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Tips and Hints for Windows 10 Newbies

As the upgrade period for Windows 10 came to an end last month (July 2016) we found ourselves upgrading all our PCs to Windows 10 at the last minute. We had a mix of Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktop and laptop PCs that were working just fine but thought it best to get all computers on the same OS version. And the price was nice – $0. There are a lot of things to like about Windows 10 but there are also some differences that we found annoying. As we work through them we will be posting our observations and findings in our Blog. This will be the index of those articles.

How to clean up the “This PC” section of File Explorer (f/k/a, Windows Explorer)

 

 

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Cleaning up the “This PC” section of Windows Explorer

First, it is no longer Windows Explorer. It is now called the File Explorer. Got it.

It seems the “This PC” section of the File Explorer was redesigned to make it busier and less useful. Instead of just having local and mapped network drives, it also includes folders for Pictures, Videos, and other folders that are probably better for home use than business use. It doesn’t help that by default these folders that I don’t use are listed first and on top:

this pc 1

You would think there is an option to make them go away. There isn’t. But, there is a registry hack that you can easily download and use to make them go away. Our friends over at How To Geek can walk you through it and provide the registry scripts you need to remove and add the items back.

How to Remove the Folders From “This PC” on Windows 10

 

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Saving Non-Standard Files in the Time Matters DMS – Email Yourself

The Time Matters DMS has integrations with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, Outlook, and Acrobat. Basically, when you have one of these types of documents open you press a TM Save (or TM Connect) button and you are provided a Document Form to complete. Once completed, the document/email is saved to the appropriate place in your document store. It’s really simple and easy to use, and keeps you from having to drill down into a hierarchical folder structure to save documents.

But, what do you do when you get a non-standard document like a WAV, AVI, JPG, TXT, HTM, XML, or other document for which there isn’t a Time Matters integration? Per LexisNexis help, you should place it a shared folder and then right click on it and select “Send to” and then “Time Matters.” When you do this for one or more documents, you get the “Create Document Profile Records” dialog that let’s you specify how you want the Time Matters Document record to be completed.

LN_help

The main problem with this method is that you have drill into the hierarchical folder structure to put the document in the correct place, or just have a folder into which you drop these types of files. When you use the TM Save functionality, Time Matters saves a copy of the document you want to save in the exact location where it belongs.

A better way for Time Matters and Outlook users – presumably a large percentage of Time Matters users – is to drag and drop the document(s) into an Outlook email and send it you yourself. This is easily done, and easier than the LN recommended way. Once you get the email – in a second or two at most – you have all the TM Save/Connect tools within the TM-Outlook integration to save the documents as you normally do. Once saved, simply delete the email.

A final point – most of these types on non-standard documents will probably get emailed to you anyway. Better to save from the email than save it to a shared folder and then “Send to Time Matters.”

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ndOffice Must-have Interim Upgrade – 1.7.4.x

NetDocuments released a great interim upgrade to the ndOffice integration. All our NetDocuments users who use ndOffice (pretty sure that’s 100%), should download the new version of ndOffice and upgrade all users. You can get the upgrade here.

As I understand it, a few versions back NetDocuments enhanced the functionality of the Workspace lookup in ND Web. This resulted in a very efficient “type-ahead” feature that makes it much quicker to get to the Workspace (typically Client-Matter) you are looking for. Unfortunately, this resulted in the loss of the auto-fill feature when completing profile fields in ndOffice. For those of us who were used to typing in the first few letters of the Document Type, as an example, and then tabbing on to the next profile field, the loss of this feature was a real productivity hit. You had to press F2 or click on the lookup button and run through the lookup dialog.

type-ahead1Good news … with version 1.7.4.x this feature is back and it’s even better than before. Now, you have the same functionality as you have in the Workspace search bar. Just type in a few letters anywhere in the Case, Matter, Document Type, Author or other field that has a lookup table and you will quickly be given a list of potential matches that filters out the more you type. The searching term can be at the start of what you are looking for, or anywhere within the searched for word. For example, if I am looking for “Office Furniture World” and type in “Office” I would be overwhelmed with all the “Law Offices of this or that” results. But, type in “Furniture” or “World” and Office Furniture World is quickly displayed and easily selected without having to touch the mouse or press F2.

type-ahead2This issue was heavily discussed in the NetDocuments Support Community, and NetDocuments should be commended for their quick action. They initially intended on waiting to upgrade it in 1.8 but chose to do so sooner. And, while I wish it had never happened, the ultimate result is that we actually got better functionality that we had before.

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