Maximize Your Use of Windows 10

, and welcome everybody to the learning objective series from the Center for Practice Management at the North Carolina Bar Association. Today we are going to talk about maximizing your use of Windows 10, which is the operating system that probably most of you are using. Several, several firms that I had talked to last year, middle of last year, realized that Windows 7 was no longer gonna be supported at the beginning of January 2020. So they had to scramble to get everybody up to speed on the newest Windows operating system. If that's the case, you probably haven't had a lot of chances to explore what Windows 10 does. But even if you've been using it for years, there's always new things you can discover to use, some which are helpful, some may not be. So we're just going to go through this. So first thing I want to talk to you about is Windows updates. Um, you have probably all heard that it is very important to update your Windows operating system for security purposes. You have probably also heard that it is dangerous to update Windows because sometimes they push out an update that wreaks havoc on your system. So what are you supposed to do? The other thing is if you are in a networked environment, you may have, like I do, have that feature completely disabled. I have no, I have no choice. Our IT department pushes out Windows updates and we don't automatically update. So I'm gonna show you what this looks like. When you want to check on your Windows updates and see if you've got the latest and greatest, I always use the search bar. I, I did actually participate in a program fairly recently where there was a, a Mac user showing us all the cool things in the Mac operating system, and I was getting a little envious when I realized that actually I have a lot of these features in here. So I'm just gonna type in Windows Update into the search bar. Because I find that that is the easiest thing to do. So I've recently checked it, so I'm looking at Windows Update settings. And when you do that, it will give you a page, and it'll show me that I'm up to date. I can check for updates. There's some optional updates. But you'll also note that in red it says some settings are managed by your organization. And so, If you have a network and if your managed IT company is handling this stuff for you, don't mess around with this. I mean, frankly, they'll test the, the patches and updates for the Windows operating system and take care of it. If you're a solo or in a smaller firm where you don't have network computers and you don't have an admin, then you're going to want to check for updates and make sure that they get pushed out. However, Sometimes the updates, like I said, can actually do some damage. Not, not terrible damage, but sometimes they just— it makes your computer act wonky. So best practices is not to necessarily update it immediately. So what you can do is you can go in and pause updates for 7 days. So if Windows pushes out an update that is, you know, giving everybody the blue screen of death or something, that comes out in the news. Everybody starts complaining about it. So if you pause updates for 7 days, that gives you a fighting chance of not installing an update or having an update that's auto-installed for you that's gonna do some, you know, make it difficult to do your work. The other thing is, so you can, you can also view your update history by clicking on this button. And I can see what was updated, what types of updates, and all that kind of stuff. Again, our network, our IT people handle this for me, but it's always good to know, you know, sometimes I'll read, oh, there's this great feature in Windows, and I'll think I don't have it. Well, that's because the update hasn't been patched through, and sometimes I can contact our IT people and go, well, I really want this thing. And they'll do it for me. The other two buttons on this View Update History that are useful are Uninstall Updates. So if you ever get an update that really is wreaking havoc on your machine, click on Uninstall Updates. And what it will do is show you what's been updated, and then you can just roll it back. So, you know, that's, that's a helpful, helpful little thing to know where it is. And then the other thing that I wanted to show you, see where it says Recovery Options? Recovery Options are restore points. And so you can, you could restore back to when your computer was running well. And what we wanna do is make sure that we have those recovery restore points set up. So I'm just gonna type in, find a setting, and I'm gonna type in restore. And Restore Points, so it says Create a Restore Point. And when I go there, this, it's funny because all of a sudden you're like, yeah, that looks like old-school Windows operating system because some of this still looks exactly like it has for decades. So when you go to create this restore point, there's a couple of different options. You can create the restore point clicking here, type a description. Say I was gonna make a major change. I was gonna update the operating system. I was gonna install a patch. I was gonna add a piece of