Tech Tips

Transcription

“So starting with Windows 10, Microsoft got really comfortable with showing ads for apps, games, and, you know, Bing searches, things like that, in Windows. They’re trying to, of course, push their own products, push people to buy stuff in the Windows Store because they get a cut, things like that. So from their perspective they think they are being helpful, they’re offering us these “suggestions,” but personally I find these suggestions really irritating, because I don’t want sponsored content appearing everywhere as I’m working.

So here’s 3 different places where we can turn off these helpful “suggestions,” and I’ll also show you how to keep your lock screen clean in Windows, so that you don’t have like these pop-ups where they suggest things to you before you’ve even logged in.

Okay, so the first step is let’s go to the Start menu here, and I’ll show you that at the top, at the top here there’s normally an ad. There’s not one right now, because it’s not guaranteed that an ad shows up, but the ads are usually for apps, games, so I’ll show you how to make sure that doesn’t happen.

And the way we turn off these suggestions is we click Start, we click the gear here, which is Settings, and now we’re going to do is we’re going to search for suggestions, literally the word “suggestions,” okay? And you’ll notice the first option is “show suggestions occasionally in Start.” So we’re going to click that, and then here “Show suggestions occasionally in Start,” we’re going to turn that to off. That’s the one that appears at the top of the Start menu, that’s what I wanted to… that’s why I wanted to start with that.

Now, we’re going to go ahead and just do a few more of these. So search for suggestions, we’re going to see “show suggestions in your timeline,” just click that, once again, let’s turn this off. Okay? Right here where it says Timeline, “show suggestions in your timeline,” just turn that off.

And now we’re going to do one last search, and this one’s going to be a bit deeper in the list, so instead of just searching and clicking one of the top five options, I’m going to click “show all results,” and all the way at the bottom, there is “turn off suggested content in the settings app.” I’m just going to zoom in real quick, right here. Okay? So I’m going to click that guy, and then once again it highlights the option “show me suggested content in the settings app,” click “off”…. great. So these suggestions are all off right now.

Now the next one I’d like to show you is something that’s harder to visualize, it’s the lock screen, so I can’t really do it while I’m recording, but I’ll show you how to fix it nonetheless. So I go here in my browser – I actually have an image of what it looks like roughly.

So if you see things like this on your lock screen, it’s because you’re using what’s called the Windows Spotlight feature, which is like, a cool kind-of random image that appears on your lock screen, which is your log on screen, you know, before you’re even into Windows, and the cost, if you will, of having this dynamic image is that they sneak in things like this, little ads. So I’ll be showing you how to turn this stuff of, in case it irritates you… I know it irritates me! So let me show you how to do that.

So the way you do this is you have to actually go to Settings again, because of course this is where we do things like this. And we have to locate the lock screen section… which is actually in the Personalization section right here – click this, and they’re going to click “Lock screen,” and you’ll notice I’m set to “Windows spotlight.” So that’s bad to begin with, well [slight laugh], it’s bad if you care about sponsored content. If you like your sponsored content being fed to you in addition to the nice images, then feel free to keep this.

Personally I prefer having a clean start page, so what I do is I actually select one of the other two options, slideshow or picture. Usually I just choose Picture and then I choose any random picture from this list, or I browse for another one.

And here’s the key, here’s where they sneak in the sponsored content… “Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen.” This is the guy. So if you turn that off, you’ve got a clean start screen. Now, of course, you’re missing out on some fun facts and tips, but take my word for it, there’s quite a bit of sponsored content there, and if you have no tolerance for that just turn this guy off, it’s going to improve your life a little bit.

There you go. Now you can enjoy seeing a few less advertisements in your day.”

Transcript

“Hi everyone. Let’s say you’re working in Excel Online, and you find that you’re not able to see enough of the document at a time.

Alright so, by saying, by Excel Online I mean in the browser, right? So this is an Excel document open in a browser. It looks a bit ridiculous of course because there’s a giant smiley face, but the idea behind this example is that let’s say I need to see many rows of data at a time, and I’m just not able to see them all in the browser… what can I do to improve the situation? In this case we’re just going to use the smiley as an example. What do I do to see the full smiley face? Well there’s a few things you can do, there’s really basic stuff like for example maximizing the window, you know, in Windows, up here, right? That could just maximize it, but often that gives more width than it does height, so it’s not that useful, so for the sake of this video I’m just going to go back to this, to keeping this size.

