Monday, 31 March 2025

Dude, how do I pin my folder for Quick Access?

By default, File Explorer opens to Quick Access. This contains a whole bunch of stuff (folders) as well as stuff that has been "pinned" to Quick Access.  Any folder of interest can be "pinned to quick access" using a simple right click. A pinned folder can be easily "unpinned" using the self-same right click action.

Wednesday, 26 March 2025

ai.exe - what is it?

ai.exe is part of Microsoft Office (now known as Microsoft 365 apps) and handles local AI requirements for Office applications like Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. An example would be auto suggestions and predictive text in Word. It is not specifically tied to the operating system version.

Basic Microsoft Edge Shortcuts

Control-Tab    Enables you to scroll through open tabs

Control-Shift-Tab    Reverse scroll but is quite an unnatural set of keys to press

Control-J    View your downloads

Control-H    View your browsing history

Friday, 21 March 2025

OOXML versus OpenDocument

When configuring Microsoft Word on a new machine, you will be prompted if you wish to have Office Open XML (informally OOXML) or OpenDocument (extension .odt for text) as the default format.

Choose the former if you want to be more Microsoft-centric and use all features of Microsoft's ecosystem, choose the latter if you need interoperability with applications like LibreOffice.

OOXML started out as an XML format for Excel and later extended to other applications such as Word.

Monday, 3 March 2025

Dawn of the NPU

Stand down GPUs, this is the dawn of the NPUs. NPUs are neural processing units, which simulate the neural networks in nature. It is characterized by parallel processing, performing trillions of operations per second. It is more efficient (uses less power) for AI tasks than a CPU or GPU.