software that I thought might, you know, change something that I wanted to be able to restore to a previous point before I made that install. So we'll just call this Installing Acrobat, and I'll create a restore point. And they basically, if I install something that creates a problem, then I'll be able to revert back, and I'll show you how you do this. So it's basically creating this restore point. Depending on how much stuff you have on your computer, it may take a little while. And then, um, you can restore the system by going to System Restore, and then you just click on Next. And you can see that if I did something after I created this restore point, like install Acrobat or update patches or whatever, I can restore back to that previous time. If you see this button down here, Show More Restore Points, you'll see that I've been making restore points whenever I make any major change to my system. So you would just click on that and click Next, and you would restore your computer back to before it had a problem. If you wanna have it configured to turn on automatic restore points, then what you wanna do is click on Configure and make sure that this button is toggled on, Turn on system protection. And that will create automatic restore points for you. So that's, that's it in a nutshell, but I thought that was something that was really important to know about your operating system. It's a little geeky, I will admit, but it is one of those things that is really important. So I'm not going to get back and forth into the, the PowerPoint because the reality is we're going to be digging into this stuff in a live demonstration and As I will often make this caveat, it is a real live demonstration of my desktop, so things happen. And I will send you the PowerPoint. It has lots of notes and lots of links and instructions in case something goes wrong. So the next thing I'm gonna go to show you is how to show your desktop. Now, if you're the kind of person who actually saves stuff on their desktop, this is going to be useful for you. I don't save things to my desktop necessarily, not a ton of stuff, but like anybody, I've got things on my desktop. I'd like to think I keep a clean desktop, but you save things on there, then you have to go back and clean it up on occasion. But if you are the kind of person who saves a ton of stuff on your desktop, which I've seen people do, there's this little way to peek at your desktop. And so it's, all the way down in the far right corner of your screen, and it's almost impossible to see. It's a little vertical bar, so all the way down here, and then if you click on it, it goes and shows my desktop. So if I kept a lot of files here or I had, you know, had an application that I hadn't added to my toolbar or something like that, the recycle bin, It's easy to find the recycle bin here, things like that. And then there's certain documents that, you know, our organization sends out, like the vacation schedule. There's the holiday schedule. I save that on my desktop because it's easy to get to, and I cannot remember when they give us days off. So things like that, you know, it's easy to get to. And you can get back and forth from your desktop again by going on the far right corner of your screen and clicking an almost invisible vertical button. And when you click that, again, it goes back into the application that you were using. So there's some other little tools for your desktop that I wanna talk about. One is if you are using a single screen, and so if you went and you're working remotely and you have a single screen, even if it's a big screen, Working in multiple applications is sometimes hard. If you have ever tried to snap windows together, resize them and stuff, you know that it's kind of a pain. So there's an easy way to do that. And so if you want to open two applications side by side, the easiest thing to do is— so there on your keyboard, if you're a Windows user, there is a Windows key. It looks like the, um, the Windows icon. It's that 4-window pane Windows key. On your computer keyboard, it's probably on the bottom left somewhere. That is the magical key for getting into the operating system and doing things with your operating system. So in this case, what I'm gonna do, and this is again so I can just open 2 applications that I already have open side by side, is I'm gonna hit the Windows key and then I'm going to hit an arrow key. And when I do that, you'll see that it takes my active screen, which is PowerPoint, and pushes it to the right-hand side. And then these other things that show up are all the other applications and pages that I have open. So I've got my settings open, I've got a browser open, I've got PowerPoint, or rather Outlook and Excel. So I'm gonna go over and click on this. And what that does is without you having to mess around with kind of trying to get these into, some sort of order so you can switch back and forth. I've got my PowerPoint open and I can work in my PowerPoint and then I've got Next to it. So if I need to copy and paste things like that, that works really great. So someone is asking a question, which arrow key do you hit