Excel Comments in Your Face

Using a table in Excel. Put comments in the column headers that now WILL NOT SHUT no matter what I do. Switch worksheets? No dice. Close and re-open? No-dice.

All is not lost. Found a VB script while Googling. Thanks Microsoft. I realize Excel is fairly new and it will take some time to smooth out the rough edges. Ugh.

Update: found a button on the Review Ribbon section called Show/Hide comments. In the past, the commend "bubble" disappeared when you moved from the cell.

Shifting Favorites in Outlook

I use Office 365, including Outlook. This is the second major version that resorts my Favorites folder on a regular basis. To be perfectly precise, it tends to change the position of all Favorites folders as if it were scrolling down. In it's defense, Outlook seems to "scroll" them consistently, but the fact that such a simple feature simply doesn't work and hasn't been fixed in 2 major version just adds to the daily flogging.

Squarespace feature request: please don't delete my data

I used SQUARESPACE to create my Web site. Although its UI seems designed for people from another planet, once you get used to it, you can create decent looking, reasonably functional sites without too much trouble.

A few days ago I was creating a new page on my site when I noticed a link at the bottom that said "Enable Page". Imagine my delight when I clicked it and the page reloaded without any of the text I'd just spent 20 minutes typing!

After a less-than-friendly e-mail to support, I got a response acknowledging the problem with a tepid commitment to put in a feature request to development? What? You just lost my data and it's not a bug?

In their defense, development eventually responded acknowledging that it was a bug. Will be interesting to see how quickly it gets fixed (we hear so much about the responsiveness of SaaS companies).

Battery? What battery? The missing Windows 10 Battery Meter

For reasons I can't begin to imagine, the battery meter on my laptop disappeared from Windows 10's System Tray. A Google search revealed lots of complicated solutions, but the following worked like a charm for me:

From Device Manager

• Click drop down for "Batteries"
• Disable and re-enable
• AC Adapter
• ACPI Compliant Control Method Battery

Not a huge deal, but further erodes my faith in Windows 10, Microsoft, the software industry and perhaps humanity.

BTW, getting to Device Manager was a bit tricky because at regular intervals, I lose (at once):

• The start menu
• Context menus on icons in the Task Bar
• Context menus in the System Tray
• Availability of native Windows apps

What better way to say "We got your money, now we just don't care?"

Windows 10 -- Making the Simple Impossible

On several occasions, I've tried to use Windows "Photos" app to view image files. On many occasions, it just displays blackness, so I have to use Windows Photo Viewer (the more traditional solution). My little sleigh ride through hell today:

• Try to open an image (JPEG) but "Photos"  app displays black
• Open same file from Explorer using "Open with". Photo Viewer works like a charm
• Want to change Viewer to be the default, but can't directly from Windows Explorer (I think, the right-click menu has about 20 options, so who knows)
• Google changing file associations in Windows 10 and it tells me to select "Default programs" from start menu
• Start menu doesn't work. For some reason it randomly flakes out on me. Start menu won't come up and right-click menu on apps in the task bar won't work (this has been happening for weeks)
• I find my way to default programs anyway, but when I choose a default program for Images, the UI doesn't change to reflect my selection (although the association for images seems to have been modified)
• Same thing for video (I want to use Media Player instead of the dreadful Windows 10 default). Also doesn't update the UI for default video program to show the new selection and the association hasn't been changed.

It's 2016 people.

BTW, just found how to change file associations from Explorer:

• Right-click
• Choose Properties
• Click Change button in section on "Type of file"

This wasn't listed in the articles that came back in my Google search.

About this Blog

This blog is dedicated to the daily flogging I and many others are subjected to trying to use technology in today's D- software and technology landscape.