544 – Farewell, IE

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In 1998, when anti-trust hearings were perhaps more spiky and combative and certainly not delivered by a flaky Zoom connection, Microsoft was arguing that the free Internet Explorer web browser was so intrinsic to Windows that it could not be removed.

Ever since Windows 98, Internet Explorer 4 was built-in to Windows, though versions of IE were available for the Mac (Steve Jobs chose to use it!), Unix and even OS/2, through the mid 2000s, before it settled on being a PC-only thing. If IE4 was installed on other versions of Windows, it was basically not possible to remove it and revert back to an earlier version, without reinstalling the operating system.

Since 2014, when Microsoft announced Windows 10, it was clear that IE would not evolve beyond the latest release, version 11. IE11 is still included in Windows 10, and will continue to be so until the end of days – or the end of the support lifecycle, whichever comes sooner.

clip_image003You can still launch Internet Explorer in Windows 10 – just press Start and type internet – though the default page does leave you in no doubt that you’re better off elsewhere…

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If you want to remind yourself what it’s like to drive without a seatbelt, or go to the shops without wearing PPE, try using IE to browse the web for an hour.

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It was announced recently that – even if the IE11 browser is still included in Windows 10 and will still be technically supported for another while – “support” for using it will start to be removed from Microsoft 365 services from November 2020. Just as friends don’t let friends do crazy things – like virus scan the M: drive – it’s time to stop them using IE11 as their daily and default browser.

All paths lead to the new Edge browser, built on Chromium for added compatibility – though somewhat ironically, issues have cropped up when using Google as the default search engine, all since fixed. Additionally, some angry-from-Manchester types have complained you can’t uninstall Edge if it arrives via Windows Update or pre-installed. Tried uninstalling Safari on your iPhone or your Mac?

There’s been a subtle change in nomenclature, too – “Edge” is the new Edge, or Chromium Edge, or ChrEdge or whatever you want to call it. The old Edge – the one which shipped with Windows 10 as the successor to IE and as a whole new web experience – is now Microsoft Edge Legacy. LegEdge is not even visible on latest versions of Windows, but if you need it and are the type who likes to live dangerously, you can re-enable it by hacking around in the registry.

543 – Dynamics CRM and Outlook

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Customer Relationship Management or Customer Engagement, whatever you call it, is a huge part of the IT industry, powering repeated companies to multi-billion dollar valuations. CRM gives companies a way of tracking customer touch points and connecting people together, powering sales teams to track their opportunities and leads, as well as a way of managing GDPR compliance with respect to contact information.

clip_image003Evolving from personal and then group contact management software in the 1980s, CRM came of age in 1995, with Oracle refugee Tom Siebel establishing Siebel Systems as the early market leader, and eventually acquired by Oracle.

clip_image004 Microsoft deployed Siebel in the late 1990s, initially requiring a “fat client” installation complete with a local Sybase SQL Server on everyone’s PC, so they could sync data from the central Siebel system, then eventually moving to be browser-based. One MS sales manager coined the moniker “IIIInSIDE” – If It Isn’t In Siebel, It Doesn’t Exist – giving sales people nowhere to hide when it came to reporting pipeline of opportunities they were tracking.

Mark Benioff, another ex-Oracle exec, set up Salesforce.com in 1999 to not only establish SaaS as a viable way to deliver “line of business” systems (as part of the first Application Service Provider boom, which was largely wiped out by Dot Bomb), but to ultimately eclipse his former employer in terms of market value. Time also moves on – now that Salesforce is the big dog in the CRM world, there are lots of competitors snapping at its heels… Pega, Zoho and many more.

Not least, Microsoft – the Dynamics CRM business (now part of Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement) is growing fast, and even courted the “Father of CRM” to choose D365 for his new enterprise. If you use Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM as part of your job, and use Outlook on your PC for mail, calendaring and contacts, there’s a handy way of connecting the two.

Dynamics Connector for Outlook

There have been several versions of a way to link Outlook and Dynamics together; the latest, Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, will fully supplant earlier versions in October 2020. See the admin guide for more on what the connector does and how it works. The installation can be a little clunky first time, though – you’ll need to install the connector software from here, which starts by downloading and extracting the setup files to a folder on your PC.

Make sure you’re getting the right version for your copy of Office – to check, in Outlook, go to File | Office Account | About Outlook and look to see if you have 32 or 64 bit version installed.

clip_image006If the latter, download the amd64 version of the client and the first major update package, otherwise download the i386 one.