with the Windows key? Either one. So I'm gonna do this again and show you. So I will expand this again. So if I hit the Windows key and hit the right arrow, it just, because I have multiple screens, it does different things. So if I hit the right arrow, because I am using my right screen to let y'all see my stuff, it'll do it in that one. If I hit my left arrow, it'll open it on my left screen. So this is actually, even if you have multiple screens, this is kind of useful stuff stuff because if I need to have 2 applications open on one screen and one application on another, I can do that as well. So being able to open as many applications again without trying to snap the different windows together and make them work, this is just a godsend. So the other thing I wanted to show you is a thing that my friend Heidi was showing in the Mac operating system and I didn't want to go, hey, we have that too in Windows, but it's the Alt+Tab. And so again, if you have a whole you have a lot of applications open and you wanna just flip between the different applications that you have open, there's two different ways to do this. So if I click on the Alt key and then the Tab key, I can switch between the different, and all I'm doing is hitting Tab, Tab, Tab, Tab. So if I wanted to go over and open my inbox or open Excel, it will, and because it's on a different screen, it'll open on the other screen. Now, the other thing that you can do though, because this Alt+Tab business, I'm having to go and, you know, land on something and it opens it. I'll go back to PowerPoint. So you can kind of again toggle between different applications, but if you don't wanna hit Tab, Tab, Tab, and you just wanna pick and see what's there, open. The other way that you can do this is you hold down Control+Alt+Tab. Now I can take my hands off the keyboard and I can just use my mouse, or I can arrow around and pick which one I want to go to. So we'll go open this one, and it is opening on my other screen. But that opens an email that I had in draft. And we'll close that because I don't need it in draft anymore. So that's— those are several things. Using Peek to see your desktop, using the Window key and arrows to open things side by side, two different applications or any open screen side by side, and then either Alt+Tab or Control+Alt+Tab to see everything and toggle between the things that you have open. So those are just some kind of screen tips and tools to be able to navigate around easily. The next thing we're going to talk about is, um, whoops, the Windows 10 tiles and Start menu. And so this is something that in our organization they actually took this away. And the reason is because it's really disruptive for people who were used to the Windows 7 Start menu to get what Microsoft did in Windows 10, which is when you click on this little Windows key down in the far left corner of your screen and you click on it, you have these things called tiles. And when you first get a new Windows laptop, hopefully you are using a, a professional version version of Windows. But if you're not, you're going to see a whole lot more tiles. But even with the professional stuff, you're going to see all these, all these tiles, and it's a little confusing. And you're like, what's the point of this? I have all this stuff in my taskbar. So it's just another way to get at the things that you frequently use. But there are some enhancements that might be interesting, but just to get this organized, you can drag and drop from the tiles to this main menu to get rid of 'em. So if I don't want my sticky notes, and I don't know why I have, I mean, sticky notes are kinda cool. I'll actually show you what that looks like. Because now sticky notes save not only on my desktop, but they save them to my phone as well. So as I put in my sticky notes, sticky notes transfer from my PC to my phone and my phone to my PC. So if I create a sticky note for myself, it's basically everywhere and it also saves it to OneNote. So sticky notes are kind of useful. That said, I don't need them in this. So I'm just gonna click on this and drag it over here till I get this, if you see the little bitty square with the red circle with the line through it, So Universal Symbol for Get Rid of This, and you can get rid of it, or you can right-click and unpin, which works too. If you want to add something, then you just drag it over. As you can see, things start shifting around. I can drag, drag these little things in whatever order I want. Um, I haven't explored this too much. Like I said, our organization added a, uh, a little Windows 7 Start menu so that I literally had to undo it to be able to see this. But I'm actually okay with it. And of course I have it on my home computer, so I'm used to it. But I've pretty much ignored it. Now, one of the things, so this is, that's all the tiles. And one more thing to show you about tiles, which is kind of cool. If the tile is an app like that you use, like To Do, then I can right-click on it and click on More, and then I wanna say Turn Live Tile On. If you turn on Live Tile, you can see that I have my to-dos for today show up right there