But, alright, so what else can we do, right? Well, one thing we can do is there’s the ribbon up top here. The ribbon is the area in Excel with all the controls. Well, if you look all the way on the right, there’s a little arrow right here, right? A little arrow, on the right. If you click that, or actually hover over it, it says “collapse the ribbon”. And if you click it, the ribbon actually hides itself, which is great, I mean that removes a lot of space that’s wasted, air quotes, it really depends on whether you need it. So with that space gone, I can scroll down and well, I can see more of the smiley, but not quite all of it.

The next step really that I recommend to solve the situation is to simply zoom out in the browser… that really is the easiest way. So in this case I’m using Google Chrome, I’m going to go to the top right where there’s a triple dot icon up here. Okay, and then I’m going to click that triple dot and then here there’s some zoom options, currently I’m zoomed in 100%, it says, which is no zoom at all, so what I’m going to do is reduce that until I see as much as I need and then I’ll scroll and then perfect, I’ve got the smiley face perfectly in frame.

Now you might ask me, you know, Matt, why didn’t you for example unfreeze the panes that are here? I mean the top five rows are kind of wasted, right, they’re always sticking around. So what I wanted was a scenario where the pane was kind of valuable, and in this case the author of the document, his intention was probably to leave the copyright information always visible because the smiley face itself is actually, you know, a public domain asset, and so that could have been the idea, and yes, I could have easily gone to “View” and then clicked “Freeze Panes,” and then clicked “Unfreeze panes,” I’ll just show you this quickly. You could unfreeze the panes. This would have released the top five rows, and then I could have easily scrolled away and saw more, but that would have changed the document. The other methods that I showed don’t change the document itself, they just change your browser’s configuration.

Anyway so that’s a bit of extra info, hope it’s useful.”

Description

This video is a fresh take on my “Reducing Email Attachment Sizes With Compression” video, posted April 20th, 2011. Since then, things have changed – it was time to revisit it.

As mentioned in the video, I had difficulty uploading the partial 7z files to Gmail as attachments. I’m not sure why – your mileage may vary. 7z would be preferable because it likely has more compression options, and even without instructions I like that searching for “7z” will inevitably lead you to conclude that it’s related to 7-zip whereas “zip” is more of a household term. I’m not sure that all applications that handle zips can handle the multi-volume approach done by 7-zip.

Transcription

“So let’s say you have to send a bunch of files to someone you know, and you really want it to be sent by e-mail. How can you do this? Well there’s actually two main methods I’ll show you – the first involves using compression, the second involves using a cloud service.

So to use compression, let’s open up Gmail here which I’ll be using to test. At the moment that I’m recording this video, Gmail has a limit for 25 megabytes for attachments on a single e-mail. So to get around this, let’s look at this folder we have over here. So as you can see I have a bunch of images here – if I select all them and then look in the bottom left corner, you’ll see that it’s 66 MB. Well, that is more than 25, so how do we get around it? Like I said before, we can use compression. So let’s make sure we have 7-zip installed first. You can download 7-zip from 7-zip.org, and then you just install whichever is relevant to your machine, so whether you have a 32-bit or 64-bit machine and operating system. Once that’s done, you should have a new context menu option, so when you right-click, when all the files are selected, if you right-click, you will see 7-zip as an option, and it will have a sub-menu which includes Add to archive and a bunch of other stuff. Okay? In my case, I care about Add to archive, so I’m going to redo that… Add to archive.

So on this screen there’s two things you need to be careful of. First is the archive format – by default, the archive format is probably going to be 7z, right now it’s set to ZIP because it knows I prefer that. With 7z Gmail gets a little concerned about it and doesn’t let you attach it. ZIPs, it doesn’t mind. So I’m going to set it to ZIP.

