestamp”:”2019-01-08 00:00:37Z”,”trace_id”:”59f4c7c8-73ab-4adb-bf15-10250a190d00″,”correlation_id”:”0a95810c-19e2-4fc6-a7be-c0ca7235d824″}

But we use MFA … and I’ve got no way to perform the MFA validation. Sigh!