in the tile. Now that's where this stuff becomes actually useful. So, okay, well, that's a bit small. So if I right-click again and click on Resize, I can make it large. And move this down here so I have a fighting chance of seeing it however I wanna see it. So I can actually see my Microsoft To-Do list of to-dos today in a truncated fashion on that Start menu. So that's useful. And similarly, you can go, you know, if you have a favorite Spotify playlist that you wanna play all the time, you can go and make it a live tile and add things to it. The Live Tiles and then resizing, you can actually make this thing super useful. If you wanna add other things to it, you just drag and drop like I showed you, or you right-click and remove it. And we'll, but you know, it, you can use this minimally or you can use it, it a lot. The other thing is here's most every application things that you've recently added. You can expand this list and see everything you've added, um, the things you use the most, and then pretty much every, every single application that you have installed on your computer. Now some of this stuff, if it's got a purple, um, folder, if you click on this arrow, then that's the actual application. So some of these may install multiple, um, multiple things on your computer. So to get to the actual application, you just click on that little arrow. So if you see an arrow, click on it, and then you can get directly to the application itself. So one of the things I want to show you that's a little bit more complicated but really can be very useful is adding a website to this menu here, which involves a couple of different steps and is slightly different if you're using Chrome or Bing. So I'm going to show this to you in the Chrome browser first. So I'm gonna open up Chrome. And I'm, I wanna be able to go to office.com, 'cause I use Microsoft 365, and I wanna be able to go to office.com because there are things in terms of sharing people, sharing, files with people through OneDrive, it's easier to do it through the, the web interface. The Power Automate is easier to use in the web interface and slightly different than the installed ones. If you're using Bookings, this is how you get to Bookings to make changes to it and all that sort of stuff. So having office.com, um, kind of in my Start menu would be super useful. So I've opened it up. The next thing I'm going to do, and again, this is in Chrome, I'm going to go to this little vertical ellipses, which has a name that I can never remember, and I'm gonna click on it. And then I'm going to go into More Tools, and then I'm going to click on, um, Add Shortcut. Then when I go back into my Start menu, It had been showing up, so we'll see. That is not it. Let's do this again just to see. So I'm gonna go to office.com. As I said, live demo, you can practice this stuff, but sometimes you just have to hold your mouth right. And we're gonna create a shortcut and create it. And for whatever reason, it's still not there. I promise you it does work, and I will send you the detailed instructions on how to make that work. But I did it this morning, then I removed it so I could repeat it, and of course it's not showing up now. The other thing you can do is in Edge, similar kind of thing. Edge is the Microsoft, the new Microsoft browser that is taking the place of their Internet Explorer. So if we open Edge and this one, I'm going to make a little, hopefully I'm gonna make it show up, um, so I can get to Fastcase more easily. So if I go to Fastcase, my bookmark, um, in theory, we should be able to, to add that to the, uh, the start menu. So I am going to go again, this one's regular ellipses. And I'm going to go into Apps and install this site as an app. Okay, so now in theory, and yep, there it is. So I promise I got it to work in Chrome before, but you can also do it in Edge since it seems to work for sure. There's the Fastcase gateway, and I can drag it over here. And now when I want to be able to get a Fastcase, I just click on it. And it's— what is happening is, is more and more websites, especially the ones that do something like Fastcase or Office 365, things like that, they're actually saving them as little apps on your computer so you can work offline and things like that. So it's really a neat and fairly new thing that's happening with some of the apps. So we use Salesforce for the back office administration for the association. But if you're using Clio, if you're using PracticePanther, see if you can't save them as apps so you can save them offline, put them in your Start menu and things like that. So the next thing I want to talk to you about, the tile, menu is, um, the secret start menu. So let me show you what that is. So the secret start menu isn't all that exciting, but just so you know, in case you ever hear something about a secret start menu, if you hold down that Windows key we've talked about and then you click on the X, what that does is you can get to different things that are a little bit harder to find. Your, um, network connections, the disk management, stuff that's really buried in settings. So if you are a, um, if, if you like