The next thing that’s really important here is the split to volumes, bytes section. This is the magic that I wanted to show you. Since we have 66 MB of files down here, if we were to select 10 MB here, notice that there’s a bunch of other options, you know, for the size of a CD and a DVD, but let’s say we select 10 MB here, and I click OK. So what it will do at that point is create multiple compressed files, each of which contains a maximum of 10 MB, but in this case, 10 is not so much what we want, right, because we’re dealing with a limit of 25… so to be safe, I’ll do… 24. And then what I will do is just press OK. Now the key of course is making sure that we followed the right format, so 24 M, 10 M, yep, that’s pretty consistent, we’re using their language. And I’m going to press OK.

Just wait a little bit… and there we go. Three files were created. Now here’s the magic. One of these files by themselves is not very useful. The three of them together? That’s great, and you’ll see why. Let’s create a new folder here, called test, and copy your three files into that folder. Now, when we right-click these files, select 7-zip, and select, in this case, extract here, because I don’t really care where it’s extracted, I just want to see the files. 7-zip magically rebuilds all these images that were compressed into it. And yet each file is actually under 25 MB, and because it’s under 25 MB, let me go back to my original folder… so if I grab this first file and drop it here, in my e-mail, you’ll notice that it is uploading, and it will successfully finish uploading. At that point I can send it to whoever I want, whatever I want, so I can send the first e-mail like this, create a new e-mail, attach 002 and repeat until all three files are gone, and just make sure that the person has 7-zip, and then I can tell them how they use 7-zip to extract them. So that’s the first method which involves using compression.

The second method is much more modern. Let me start by just getting rid of this… okay. So the next method involves going into our folder, let’s delete these files, and instead of using the compressed files, we’re going to select everything that we have here, which is more than 25, remember, it’s 66. And we’re going to drop it right here. So you’ll notice a new pop-up, “Large files must be shared with Google Drive,” this is the second option, it’s more of a modern option. So Google is offering automatically to take your files and stick them in Google Drive and create a link, so I’ll say okay, got it. And then you can see, that it’s just going to start working on uploading everything, and at the very end all I’m going to have is a nice neat link. Now, you might not want to do this, which is why I show two methods, but personally I find this is a very convenient way to do it. As you can see, all of the files have been attached, we can even try clicking one of them, and prove that the image is in fact visible.”

Transcript

“Hi everyone. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to convert old Office files into their newer formats. So by old files I mean the DOC extension, the XLS extension, or the PPT extension, how to convert those into their X equivalents. So DOCX, XLSX.

So what happened is, in Office 2007, Microsoft introduced these newer formats, the X formats, so it’s possible that when you encounter old Office files, that you sometimes have to convert them to the newer formats – there’s a number of reasons why you’d want to do this, but let’s say you need to do this.

Let’s start the Word document, let’s open it up. Once it opens up in Word, it’s actually really simple to convert – top left corner, you’ll notice that there’s a File menu, click on that, and then you can click “Save As,” again on the left, and then you can click “Browse,” in this case I want to click Browse because I want to choose where my file will be saved. And this is definitely the folder where I want to save it.

So here’s what you need to notice. Underneath the filename you’ll see it says “Save as type,” right? So save as type is currently set to Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) – we need to change that. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to click on the “Save as type” dropdown, and I’m going to select the first option “Word Document (*.docx)”, that’s what you need to select – Word Document, and it ends with DOCX. So I’m going to select that, and then I’m just going to press Save. It’s really that simple, it did the conversion.

You might also get a pop-up saying hey, you’re being converted to the new format, that’s fine, you can click OK to that. Just be mindful if there’s any other pop-ups, something that says like oh there’s been an error in the conversion, something went wrong, that you have be more careful of, but in general Word does a pretty good job unless you’re dealing with complex documents. So we’re going to save this, close it. And as you can tell now, I have two files, I have the DOC and I have the DOCX. Pretty simple.

Now, I can do the exact same thing with the PowerPoint file and with the Excel file. So just for the sake of the exercise, I’m going to open up the Excel file, and we’ll do the same thing. Here’s the file, I’m going to go to the top left, I’m going to click File, I’m going to then click “Save as,” I will click Browse, and here it says Excel 97-2003 Workbook – that’s nice, but that’s not what we want, so we’re going to change it to where it says “Excel workbook,” which ends in XLSX, the new format. And then we’re going to press Save. And that’s it – you can even see up top right now, the extension is XLSX.