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Once you have the base version installed (a process which takes a good few minutes: you also have the option to enable offline usage, which means setting up a local database to hold the content), don’t bother starting it yet – go straight ahead and run the update to the current version (strangely, a larger download than the original install). Once that’s downloaded and installed, you’ll need to restart Outlook if it’s running.

clip_image012On first run, enter the normal URL you’d use to access CRM – after a few minutes of configuring the addin you should be good to go.


You’ll see a new Dynamics 365 tab on the main menu, offering a variety of CRM-specific activities.

clip_image014Arguably, one of the most useful and obvious (given that you use this data all the time in mail) is managing contacts for your customers – Outlook is a great way of pushing them into CRM.

clip_image016clip_image018Start with an email – the Dynamics 365 app adds context-sensitive commands to the Outlook UI, so with a couple of clicks you can track an email in CRM – copying its contents into the Account record, so others can see that you sent or received it.

clip_image020If you right-click on an email address in a message, calendar appointment etc, and Add to Contacts, you can then sync that with Dynamics in a couple of clicks…

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… meaning there’s no excuse to not have your important contacts listed in CRM.

You can even match the contacts’ LinkedIn profiles, and create an org chart of all the listed contacts.

542 –Excel Special Paste

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Anyone who spends an amount of time preparing spreadsheets in Excel, will be familiar with the frustrations that can come from cut, copy & paste. You need to know what the source of a cell is before you know how it will behave if you copy and paste it somewhere else, even to another sheet.

As an example, if you took the small table below and wanted to copy and paste the calculated values on row 4, you’d need to deal with the fact that the formula will change – offsetting the D and the 2 reference to wherever you paste it (eg if you pasted the copy into E4, the formula would be =E2-E3) – normally, a powerful and useful function, but a potential nuisance.

clip_image004You could decide to paste just the value itself (which means that if the values in D2 and D3 changed, cell D4 would be recalculated but your copy would not), or you could copy the cell, then copy original cell’s formula and paste that into the formula of the destination cell.

clip_image006There are lots of “Paste Special” options, which will vary depending on what kind of data is in the clipboard. Right-click in a destination cell and the Paste Options menu will surface the commonly used variants, or click the arrow by Paste clip_image008Special to see all the others. Move the mouse over that pop-up menu and the rest will fade away.

An older UI for selecting the options is available if you click on the Paste Special… command at the bottom of the pop-out, or by pressing CTRL+ALT+V to pop out the Special dialog.

clip_image010Transposing

One of the more particularly useful features of Paste Special in Excel is the Transpose option – if you select and Copy a row of data then Paste / Transpose it, the data is rearranged as a column (and vice versa). Great news in many cases, but if you want to paste cells and keep the original formulae (without resorting to using absolute references formula references using $ in the formula itself, eg setting =$D$2-$D$3), there are no default options to transpose the orientation of the cells but not change the  formulae.

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One trick if you ever find yourself in this position, is to bulk change the formulas so they won’t get modified when you paste the cells; do a Find & Replace to change = to something like #=.

After pasting and transposing, reverse the process to restore the formulaclip_image014.

clip_image016NB: this can be a little hit and miss depending on how you’re using cell names or references – you may find that it’s more reliable if the reference is made to a cell on a different worksheet.

It’s an edge case but could save you lots of time if you need to do it.

For most of us, getting to grips with shortcut keys in Excel would make things more productive – as well as numerous combos of CTRL-something, there are simple keys (like pressing F4, which repeats the very last command … so if you’ve just coloured a cell yellow, move the cursor to another cell and hit F4 to make that one yellow too… if you’re doing very repetitive things, this can save so much time).

There are also more complex sequences; press the ALT key in Excel (and other Office apps, too) to see the key combos that clip_image018invoke each command group on menus or the Ribbon – if you can’t remember the shortcut, just press ALT then the key for the menu you want, then the key on the menu that equates to the command you’re looking for.

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A little bit of legacy/history – press ALT-E then S to jump to the Paste Special menu – why E? Even though it’s long gone, really old versions of Excel had an Edit menu, and the commands on any menu – in any application – that have an underscore under a letter (like Paste Special) are highlighting the key you can press to jump to that command.

So ALT E / S used to be the combo to get Paste Special circa Excel 2003, and it still exists today.