digging around in the operating system, this is the easiest way to get into some of this stuff, is to be able to click on the Windows key plus X and get to the, um, different options that are mostly in settings, but There you go. And then the last thing is the actual search. So I use this search down here all the time. I use it to get to documents. I use it to get to different settings. So you can click and start typing something, and we'll type in ethics. And what this does is it's searching, and we'll do ethics. Social media. So what it's doing is it's searching the web, but it's also searching my local machine. So it found a Word document, it found a folder, it's found documents I saved in SharePoint. So this little search is looking across not only your local files on your computer, but also your cloud files, and then also the internet at large. So you can just— and the nice thing is, no, it's, it's like the, um, it's like the search in, uh, the macOS. You can find anything. So if I want to find the setting for, um, Focus Assist, I just start typing in Focus Assist or Focus, and it pulls up. Here's the Focus Assist settings. So those are settings. Or say I wanted to, um, you know, a lot of times when you install a new application, it automatically starts when you boot your computer up, but I don't always want to do that, and I never can remember where that thing is. So I just say start, start typing startup, and here's the startup apps, and I can go in there and say, okay, you know, I don't want the classic Start menu to run when I start up. I definitely want Dropbox to run when I start up, so on and so forth. So you can go and customize that. So this is the universal search. It works for everything. If you know that you are searching for documents, just go ahead up here and click on Documents, and then you'll see that it puts Documents:. Now again, the nice thing is, This is the documents that are saved on my desktop and in my SharePoint cloud and in my OneDrive cloud. And you can probably hook some other cloud storage up as well. But this lets me, you know, find what I'm looking for. You can also go to this More button and search your email, search for contacts, search for photos or videos if you have stuff like that. The web search, it's Microsoft, so you're going to be using Bing to search. As a default, and you know, but this little search tool, I use it all the time. It's really, really handy. And then the other stuff on the screen, weather, news, and then this bizarro button. If you've ever used a reverse search in Google, Google has a thing where you can upload a picture to Google and have it look for similar images. And there's a similar function in Bing, and there's a standalone reverse image search called TinEye. This also does it. So if I click on this button down here, just to show you what buttons do, this is actually invoking the snipping tool, which we'll look at. And then I can say, let's see, I'm just gonna snip this, and it actually tries to look for similar images on the web. And if it finds one, I'm gonna be really distressed. So the good thing is it didn't see anything that looked like something that was buried within my, my computer, so that's a good thing. But I just like to click on buttons. I very rarely break anything. So those are the Windows 10 tiles and everything. And it's useful. The next thing I'm gonna show you is possibly more useful depending. It's kind of similar to that, the Alt+Tab that I showed you, but this is Task View and your Virtual Desktop. So what Task View and Virtual Desktop are is Task View just lets you see not only everything that you have open, but it also shows you recent documents you've worked on. So it's a really super quick way of seeing, like if you tend to work in multiple, applications, it just lets you not have to open Word and look at the most recently opened files and then open Excel and look at the most recently opened files. It lets you see it all at once. There is, again, in your taskbar down at the bottom, there is this thing that looks like a little ladder, and it's called Task View. And if I click on it, You can see, and there's other things on my other screen that you can't see, other applications I have open on the other screen, which is why you can't see them. But the one that's open on this screen, and then the documents in PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Acrobat that I've opened earlier today, yesterday, and then you can go and add up to 30 days, which probably is more than I need. I, you know, just a couple of days' worth of documents that I've been messing around with is all I need. The other thing you can do here is create desktops. And so you have the ability in Windows 10 to create virtual desktops. And basically, I'm gonna, it's easier to show you than tell you. So this is the desktop that we're working on right now. And you usually only have one, but if you wanted to add multiples and you had, so that you could kind of segregate. Say you want your case management program and your, your document management product open in one desktop, and you wanted to have all of your social