And that, is how you convert Office files. The procedure will be the same for PowerPoint, other files from Office. And I would just say in general, be mindful of error messages that come up when you do the conversion, but if your document isn’t too complicated, you probably won’t have error messages. So that’s it, hope this helps.”

Most programs let you decide whether you’d like to them to open up automatically when you start Windows. Naturally, this is typically only an option when it’s logical to do so – for example, having Spotify immediately open with Windows makes sense. Having Notepad open with Windows… not so much. But what happens when a program doesn’t offer you that option, but you’d like still it to start up with Windows?

Solution

There’s a few ways to achieve this, but one of my preferred options is using the Task Scheduler in Windows 10. 

1. Press the Start button, and search for “Task scheduler” or “Schedule tasks.”
2. In the “Actions” menu on the right, click “Create Task.”
3. On the “General” tab, specify a value for the “Name” field. I suggest picking a clear name as you may have to find this task in a list later.
4. Switch to the “Triggers” tab, and click “New…”
5. In the “New Trigger” dialog, change the “Begin the task” field to “At startup.”
6. Switch to the “Actions” tab, and click “New…”
7.  In the “New Action” dialog, confirm that the “Action” field says “Start a program,” and then click “Browse” and select to the .exe you’d like to launch on boot. Then click “Open.”
8. In the “Create Task” dialog, press OK.

That’s it. To make sure you new scheduled task is working correctly, you can:

1. In the main “Task Scheduler” window, click “Task Scheduler Library” on the left.
2. Find your task in the list, and select it.
3. Click “Run” in the list on the right.

If your executable ran correctly, a final test would be actually rebooting the machine to see if it launches as expected – just to be safe.

See Also

Task Scheduler – Microsoft 

As much as I like working on videos, I must admit that the rendering process certainly takes a toll on a machine’s performance, particularly when you’d like to use your machine to do something else while it renders. In my case, my main computer at home is by far my most powerful and versatile machine, so when it’s locked up doing rendering for a multitude of hours, I’m faced with a terrifying prospect – actually going outside or reading a book. Determined to avoid this type of cruel fate when away from home, I started to think of ways that I could do the editing on a somewhat less powerful machine, but offload the actual rendering to my beast of a machine at home. This would allow me to just plow through my editing tasks without thinking about the rendering – and gradually, the rendering would occur with no toll on my editing machine.

So when I googled for a solution, I found a post by a Kevin Snyder that proposed a simple, but brilliant idea. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before – you see, Adobe Media Encoder has a “Watch folders” feature, allowing you to identify folders on your machine where if a file appears there, Media Encoder immediately starts rendering that file according to your pre-established directions. Kevin’s article proposed a very simple idea in my mind: what if the folder was in Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint/OneDrive, or any other cloud sharing tool?

Of course! Brilliant! I quickly configured a “[MediaEncoder]” folder in one of my cloud sharing utilities, and was excited to do the test. Machine A was designated as my editing machine, machine B as my rendering machine. As a first attempt, I copied both the Adobe Premiere Pro project file I wanted to render, and all the media it referenced into Machine A’s copy of the “[MediaEncoder]” folder. It synchronized just fine, but then I noticed that Adobe Media Encoder started to spit out multiple rendered files, rather than only the project I wanted it to render. It was rendering the media I included as references. It didn’t work as I expected, but it taught me a lesson. I would need to supply my actual Premiere Pro project file, and see if that worked by itself. But… what about the media referenced from within the project file? Would Media Encoder be smart enough to locate them, even if the cloud sharing folders are installed to different drives across machine A to machine B?

Well, guess what, folks. It seems like Adobe Premiere Pro project files actually use relative paths when referencing media files – because despite both machines being on different different top-level drives, it rendered the file just fine on machine B.

Solution

Once again, Kevin’s idea was brilliant. You simply set up the same cloud sharing solution on both your editing machine (A) and your rendering machine (B), and then you configure Adobe Media Encoder to watch a specific folder (within your cloud solution’s synchronization area) on machine B. Then, after you’re done doing your video editing on machine A, you can just copy that tiny project file into that specific folder on machine A, it’ll synchronize with machine B, Media Encoder will see it, and after a while, machine B will finish rendering, and the rendered files will be synchronized with the cloud, and next thing you know it, machine A receives the rendered project. Amazing!

