Category Archives: ICT proficiency

Thing 22: Exploring private browsing

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This post in unashamedly reused from our recent Cyber Security: Safety at Home, Online, in Life free online course. It appeared in week 1 and is an open step – so anyone can see it. You might like to share the link with others if you find the idea of private browsing appealing. Thanks to the team in Computing Science who wrote this article, for allowing us to share with you (they did a much better job than I could have done).

At the end of the article I have added a section on how private browsing might be useful to us every day at work and something to remember in terms of University use of the internet and forthcoming legislation relating to privacy online.

Cyber Security: Safety at Home, Online, in Life: Exploring private browsing

We use a range of tools which have options to protect our privacy online every day. Can we use these tools better knowing exactly what they protect?

Private browsing

Modern web browsers provide an optional privacy mode for browsing. Although privacy is increased, some features which make browsing easier, such as caching, are removed. ‘Privacy mode’ has different names in different browsers, but operates in a similar way.

How does private browsing work in your web-browser?

Let’s examine the official information provided by the major browsers on their privacy mode of browsing and how they work.

Choose the documentation for the browser you use the most.

Finding out about browsing terms

If some of the terms used are unfamiliar to you you may want to find out a little more about them.

  • Browsing history: What is it? What information exactly does each record in the history include? Where is it stored? Does a website I visit have access to my browsing history?
  • (HTTP) Cookies: What are cookies? What are they used for and how? Where are they stored? Which websites have access to which cookies?
  • Web cache: What is it and what is it used for? Where is it stored? Who has access to it?

Some possible places to start with are:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of using private browsing mode?

How might private browsing be useful to me?

Do you have more than one email account you need to use at work? Have you tried to log in to Office 365 to access another account other than your personal work one and got frustrated that you are automatically logged in to your work account?

This is one example where private browsing can help you out. By switching into incognito or private browsing mode you can avoid the auto login feature built into campus desktop and access that group email account you find frustrating to access. Try using your usual browser in private browsing mode – and if that is still frustrating choose another browser (is you usually use Internet Explorer, try using Chrome, for example). By choosing incognito or private browsing mode, the browser does not store your browsing history, and you won’t therefore be automatically logged in next time.

If you are using a computer that is not your own desktop machine, or you share a computer at work, then private browsing could be useful, especially if you forget to log out, as it won’t keep you logged in, does not save passwords, and erases your browsing history. At home this might be handy if you are trying to surprise the person you share a home computer with….

Can you think of other examples where private browsing might be useful?

One thing to remember….

Here at work, private browsing does not mean that our friends and colleagues in NUIT don’t have countless other ways of seeing what you’re doing on your computer. The University’s rules of use, with guidance outlined in a statement on internet use and a corresponding policy, which should still be followed in line with the Computer Users Agreement that everyone signs before being given access to University IT facilities.

And at home, your ISP (Internet Service Provider) could, if required, be required to retrieve any browsing history under specific legal circumstances. The so called ‘Snooper’s Charter’ – Investigatory Powers Bill is in its final parliamentary stages. The final reading in the House of Lords takes place on 25 October, and once amendments have been considered it will go for Royal Assent before being entered into the statute and becoming law.

Thing 18: Focus on Windows Shortcuts

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1keyboardThere are loads of things you can do in Windows with keyboard shortcuts, some of which will be faster than:

  • Take hands off keyboard
  • Grab mouse
  • Move the mouse
  • Click
  • Go back to keyboard

So, if you are fast on the keys, you may find it useful to consider what things you do regularly and have a look for a new keyboard shortcut or two.

In this thing, we invite you to find keyboard shortcuts to add to your repertoire.  Drop a line in the comment with your favourites. (And we know that you can drive a Mac from the keyboard, so Mac-o-philes can join in too.)

Here are mine:

  • Windows – left arrow – send the window to the left of the screen
  • Windows-M – clear the desktop
  • Windows-tab – cycle through open programs, a bit like alt-tab but more fun

Web Browsers

  • Ctrl-J – goes straight to your downloads folder

There are loads that work across many browsers  see http://www.groovypost.com/tips/50-universal-web-browser-hotkeys/

Word

  • Ctrl-M indents (cntrl-shift-M unindents)

For more see: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/kb/290938

Explorer

  • Windows- E opens my computer

More shortcuts here https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee851673.aspx

Outlook

  • Ctrl-N New message
  • Ctrl-Enter Send
  • Ctrl-Shift-M move message to a folder

And there are many more on this Microsoft article

Starting programs

What if you find yourself continually needing to open a particular program or folder?  You can add these to your start menu, or to the quick launch area.  But, you can also add your own shortcuts to start something off.