media stuff open in another desktop, and you wanted to have your documents and correspondence in another desktop. You can do that and create virtual desktops so one single desktop doesn't get so cluttered. So what I'm gonna do is click on New Desktop, and then I'm just gonna mouse over to Desktop 2. And then what I wanna do is add things to this desktop, and the easiest way to add things to the desktop is literally just to open them. So I'm going to open Chrome, and then I am going to open Salesforce. And so we're gonna— and we don't get to name the, uh, the desktops, but I'm gonna call this my, um, my NPBA desktop. And then I will open my page because if I log in, I can edit it in WordPress. So now I can make changes to the AMS, I can make changes to, um, my website, and then I want to open some applications. So something I use for work all the time is Microsoft Teams. So I'm gonna open Teams. And you get the picture. So now I've created this desktop. If I click on that little Task View button again, and of course there's a shortcut, which is Windows key, Control, and right arrow to get back and forth, click on this. I'm in Desktop 2. If I go back to Desktop 1, here's the things I was using in Desktop 1. Or I can go back to Desktop 2, and those are the things, you know, I had open in Desktop 2, including the two tabs I had open. And you can create— and these, this will stick, um, if you, you know, turn off your computer and go somewhere else, your desktops are there. You can add infinite numbers of desktops. What I have not discovered is that, you know, usually if you want to change the name of something, you can right-click. I can't figure out how to change the name of the desktop, so I wouldn't necessarily suggest opening too many because you'll get lost in which desktop does what. But having a couple of virtual desktops so you reduce distractions, um, like you could, you could create a desktop with all of your social media. If you check LinkedIn or Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram or whatever, you could create a desktop with those things open. And so instead of getting tempted to open them in your active desktop, you could just say, okay, I'm going to take a 10-minute break and check my social and go to that desktop. So you don't have the, the temp, you don't just don't have as many distractions. Um, if you want to delete a desktop, you just Click on the Delete button and it's gone. And then to get back, you just click on the taskbar again. Okay, so there's other things to be aware of in the Windows operating system. One thing is it will notify you about everything to distraction. If you want to turn those off, there's lots of ways to do it. So your notifications show up in this far right corner and you can actually manage what you get notifications about. So you'll note that I have Get notifications from apps and other senders turned completely off. If I wanted to turn some on, I could turn some on, and then I could scroll down here, and I could choose which ones actually sent me notifications. If I wanna keep all the notifications on but have them turn off at certain times of the day, then I would go to this thing called Focus Assist Settings. And if I click on it, you can see that I can have choose the times and activities when you do not want to be disturbed. So during these times of days, I want to turn on Do Not Disturb and change the times of day. By clicking on it and saying between 11 PM and 7 AM, don't disturb me. But the reality is I probably wanna do it between 9 and 5 Monday through Friday because I don't want all these things popping up at me all the time. So Focus Assist gives you an ability to kind of turn off the notifications, see just the priority notifications, then you can go to your custom priority list and you can say show me which things are important from which apps that I use and, and that kind of thing. So you have a lot of control over these notifications using Focus Assist in terms of being able to kind of tell it when you, when you will be available for popups and things like that. You can also turn them off in individual apps. Like for instance, I don't have Outlook popups anything to let me know I have a new message because I find that incredibly distracting. It's hard enough to get work done without having notifications pop up in your face all the time. So if you don't like that stuff, it's easy enough to turn it off. So the next thing I wanted to show you is speech recognition and dictation, and this works okay. I am not going to tell you that it works better than some of the commercial products like Dragon, 'cause it doesn't. But it is built in. I think it's of limited functionality. I think what is built into Microsoft Office applications are better than what's built into the operating system. And I'll show you what I'm talking about. So basically, there's speech recognition built into the operating system, but it's also built into Office suite. So if I go into Word and I open a new document, bring it over on the screen to show you. If you're using Office 365, there is a button called Dictate. [NOISE] And then it will start