Additional Tips

• On the rendering machine, you can use Windows 10’s task scheduler to make sure Adobe Media Encoder always opens on startup.
• The name of the sequence in the Premiere Pro project will determine the name of the rendered file.
• Apparently*, for Adobe Media Encoder to be able to render a project file, you can’t have any sequences placed in any bins. They have to be in the top-level root of the Adobe Premiere Pro project file.
  • *I lost my source. I’ll locate it soon and reference it here – I never tested it personally.
• This approach can result in burning a lot of bandwidth (the rendered file is uploading from machine A to the cloud, and then from the cloud to machine B). I only use this when both Internet connections I’m using have unlimited bandwidth, or I know the files aren’t going to have any meaningful impact on the monthly bandwidth limits.

Ideas for Improvement

I’ve got the following ideas in mind for improving this solution – I’ll be updating this page as I progress.

• Is there I way I can avoid manually copying the project to the watch folder? I’m not sure right now, but I’m hoping there’s something I can do in Premiere Pro to signal I want a copy of the project dumped to my watch folder. Will investigate.

See Also

Using Adobe Media Encoder as a Remote Render Farm for Adobe After Effects – School of Motion – Kevin Snyder

Transcript

“So I was asked recently to demonstrate the basics of working with images in WordPress, particularly when you’re dealing with images that are of a high resolution. So if you look at my desktop here, I have three images. I will just display them quickly – this one, this one, and this one. Now, what they have in common is they’re all the same size… if I hover over them right here, you’ll see that they are 3200 by 2400, that’s a fairly large size, and I can demonstrate that by opening one of them in Paint. So in Paint what you see is a portion of the sky, in this particular shot, and the reason is that the file is actually, the photo is actually quite large. So there’s a lot of detail here, and I have to scroll around to see it all. Now obviously this isn’t practical, and that’s the same reason that Windows will show you a smaller version of the file, like this, it will scale it to your screen size, so that it’s consumable, and like, easy for the user, rather than impractical, like Paint.

So, now that we’ve established the size of these images, we’re going to talk about uploading it to the WordPress platform, and how to use the tools in the WordPress platform to actually modify those images. Now, there’s also another option – you can modify the files before you upload them, but that’s not for this video. I’ll cover that in another video. For this video, we’re talking about using the tools that WordPress gives you. Let’s upload the first image right here.

Now that it’s finished uploading, I’ll just confirm with you that on the right-hand side, we see a resolution of 3200 by 2400… that’s a large resolution. If I wanted to incorporate that into my page or blog post, what I would do is I would want to insert it… but certainly not at the full size, because as we saw, that’s very impractical. So on the right-hand side here, we have Attachment Display Settings and we have size options. So clearly full size is impractical, forget about that.

Instead what I think we’re going to do just for demonstration’s sake is I’ll choose Medium. So I’m going to choose medium right here, that’s 300 by 225, and I will insert into the page. So what do you see? The image gets inserted.

Now, what WordPress is doing internally is interesting. I’ll go back to Add Media to demonstrate what I mean. Put simply, WordPress is keeping your image in its original form, so 3200 by 2400, it’s still visible in the Media Library, and what it is doing is internally it created another copy of the file, of the photo, that is smaller, and the reason it does this is so when people are actually viewing your blog post, it doesn’t have to force them to download the entire file, that would be very inefficient. So instead, it’s got a smaller version of the file that downloads really quickly, that gives you the exact size that you want. So that’s one way to use WordPress to make your images more practical when they’re injected into your post, or your content, anywhere.

Now, as a next step, let’s go back into Edit Page, and I’ll demonstrate how you can resize a photo using WordPress’ built-in tool. So what I’ll do is I’ll just drop the image here, which triggers an Add Media action, and once I have access to the image in the media library, I will direct your attention to the Edit Image option, on the right-hand side. So if I click Edit Image, you’ll see that on the left you have the image, you have some controls up top, which we’re not going to use right now. And you have some options on the right-hand side.

