Microsoft 365 training and content for modern digital workplaces
I’m thrilled and humbled to have had the opportunity to be a guest blogger over on Microsoft’s Humans of IT (HoIT) blog. My post is about balancing all our obligations, embracing imperfection, and leaving room for joy in our endeavors.
You can read the post here.
Shoutout to Shona, Ally, Oniel, and William for the opportunity and helping to make the post the best it can be.
If you’d like to apply to be the next HoIT guest blogger, you can do so at aka.ms/guestbloggers.
It can be difficult to keep up with all the messages in LinkedIn that come in from colleagues, old friends, recruiters, and bots. Even if you have every intention of replying at a later time, your message buddy can see that you’ve seen their message but chose not to reply immediately. This can add false tension or anxiety to the communication, or just send a signal to the other party that’s unintended such as how you might value that person or their objective. Your message buddy can also tell when you’re typing and may be anxiously awaiting what you have to say even if you change your mind and delete the draft, leaving them hanging.
Let’s reduce some stress and disable read receipts and typing indicators so you can reply when you’re able with the peace of mind that no unintended feelings were conveyed when skimming between meetings. Just keep in mind that if you do this others won’t see that you’ve read their message or a typing indicator when you type AND you won’t be able to see the same from anybody else. Disabling it from applying to you removes your ability to benefit from it applying to others.
1. Go to LinkedIn and log in.
2. Select your profile menu then Settings & Privacy.
3. Select Communications at the top navigation menu.
4. Click Messaging experience on the left.
5. Next to Read receipts and typing indicators, click Change.
6. Toggle the option to the off position. It saves automatically.
By default your LinkedIn profile may appear in public search results and individuals who aren’t logged in to LinkedIn can see some of your information (depending on the privacy settings of each component as you added it to your profile). This public/anonymous access is also what allows Outlook to find your profile as a potential match for you if you haven’t connected your profile yet.
Note: Connecting to LinkedIn at work requires that your administrators enable LinkedIn connections.
In this post we’ll go through the steps to disable your public profile so that only logged in users may connect with you and/or view your profile in whole or part depending on your settings. You can also watch a video demonstration at the bottom of this first section below.
1. Go to LinkedIn and log in.
2. Select your profile menu then Settings & Privacy.
3. Click Visibility (on the left) and then next to Edit your public profile, click Change.
4. Toggle the Edit Visibility option to the off position. It saves automatically.
You could, alternatively, just restrict which content appears publicly. Instead of step 4, leave it toggled in the on position and choose which items below it should be available.
As you make changes, the preview on the left will update to show you what anonymous users will see when on your profile but not logged in.
1. Go to LinkedIn and log in.
2. Select your profile menu then Settings & Privacy.
3. Next to Profile visibility off LinkedIn, click Change then change the toggle to the off position.
I still see a lot of LinkedIn profile URLs including generic alpha-numerically decorated user names. Let’s clean that up and make it unique and intentional.
For example, if you don’t change your URL it may still be something like:
….linkedin.com/in/nate-chamberlain-ab1234567/
But you can update it to something that looks great on a resume and every other profile, such as:
….linkedin.com/in/nchambe/
Better, right? Let’s do it.
1. Go to LinkedIn and log in
2. Select your profile menu then Settings & Privacy.
3. Click Visibility on the left, then next to Edit your public profile, click Change.
4. In the upper right-hand corner, select the pencil icon under Edit your custom URL to edit your URL.
5. Enter your preferred URL suffix and click Save.
6. If available, you’re done! If unavailable, try another suffix. FYI – “AWESOME” is not available.
Mark Rackley recently tweeted about the ability to create a calculated column in SharePoint online document libraries that would automatically render thumbnails for documents. In the GIF from his tweet, it shows how this works for media files.
Naturally curious, I had to see how this worked for documents of .docx, .pdf, .pptx, etc. types. What I found is that it only currently supports some file types:
1. Add a new column to your document library (library settings > Create column).
2. Set the column name to Thumbnail. As for type, you have two options:
3. Click OK.
Supported file types will have thumbnails rendered (like .docx and .pdf in the example below) and others will just be blank (like .pptx and .xlsx in the example below).
Here is an animation demonstrating the entire process, start to finish using Single line of text as column type:
And another animation but using the Calculated column set to [Title] type:
In this age of building bots and eliminating needless clicks and such to get employees the info they need faster and more directly, we need all the best practices we can find when creating solutions for users. This post will share a better practice when it comes to getting reliable, fast results from SharePoint lists and libraries that don’t rely on search index configuration or endless view sprawl.
If you’re just here for the quick answer, here it is. For string values, you can simply add this to the end of the list’s URL to filter it as specified.
?FilterField1=[IntFieldName]&FilterValue1=[FilterValue]
If you want to learn about how this came up in my work and why I chose it as a solution, read on.
Recently, I was involved in troubleshooting a bot that would search a SharePoint list using its built-in search box. However, the bot would be searching for items that were created minutes prior and the search index hadn’t updated yet so no results would be found and the bot would fail to complete.
So I suggested we filter instead of search.
Filtering lists works independently of the search index. Meaning I can create a new item in a SharePoint Server 2019 (or any SharePoint version) list right now and then filter the list and find that new item immediately. But if I search immediately, it won’t be found yet.
Want to argue about continuous crawls as workaround? Send your thoughts to nothanks@natechamberlain.com.
For this particular bot, we’d be replacing this process:
with this one:
It not only simplifies the steps involved, but reduces the likelihood that changes to UI elements will break our bot along the way.
First you need to identify the internal field name of your column on which you’ll be filtering. Then we simply add a bit of text to the end of the list’s URL.
If your filter isn’t working for yes/no columns, replace “no” with 0 and “yes” with 1 in your URL.
You can filter the list on multiple columns by adding &FilterField2=… in the same format as the first. See below for an example:
?FilterField1=[Field1]&FilterValue1=[Value1]&FilterField2=[Field2]&FilterValue2=[Value2]
Be sure to check out this documentation for more URL filtering ideas and uses.
I had an issue come up today where a user wanted to search a SharePoint list by the default ID column.
Problem:
The ID column cannot be indexed and is not searchable using just the ID number itself.
Solution:
You can still search ID numbers in lists if you include the proper Keyword Query Language (KQL) syntax. Format your search as ListItemID:3 (replacing 3 with your own ID number, of course) and it will work.
And yes, this works in both modern and classic list search experiences and in SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online/O365.