Eg.  I want to be able to open Microsoft Word with Ctrl-Alt-W

Search for Word

2searchword

Right click on it, select “send to”

3sendto

  • then select “desktop (create shortcut)”

Find your new shortcut on your desktop, right click and select “properties”

4properties

Open the shortcut tab, put your cursor in the Shortcut key box:

5shortcut

Windows will now capture the next keystroke you type as a shortcut key to launch Word.

  • Press Ctrl-Alt-W, then click the Apply Button
  • Try it out!

You can add shortcut keys to any shortcuts you create by other methods.

Over to you:

  • Add a comment with details of any gems you have found.

Thing 13: Team Top Tips on Saving Stuff

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This week’s problem:

  • After a lengthy Google Search you find a gem of information
  • A colleague sends you a brilliant link or tip in an email

What do you do with these? How do you ensure that you can find them again when you need them?

With a trusty notebook and pen I pestered LTDS colleagues for ideas…

Bookmarks

Lynsey suggested bookmarks as “saving stuff 101”.

Look for the Star on the IE or Chrome address bar.  If you want to move to the next league you can organise these into folders.  (see Chrome instructions and IE instructions)

My Bookmarks on the Staff Homepage

Have you spotted “Customise My Bookmarks” on the Staff Homepage?  No longer any need to trawl for ages to find the list of active purchasing agreements etc.

Try adding a hard-to-find-University-page as a bookmark – it will take a jiffy and you can even modify the order.  (Carol is our resident expert.)

OneNote

Janice and Carol were keen to include OneNote on our list of great tools.  You may even remember that we had a look at OneNote back in Thing 3.  Carol points out that it works well with other Office Products — I didn’t know that you can  move an email straight to OneNote. Here’s how it goes:

https://youtu.be/-V_hiKHPqr0

And you can email stuff to OneNote notebooks too. And there is a webclipper for Chrome.  And… can you tell I really like OneNote?

Evernote

Evernote is a third party tool that synchronises notes you take between your PC, Mac, tablet, phone.  You need to signup to create an account and it can be used free as long as you only want to use the App on two devices – still OK for most people.  Some of the really neat things about it are:

  • it works really well on a smartphone (OneNote is a bit clunky on phones).
  • text on photos you add to Evernote becomes searchable –  it scans and OCRs the photos for you.  (Yes it does work on photos of business cards!)
  • It is very easy to use – for proof see this much more professionally produced video.

Social Bookmarking Tools (Delicious and Diigo)

How about if you want to share web bookmarks with a bunch of colleagues involved in similar work? For this Graeme suggests a tool like Delicious.  You have to create a free account, and add a bookmarklet to your browser (no need for admin rights to do this thankfully).

Then you can get cracking adding links to Delicious.  You can share your links, as Graeme has done, search other user’s links and follow other people.

Diigo is a similar tool, also giving you a publically visible list (see this list from The Enterprise Shed). We’ve also had a go at presenting some of these links in a more organised manner using Diigo’s Outliner feature.

Other Strategies

Our colleagues suggested:

  • Email the link to yourself (but put something useful in the email other than “useful link”)
  • “Just remember it”
    (you know who you are.. youth must be on your side!)

So, have I missed anything?  If so add it to the comments.  Try out one or more of these ideas and let us know how you got on.

Thing 12: Using styles and templates in Word, an introduction

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Consistency in document presentation is something that has come up several times recently, alongside using document templates.

One way of ensuring that documents we produce have the same consistent approach is to use styled templates in Word.

What are the advantages of using styles?

By agreeing to use styled templates we can ensure that we are consistent in presentation. When styled documents are converted into PDFs, the software uses the styles as a way to generate indexes, bookmarks etc that have a cascading hierarchy. This makes navigating longer documents easier for the reader, and for screenreaders.

  • You can auto-generate a table of contents.
  • You can move pages and numbered paragraphs around within a document and the page and paragraph numbers change automagically saving you time and frustration.
  • You can move well formatted text easily between Word, PowerPoint, Excel and even websites.
  • If you receive a styled document and want to take content from it into another document, using the paste and match styles function in word makes it match the rest of your document beautifully.

Mastering styles is worth doing as it will save you a lot of time in future.

Your task

There is a good online tutorial from FMS on using styles effectively in Word.

Work through it, and then think about whether or not a styled set of LTDS templates would be useful or not, and why or why not.  Add a comment to this post with your thoughts, and as Mrs Merton might say “Let’s have a heated debate…”

Thing 8: Excel – some quick reminders

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This week brings a tapas of excel goodies, do feel free to try out one or more of these offerings to suit your appetite.  You’ll need to download the thing8 sample worksheet [ thing8excel ] – but by all means do try this on your own data too.

Setting print areas

thing8-printareas

Be kind to the person you send your lovely data to.  Define the print areas and repeat the row titles if it spans more than one page.

Try this out on the Biscuits Consumed sheet

  • Set the print area to the first 4 columns
  • Use print titles to repeat the first row
  • Use View/Page break preview to check it is good.