Now what we want is to resize this image to a more practical size. So on the right-hand side, you have the original dimensions noted, and then you can change it to something else. So let’s say I decided that 3200 was too much, and I wanted to make it less large, I could something like 1200 as the new width of the image, and then click Scale. What this will do is essentially resize the image while maintaining the proportions. Okay? That’s important, maintaining the proportions, because otherwise the image could warp and look completely wrong. So what we have here is a new dimension has been set, of 1200 by 900, right? So and then I can click Back right here, and what you’ll notice is you will have a new size listed in the media library of 1200 by 900. Now, you can still apply Attachment Display Settings in the bottom here and select different sizes, and it will still continue modifying, keeping the original and creating a separate sized version of the image to use in your post.

Another interesting thing I wanted to mention is if you click Edit Image again, you always have the option to restore the original image – just zoom in right here so you can see it, on the right-hand side, it says “Discard any changes and restore the original image. Previously edited copies of the image will not be deleted.” So if you click Restore Image and then you go back, you will notice that the size on the right-hand side is back to what it was before.

Now, for image number 3, I’m going to choose to crop it instead. I’m going to X this off, and I’m going to drag image number 3 into my post, which will trigger again an Add Media action. So now that it has uploaded successfully, I’m going to decide that I want to edit it once more and my intention this time is something very unique – I’m going to decide to crop everything but this globe in the center, that’s my focal point, I just care about this, nothing else matters, right? So that’s the task we’ll be working on.

WordPress makes this relatively easy. I just have to drag my mouse anywhere over the image on the right hand side to the exact positioning that I want, let’s say this, and then what I’ll do is I’ll click the icon up here that corresponds to the action that I want to do. In this case, this icon is the crop icon, so I will click it… and there you go, it cropped it. Now, notice that the scale is still normal here, still the regular scale, but when I click save… and then I look on the details on the right, the image is no longer as large as it was before. Instead, it’s 995 by 768 – that is, the cropped size. So now, if this size is actually reasonable enough, I could inject it outright as an original full size, right here, in the bottom-right side, or I can just continue and just change the size in the attachment display settings to something smaller, to make it more practical for my post. The interesting thing about this is that WordPress always keeps the original of the file, as we showed earlier, but it also allows you to keep the edited version around, the most recent one, and to also change the attachment display settings and have like, a copy of the image created on-the-fly that you’re going to use for a particular purpose, like a thumbnail, or a medium-sized version for example. Right? So this is a medium sized version of the image.”

I’ve discovered I have a new passion in life, and you know what it’s all about? Helping people remove as much of the ads and sponsored content from Windows 10 as possible, assuming, of course, that that’s something they want to do to begin with. And so today, a very quick but essential tip… how do you remove the “helpful” facts and/or links that appear on the login page? Here’s an example:

These icons visually pollute the lock screen image, and in many cases, Microsoft uses them to sway consumer behavior – something they’ve clearly grown fond of doing since people accepted free Windows 10 upgrades. Solution If Windows 10 isn’t doing what you want, beat it with a rolled up newspaper until it starts behaving again*. Or, in technical terms, do the following:

1. Click the “Start” button, and search for “Settings,” then press Enter.
2. Click “Personalization.”
3. Click “Lock Screen.”

Now, here’s where you’ll have to come face-to-face with a difficult decision. Microsoft has bundled its “amazing” sponsored content with the nice random photos you see on your lock screen – they call the combination “Windows Spotlight.” Personally, I love the changing photos… but I really dislike when they’re polluted with sponsored callouts. And so my personal choice is to sacrifice the changing image for the sake of gaining a little more relaxation and peace of mind on my logon screen. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click the “Background” dropdown, and change it from “Windows Spotlight” to either “Picture” or “Slideshow.”
2. Select the picture or picture(s) you’d like included, respectively.
3. Locate the “Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen,” and enthusiastically toggle it from “On” to “Off.”

That’s it! Now, take a deep breath, and enjoy your newfound freedom from yet another source of advertising. * Beating a computer with a rolled up newspaper won’t actually solve anything. Best left to the imagination.

