Once you complete the steps, Windows Defender Antivirus will continuously protect your files and folders from unauthorized access by malicious programs like ransomware

1. Open Windows Defender Security Center.
2. Click on Virus & threat protection.
3. Click the Virus & threat protection settings option.
4. Turn on the Controlled folder access toggle switch.

   

5. Once you complete the steps, Windows Defender Antivirus will continuously protect your files and folders from unauthorized access by malicious programs like ransomware

1. Download the Microsoft Color Tool from GitHub (click the colortool.zip link to get the tool).
2. Unzip the content of the colortool.zip compressed file. (If you need help, use this guide to extract all the files.
3. Open Start.
4. Search for Command Prompt, right-click the result, and click Run as administrator.
5. Type the following command to navigate to the folder that contains the Color Tool executable and press Enter:cd c:\path\to\colortool

   In the above command, make sure to change c:\path\to\colortool with the path to the folder where you extract the “colortool” folder.

6. Type the following command to change the Command Prompt color scheme and press Enter:

   colortool -b scheme-name

7. In the above command, make sure to change scheme-name with the name of the color scheme you want to use. You can figure out the name of the colors available in the “schemes” folder inside the “colortool” folder. For example, the current release, includes eight different schemes:
   • campbell.ini
   • campbell-legacy.ini
   • cmd-legacy.ini
   • deuternopia.itermcolors
   • OneHalfDark.itermcolors
   • OneHalfLight.itermcolors
   • solarized_dark.itermcolors
   • solarized_light.itermcolors

I love this!! What a great solution to losing his pens.

Before you lose your pen:

1. Open Settings.
2. Click on Update & Security.
3. Click on Find my device.
4. Click the Change button, and turn on the Save my device’s location periodically toggle switch.

make sure to use the pen so that Windows 10 can start tracking.

When you lose the pen:

1. Open Settings.
2. Click on Update & Security.
3. Click on Find my device
4. Under “Where’s my pen?” click the Go here to track it link.

Complete the steps then a map will show you where the pen is (approximately).

Now if only there was a speaker on the pen so we could make it play a sound to help see where under the couch it is 🙂

Love this!

Here is a link that can save you tons of money.  No it is not a work from home and get paid link or an insurance discount link but it a free link to some amazing tools from Microsoft

https://products.office.com/en-ca/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online

So it may actually be a get paid to work from home link in a way. Need to remote work but don’t have an Office suite on your home computer?  These light weight apps may just be the things you need. While not having all the power and features of the full blown Office suite they will surely help out in a pinch.

Free tech training is a hard thing to find.

Quality tech training is even harder to find

For 2 days in December some of Microsoft’s best cloud engineers will be giving a training session.

Here is the link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/techsummit/toronto

It was a while coming but the new (and far easier way) to change your lock screen image is here.

1. Open the start menu
2. Type lockscreen
3. It shows up!
4. So easy 🙂

There is of course the “official” way (https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/17185/windows-10-lock-screen) but using Type Anywhere is so much more fun.

To tweak your lock screen to your liking, select the Start button, then select Settings > Personalization > Lock screen . Try changing the background to a favorite photo or slide show, or choose any combination of detailed and quick status notifications to show you upcoming calendar events, social network updates, and other app and system notifications.

(Thanks Phosquire!)

In large organizations it is common to have large numbers of people. Obvious, right?  Well how can you see a list of all users in AD when you have over 2000?  That 2000 number is not random – it is the default list length in AD.  So how do you see 2001 people?  Like this:

1. Log
2. Logon to the server in question
3. Open AD
4. Select “View”
5. Select “Filter Options”
6. Modify the items displayed to what ever count you want!

Love it!

Wow!  When it rains it pours!  More Excel tricks 🙂
This one is also duplicate related (can you guess what I do for a living? 🙂 )  Another super easy trick to remove duplicates (no formulas needed)

1. Select the column (not row – you may need to do a transpose)
2. Go to the data tab
3. Click remove duplicates
4. Done!

Excel like a boss!

This has been another thorn in my side. I know how to do it using formulas (as you may have read in my older blog posts) but I was just shown a super easy way to find them.

Its almost embarrassingly easy:

1. Select the row or column
2. Go to the Conditional Formatting section
3. Select Highlight Cells Rules
4. Duplicate values

Voila!  Are your duplicates are shown.  Thanks Jason G for the pro tip!

This is a new one on me.  I had never noticed this before but it seems like it has been in place since Excel 2013.  If you ctrl-click a cell and then ctrl-click it again it is “multiselected” and starts to darken. The more you click the darker it gets. Really cool way to change the formatting for a cell, right? Wrong, as soon as you click else where (not ctrl-click) it goes back to its original shading. So what does it do?  According to kb2769340 it is used to show and highlight cells.  Okay… The problem is it also breaks the copy column/row rule. If you are selecting numerous cells and accidentally click one twice Excel does not know how to handle this and you will get an error (“This action won’t work on multiple selections).  Kinda frustrating… hope this “feature” gets removed in favor of something more user-friendly