Autofilter

Autofilter can help you explore your data. The “Biscuits consumed” sheet holds data from a follow on study catalysed from the biscuit world cup – this time participants chose one biscuit per day and gave it a score.

  • Select the 4 columns making up the table and click “sort and filter” and select “filter”

thing8-sortandfilter

  • Use the drop down menu on the column headings to try a few things out eg:

thing8-filter

  • sort the biscuits A-Z
  • select just the Fruit Club results
  • On the comments heading use “Text Filter” to look for all rows containing “choc”
  • Clear all filters before you go on…

Pivot Tables

We often get information that we need to summarise. Pivot tables can make this really easy.

On our biscuit example we might like to ask “how may times was each biscuit chosen?” and “what was the average score for each biscuit?”.

Here’s what to do:

  • select the first three columns
  • Click on the Insert Menu and select Pivot Table
  • accept the defaults to create a new worksheet

thing8-pivot

  • Drag “biscuit” from the field list to the rows area and drag score to the values area
  • If you like drag, score into the values area a second time, click on it and change the “value field settings” to give average of score.
  • See if it matches the Answer to Biscuits Consumed sheet.

Absolute and Relative Referencing

If I have not yet exhausted your appetite for Excel tapas, here’s one that has its own shortcut key (F4).

By default Excel always uses relative referencing.  If you copy a cell four rows down, any formulas in that cell are updated to point to the corresponding cells four rows down.  You might not always want this, and the good news is that you can override it by using $ in the formula.

To try this out have a look at the sheet labelled MyShares.  (This relates to an alternative reality where you have enough spare cash to have some shares and time to ponder how they will grow in a variety of scenarios).

We need to copy the formula in cell E5 to fill the other areas and work out how our shares may grow.  At the moment the formula is

=D5*E4

A fruit club goes to the first 3 people who can tell me by email where to add two $ signs!

(See this Microsoft article if you need a hint!)

 

Thing 6: Get Outlook to work for you

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outlook1

Is email a headache? This thing is a chance to step back from your inbox and think about what you could do to make it work for you.

A quick poll of LTDS colleagues  suggest that the following techniques work:

  • Use folders to hold emails on different topics
  • Colour code items to indicate whether actions are needed
  • Set reminder flags
  • Use rules to delete or move messages that fit particular conditions

Here are three scenarios by way of examples:

  1. You anticipates lots of emails from a particular source that you only need to look at once or twice a day.
    eg:  You have created a form that sends you an email or a Doodle poll and want to keep track of responses, but only want to look at this once every couple of days while it is open.
  2. You want to watch out for certain routine and regular communications and make sure you read them
    eg: You want to make sure you jump on Richard’s weekly update from the Strategy Group
  3. You are part of a small project team of 5 people and want to easily identify communications about this project.
    eg: I work with Angela and Catherine on the Dementia Care free online course, and with Steve, Kovila and Martin on the Cyber Security one. We sometimes use a mailing list and other times communicate with each other individually.

I’ve used these scenarios to illustrate a few things that are possible with rules.  Work through one or two, translating them to your own context. Or, if you like consult with one of the team’s uber-organised colleagues to help you fix something immediately useful to you.

If you are new to rules you may want to have a look at one or two Microsoft training videos.

Scenario 1: Lots of emails from a source that you only need to look at infrequently.

This is crying out for a rule.  One option is to create a folder and move all responses automagically to the folder.

  • Right click on the email message

outlook2

And select Rules

outlook3

  • Then fill in the boxes and click OK.

outlook5

Scenario 2: Watch out for important communications and flag them

Let’s highlight all strategy group updates and flag them.

  • First off find one in your inbox and right click on it.
  • Click advanced options

outlook7

  • Click Next to move on to “What do you want to do with the message?” screen and select “flag message”
  • Click “follow up at this time”

outlook6

  • Select when you want it to go red

outlook8

  • Click through the dialogue boxes to make the change.

Now these will be flagged – you can tick them when read and digested and move them to folders if you want to keep them.

Scenario 3: Colour code items from particular people

Outlook  gives us the possibility of creating custom categories.  You can edit categories in use in Outlook and add new categories, by clicking  the arrow at the bottom of the Categorize button.

outlook9

But, helpfully, you can also do this on the fly in the process of creating a rule.

Here’s what I want to do: assign all emails from the Lynne, Catherine and Angela to a new category “Dementia”.

Create the rule;  in the “Which conditions?” box select the “from”

outlook10

You can add extra people to the list in the rule description box by clicking the underlined value:

outlook11

Then  click next to go onto “What do you want to do with the message?”

outlook12

  • Click category in the bottom part

outlook13

  • Add a new category

outlook14

Now, presto, everything from this project team is signaled on my inbox.

For your blog/comments on this post

Which strategies do you use to manage email?  What have you done/will do as a result of thinking about this thing?