typing as you speak. If you have used dictation tools before, you know that you have to say Period, new paragraph. And give it a couple of commands in order to make it, you know, work out okay. And I'll send you a link of all the commands so you'll know what to do. And you don't have to guess. If you've used dictation tools before, it's really easy. If it's not, something that you've done before, then it's something to get used to. But as you can see, the dictation tool in Word, and it's also in Outlook, and it's also in PowerPoint, works pretty well. [NOISE] The speech recognition that's built into Windows is a slightly different beast, and I think it's of limited use. There's dictation across your computer, and then there's speech recognition. So dictation, say I was going to put together a new message in Gmail. So I'll go into my Gmail, and I'll compose a new message. And this is where the, dictation tools in the operating system. So if you use WordPress or some other sort of blog platform and you like to dictate, you can use the Windows operating system dictation tools to dictate into anything and into Word and all too. But I think the stuff built into Word is better. But the way you invoke this is you click on the Windows key and H. And we'll say, hi Adam, comma, new paragraph. This is dictation in the Windows operating system. And it quit listening to me, which it does sometimes, which is really irritating. Stop listening to me and type like I told you. So as you can see, it's not that great, but any of this automated dictation stuff, you know, you're used to it, you know you have to clean it up, but I just wanted to let you know that it is built in. The speech recognition tool really doesn't work all that well at all. The promise that it'll open Word and let you start typing in document, do all this other stuff, it's really persnickety, so I'm not gonna bother to show it to you, but what I do want you to know is that any third-party tool that costs money that does this kind of stuff like TextExpander or ActiveWords is well worth the money. 'Cause what's built into the operating system is not that great. And then once you're done, you can stop, and then you could send your email off. This is of limited use, really, but if you like dictation, I just wanted you to know it's there. So the next thing I wanna show you is Cortana, and frankly, let's be real, Cortana is a little scary, and the reason is is because I am, a little nervous about all things that are recording and listening all the time. So that's Siri, Cortana, the Google Dot, the Echo, the Amazon, you know, anything that has a speaker that's hooked up to the internet and is listening to you and is able to do some cool stuff, but keep in mind that they are recording it and keeping it. And so these are the kinds of things that you have to weigh. You can disable Cortana. You don't have to use it at all, And I normally do have it disabled because I don't talk to my computer that much. That said, people really like this stuff, so I just wanted to show you how it works. So Cortana, like Siri and Google and all that, has a wake word. You'll see that I've said Cortana any number of times and it has not woken up. But if I say, hey Cortana, what's the weather in Phoenix? Right now, it's sunny and 55 in Phoenix, Arizona. The forecast shows sun with a high of 64 and a low of 42. So that's not all that impressive. We've seen other tools that do that kind of stuff. Where Cortana, I think, gets really interesting is how it's hooked into your Microsoft products. And so what I'm going to do is say, hey Cortana, what's on my calendar? Sometimes she doesn't listen. Hey Cortana. Oh, now she's ignoring me. Hey Cortana, what's on my calendar? I'm finding 4 events for today. First up at 12 PM, CPM Learning Objectives, maximize your use of Windows 10. After— you get the idea. You can have her tell you what's on your calendar. You can actually have her send an email to someone. You can have her remind you to do something, and it'll pop up a reminder, and it puts it in whatever app The defaults are Outlook and Microsoft To Do. So Cortana, because it's hooked into your existing Outlook and Word and you can pull up documents and do all sorts of stuff, Cortana is actually useful, but again, from a privacy and security perspective, it is saving a transcript of what you say to it. The good thing is, like I showed you, it's pretty hard to wake it up, and certainly it doesn't, like if I say Google very loudly, my phone wakes up and wants to know how it can help. Cortana seems to be, actually you have to kinda yell at her. So I think that's good, but it just, you know, something that I wanted you to know was there. Other things that I think are useful are things like dark mode. When everybody was getting very excited about dark mode, I didn't understand why. And so I played around with it. The good thing is that, you know, we're sitting here staring at a computer screen all day, and unless you're a graphic designer, you don't necessarily need to see it in the best color. You need to keep from having eye strain from blue light and things like that. So dark