Month: November 2018

Did you know … you can set image transparency in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook?

When you wanted to use an image as the background for a document, you often needed an image editor to lighten the picture – the image was too dark for dark text to be legible but too light for white text. Or you’d compose your PowerPoint slide with the image in one frame and the text in another.

Did you know, in the latest Office 365 Update, Microsoft added a feature that allows you to create faded background images within Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook? Within one of these programs, insert a picture into your work. Select the image. From the Picture Tools Format ribbon, click on Transparency

You can select one of the pre-set transparency levels or click on “Picture Transparency Options …” for finer control of the transparency level.

Move the slider (or type a number) to adjust the transparency level – 100% is invisible, 0% is the original image.

Voila – you’ve got a background image and legible text.

There are a lot of other image effects available – the vignette is the “soft edge oval” from the “Picture Styles” section of the ribbon bar. Many of the effects I’ve traditionally used Photoshop or Gimp to apply are also available in the “Adjust” section, so click around and check it out!

Did you know … you can draw attention to Teams posts?

Before I tell you how – don’t be the person who flags every single message as urgent. Not because it’s annoying (although it is), but because it’s hard to single something out for attention if YOU ALREADY MARK EVERYTHING URGENT AND USE HUGE, BOLD, RED LETTERS AND END WITH !!!!!!!!!! If everything is urgent, you don’t have a classification for super urgent things.

OK, now that I’ve done my quasi-civic duty and at least tried to avoid having big red icons next to 97% of the messages I see …

You can use @ mentions to draw individuals’ or groups’ attention to a specific post. In the message, type @ and then begin typing either an individual’s name or the Team’s name. The @ mention can be included anywhere in the message – it doesn’t have to come first.

Team members using the desktop or mobile client will get a banner message alerting them that they have been mentioned in a post.

All clients will have a little logo along the right-hand side of the message indicating either a group

Or individual mention.

If you want to draw attention to an item without banner messages, you can also mark a post as important. When you are typing your message, click on the “Format” button when typing the message.

Then click the exclamation point. (For anyone who prefers keyboard shortcuts – use ctrl-shift-i)

And you’ll see both the red bar along the left and the IMPORTANT! designation atop the message.

Team members will see an exclamation point marking channels with important messages too.

If you accidently mark a message as important (keyboard users who type ctrl-i for italics can get both ctrl and shift occasionally), click the hamburger menu next to your post and select Edit.

Click the exclamation point again to remove the important designation.

Voila, the message no longer has an over-inflated sense of self-worth. Or my typo.

Fact-free discourse

The migrant caravan illegally invading the United States has been a gigantic heap of “alternative facts” — or, for the old fashioned, inaccuracies and lies. Is there anything to gain from proving individual tenants of Trump’s argument to be the abject falsehoods that they are? People walking from Southern Mexico are not at the US border. 5,800 US military personnel, *they* are at the border in what I am sure is a fairly expensive political stunt. But people hiking across Mexico have a few weeks of walking ahead of them.

And what exactly are they doing that is wrong?? How many people know step #1 of the asylum process? Here it is — from the US Department of Homeland Security website. To apply for asylum, you need to be physically present in the US or seeking entry into the US at a port of entry. So … people who want to request asylum in the US that head to a port of entry are, wait, following the legal process.

But while there are a bevy of proximal arguments being made, the distal complaint is essentially “we don’t like other, keep them out”. So I wonder about the efficacy of of providing actual facts to counter the litany of alternative ones. Are there people rooting for militarization of the border who will change their mind when they realize asylum seekers showing up at a port of entry are following the proper process? Or will they come up with some new “fact” to heap on the pile.

Cloudy ROI

I often have trouble seeing the value behind cloud offerings — but most cloud migrations I’ve seen have done 1:1 replacement of locally hosted servers with cloud hosted servers. The first two years, the cloud hosted servers are cheaper (although that’s some dodgy accounting as we’re assuming no workforce changes as a result of outsourcing servers and depreciation of the owned asset is not considered). The third year, though, is a break-even point. General Depreciation System considers computers a five-year property, but there are accounting practices to handle fully depreciated assets. It remains on the balance sheet as a cost, it’s accumulated depreciation is listed as a accumulated depreciation contra asset item. When you *do* stop using the asset, the accumulated depreciation account is debited for the full depreciated amount, the fixed asset account is credited with its full cost. Point being I can continue using a computer asset after five years. Cloud hosted servers make financial sense for a company that tends towards “bleeding edge” implementations (buying the new whatever next year), but for a company that buys a server or application and then uses it for a decade … you’re simply turning capital expense into a greater ongoing operating expense. Which … good this year, but bad in the long term.

Now for a smaller company that doesn’t have a dedicated IT department, and that doesn’t actually need the capacity provided by a single modern server … externally hosting resources is financially beneficial. A web site, e-mail, chat-based customer service? All make sense to host externally. You don’t have to own half a dozen servers, make sure they’re backed up, etc. But I don’t see the cost benefit at enterprise levels unless (1) you want to build data centers close to customers without the expense of actually building a data center. For instance, opening your services to customers in the EU … getting a data center set up in, say, Germany isn’t a quick proposition. As your business grows, it may become “worth it” to invest money into a European data center. But cloud-hosted computers from some major provider who already has a presence there provides quick time-to-market and minimizes up-front cost. Some countries may have a laborious process for prospective businesses too — a process the cloud hosting provider has already navigated. Or you (2) plan a substantial workforce reduction. If someone else is backing up, patching, and monitoring systems … you don’t need people performing those duties. Since a cloud-hosting provider is able to leverage those employees across far more servers than you’d need — there’s a place where scale produces a cost benefit. But, strangely, I don’t see companies reducing IT operations staff after moving to the cloud. This may be a long-term goal to ensure the enthusiasm of staff for the move — it’s not particularly enticing to put six months of work into a project that ensures my job goes away. Or this may just be a thing — move to the cloud and still have twenty ops employees.