Transcription

“Hi everyone. In this video, I’ll be showing you how to hide the Tools Pane from Adobe Reader DC. I’ll be showing it under Windows 10. So you know when you’re opening a PDF with Adobe Reader? On the right hand side, there’s this special section known as the Tools Pane. It’s an area that has several functions: Export PDF, Create PDF, and a bunch of other things.

Now, generally speaking, I find this section obstructive, more than anything. So it’s in the way. I would like, for example, the Adobe Reader window to utilize the full width of the window, not just a portion of it because of this sidebar. So in order to hide the sidebar, I click on the arrow here. Now that’s fine, but when you close the window and then re-open a PDF, any PDF, you’ll notice that it’s not gone, it was just temporarily hidden. And similarly, and if you go to the View menu up top and then click Show/Hide, and then un-check it from here, and then close the window, and then re-open it, you’re in the same situation, it just comes right back.

So how do you remove it permanently? Here’s how. Up top where you have File, Edit, and View, I want you to click Edit, click Preferences at the very bottom of that menu, and then here, make sure that you’re in the Documents section on the left. If you’re not, just click Documents. When you’ve clicked Documents, you’ll notice there’s a section called Open Settings visible. And in the Open Settings section, there’s an option called Remember current state of Tools Pane. That’s the one you want to check – so go ahead and check that option, and then very simply, click OK.

Now what that does is it tells Adobe that when you’ve made a selection about whether the Tools Pane should be visible or not, that it should remember that, so it should remember the state of the pane. So right now, if I were to close Adobe Reader, there’s no change, in the sense that when I re-open it, the pane is still there, it’s remembering the state. Now if I close it, the state is now closed – so if I close Adobe Reader, open it again, it’s gone. And that’s how you get rid of the Tools Pane.”

So there I was, browsing the web with Chrome as I always did, when I noticed a new pop-up in Windows 10. Take a look at this:

Now, as much as I like Windows for its simplicity, I have to express my total and utter disgust at this type of tactic. This is basically the corporate equivalent of a kindergardener pointing to another child and boasting how much better they are than them, in an attempt to increase their own popularity amongst the rest. And you just know that they’re using the fact that their dad is the principal to more easily get away with it.

See, that’s the thing… if Microsoft actually had any ounce of fairness in their use of this tactic, I might be more tolerant. For example, if they routinely referenced impartial external studies that they didn’t finance in any way, and then used the findings to suggest superior apps, then great. That sounds a good feature for Windows, a good way to help raise security and performance across the entire Windows userbase.

But you just know that they’re just doing whatever they can to get you to use their products – it’s not about the greater good, it’s about their greater good. There’s no way they’ll put a pop-up above a non-Microsoft app and say “X runs 35% faster than Edge.” And, let’s face it – they kind of need that extra boost – most of the time, Microsoft products forever play catch-up to far more innovative companies.

This whole situation sounds familiar, though, doesn’t it? Haven’t we seen unfair tactics before? Oh right, the 1998 antitrust case, United States v. Microsoft Corporation.

On May 18, 1998, the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against Microsoft. The charges were brought to determine whether Microsoft’s bundling of other programs into its operating system constituted monopolistic actions. The suit was brought following the browser wars that led to the collapse of Microsoft’s top competitor, Netscape, which occurred when Microsoft began giving away its browser software for free.

Ultimately, Microsoft lost this case, and ended up having to settle.

[T]he Court concludes that Microsoft maintained its monopoly power by anticompetitive means and attempted to monopolize the Web browser market, both in violation of § 2. Microsoft also violated § 1 of the Sherman Act by unlawfully tying its Web browser to its operating system.

Naturally, this is not exactly what Microsoft is doing right now. But, if you ask me, it’s getting pretty damn close to it. After all, it’s leveraging its own operating system to try and pull people away from third party apps – something third parties can’t do as easily, if at all. So anyway, in the spirit in denying this type of unfair tactic, here’s how you can stop it from appearing on your machine:

1. Click Start.
2. Click “Settings,” the small gear icon.
3. Click “System,” the top left option.
4. On the left, select “Notifications & actions.”
5. Scroll down until you find the “Get tips, tricks, and suggestions as you use Windows,” and turn it Off.