mode tends to reduce eye strain. So there's a way to turn it on easily. So what we're gonna do is we're going to, and this time I'll, I'll surf to it. So if I click on the Start menu, this little icon is Settings, and you'll recognize the screen hopefully. So here's all the settings, and we're gonna go into Personalization, and Here's your, your background colors. If I go into Colors, I can choose my default Windows mode is light or dark. Now I have it in dark. If you wanna see what it looks like in light, click on Light, and you can see that my taskbar is now in light mode. I can't read that. I find dark mode far superior, and it also shows you everything up here. You can change your default app mode. I tend to like light for my apps for whatever reason. So you have a lot of granularity. You can also choose your own personal accent color. I like purple, so I chose purple. And you can show your accent color. So this is basically dark mode. It's not that exciting, but it, it does help. Now the other thing that you can look at is, again, to reduce that eye strain is if you tend to work late into the night, you can have the blue light start filtering out at certain times. So what you wanna do is I'm gonna type in nightlight. And if you go into nightlight, what that gives you the chance to do is I've got it off until 9:00 PM tonight. I can change that schedule. I can say turn it on, say, as the sun starts setting around 4:30, or you can say sunset to sunrise or set hours. So say at 4:30, I want to start reducing the blue light. So I can go change this, say 4:30 PM, I want to have the nightlight turn on. I want to change the strength and then turn on or turn off. Now one of the things that I've found is that because I use external monitors, this works great on my laptop monitor but not so much on my computer monitor. So what I want to do Get out of this, and I'm gonna go into this little app that I downloaded and paid for, but it wasn't much, called Iris. So what Iris does, and you'll be able— whoops— see this right away. Iris works on external monitors. So for— if for some reason Night Light setting doesn't work on your very cheap external monitors, you can use Iris, and it does. I think it costs $30 or something. And so if I go to Simple and turn off The blue light, it's, um, it's definitely fighting with me here, but it will reduce the, uh, it actually makes your screen look kind of yellow. It's a bit jarring at first, but then once you get used to it, you will appreciate not having eye strain. Two more things to show you real quick. Cloud Clipboard. And the Cloud Clipboard is you can turn it on and I'll give you the instructions to do it if it's not already doing it. The, I guess the good side is that it's on your phone, it's on all your devices. The bad side is that, again, it's being stored in the Microsoft cloud, so if you trust the Microsoft cloud, you should be okay. But what the clipboard does is every time you copy and paste, it's saving it to a clipboard. It's not an infinite scroll, but it does save most everything you've copied and pasted throughout the day. And the way you get to it is you again use that handy Windows key and then you hit the V key. And then you can see that everything, pictures, things that I've copied on my computer throughout the day, I can get back. So it is inevitable that you will copy something and then you will need it later and then you can't remember where you copied it from, like a URL in an email. And then you go, oh, I have to go back to my email and find the email and pull it up and copy it again. Nope, just hit Windows logo V and make sure that your Cloud Clipboard is turned on and I'll send you the instructions to do that. And then the last thing is Snip Sketch. It's, you know, when you need it, you need it. So used to be Windows had a Snip Tool. Snip Sketch is a little bit more sophisticated. And so there's a couple of different ways to invoke it. You can again use the Windows logo and click on Windows logo, Shift and S. And that pulls up this little tool. You can do a regular snip, a freeform snip, grab the screen. That's useful. But what I find is really useful is if you actually just pull up, um, the Snip and Sketch tool, which I actually put in here. Because what this does, and I opened two copies of it, if I click this arrow, I can say snip in 10 seconds. So if I need to show somebody, click here, here, and here,, but I want it all to be open at the same time. So I'm gonna say Snip in 10 Seconds, and then I'm gonna go here and let's see, we'll go to my Twitter and I'll click on it. It basically gives you 10 seconds to navigate to where you want, then you can snip it. Then you have some annotation tools so I can draw on it like that, and then you can save it and send it to somebody. So if you need to take a picture of anything on your screen, you can do it through the snip tool. So I will compile all my notes, give you all the links with the instructions, send you the recording, and then, you know, you can go and explore the Windows operating system and think about what you can do to make it a little bit more, um, user-friendly for your