How to have relevant and current skills in ’cloudy’ times?

This year Microsoft Certification celebrates 20th birthday! It is an important birthday as this year is THE year of important changes. But, a bit more about that later.

What was going on twenty years ago, what happened around year 1992?

Microsoft Windows 3.0 was introduced in 1990; Windows 3.1 two years later, Microsoft Windows NT shipped in July 1993, Windows 95 and Microsoft Office 95 saw the daylight in 1995.

Do you remember what the typical internet connection speed was back then? It is funny and interesting to remember speeds in Kbps and acronyms such as BBS and Gopher. I remember turning off loading pictures in Netscape Navigator (!) to speed up page loading because the text was what we were looking for and pictures were (un)necessary evil. I started surfing the Internet with speeds of 9600 Kbps and couple of years later I bought a US Robotics 56K modem for a price that was between today’s prices of a 128MB and 256MB SSD drive.

Today, people talk about clouds and cloud computing almost everywhere as if the terminology has been always with us. Speed is measured in tens of Megabits per second (Mbps), video is streaming in HD resolution on our 42’ LCD screens, cell (mobile) phones are useless without an internet connection.

Take a look at this infographic to see the history of Internet usage and speeds:

Infographic: From Horseback To Bullet Train: The History Of Internet Usage And Speeds by WebHostingBuzz

Typical computing environment today is light years away from what it was 20 years ago. Not only software and hardware has evolved but also has administration, engineering, deployment and maintenance. Our workplaces evolved too and the way we work has changed significantly. We can work everywhere: on a train, over the ocean, on mobile phones, very often keeping files stored centrally, ‘’in the cloud’’. This way files are synchronized and up-to-date all the time, accessible from virtually everywhere.

If you work in or around IT industry you probably have already witnessed the shift in the skills IT professionals need to have. As the technology has evolved so our skills need to evolve to be able to configure, manage, deploy, operate or design these cloud enabled environments.

Microsoft Learning and Microsoft certifications have always followed the technology and stayed current and aligned with the products: from Windows NT to the latest and greatest Windows Server 2008 R2; from Windows 95 to Windows 7. Microsoft certifications today validate skills on almost every Microsoft product or technology.

If you have taken Microsoft certification exams in the past, you certainly noticed how exams have changed. Microsoft Learning kept their exam development process relevant and changed the way exams are developed. The exam experience is now very different from what it was before. This is a good change for the mutual benefit.

Following table shows some big improvements in exam development process:

Today	Back Then
External subject matter experts write items	Product groups wrote items or hired contractors to write items
More interactive item types are being added to exams; in fact, most new exams will contain a minimum of 3 different item types	We used mostly multiple choice items
You will not see true/false items on our exams (good T/F items are very difficult to write well and easy to guess)	A few true/false questions were sprinkled through our first exams
We’re pilot testing a short answer “fill in the blank” code snippet item type on our code based exams	Our very first exams had a few short answer “fill in the blank” types of questions but these were removed because of scoring was extremely complex
External subject matter experts review items	Items were reviewed by internal Microsoft employees
Beta exams are free	Beta exams cost $50
External subject matter experts set the cut score	The cut score was set by internal Microsoft employees

(Table taken from Born To Learn post 20 Years of Certification: Exams Grow Up)

New technologies are “cloud enabled” and “cloud capable“; new technologies inevitably include cloud-related skills. IT Professionals and Developers need to validate new skills and Microsoft Private Cloud Certification is good example.

Beta exams were available in April and they should be published by July. The private cloud certification builds upon the skills on Windows Server 2008 as the foundation and extends onto validating skills with deployment, operation and monitoring with System Center 2012 range of products.

It is not too late if you have not started yet. But do not delay, start planning and learning today by achieving MCITP Server Administrator certification!

Good luck!

Schedule your exam now!

One of the best exam preparation tips is to schedule your exam weeks in advance! Schedule an exam even before you start to study!

Wait! What are you talking about?!? Are you out of your mind?!

No, I’m serious: schedule your exams in advance and make a note in calendar (on a wall, phone or in Outlook). That way you:

1. Set your mind toward achieving your goal

2. You actually have something "tangible", that is "an end" of your studies that is no longer only "a wish" in your mind but actual date

3. You won’t schedule it "when you are ready". You HAVE TO be ready by the date you have set

4. You will loose your money if you don’t show up. If you reschedule or cancel bookings that are 15 or more days from the date of original booking you won’t be charged. But you are serious about studying and taking exams and this shouldn’t be your option

5. PLEASE, don’t say that you are going to TRY to take and pass the exam. This is nonsense. You have to study to understand and to learn.

And you ARE going to take the exam TO PASS, not to TRY TO PASS.
Of course, if you have a VALID reason to reschedule you will do it, but avoiding to take an exam won’t earn you passing score.

Good luck!

First (or second) aid

I have another blog that I have set up for IT Pro topics (http://www.sasakranjac.com) but I am experiencing some hosting issues with it. Until I solve the problem I will post here, instead on the blog I have mentioned before.

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

I wish you all Merry Christmas and happy, healthy, successful New Year 2012!

Create Signatures in Outlook Exactly As You Want!

Today, it would not be a guess to say that any kind of email client have some feature that allow users to create and manage signatures. Not just ones that are installed on your computers but also web-based clients.

If you are an Outlook user you can enjoy Outlook’s great Signatures and Stationery feature that allows you to create and manage personalized signatures and add them to your email messages.

Personal Stationery tab define how new and reply email messages look: fonts and themes are defined there.

Signatures and Stationery dialog box can be accessed in two ways: going to Outlook Backstage and choosing Options or from an email message.

1. from Options: click File, click Options, click Mail, on the right under Create or modify signatures for messages click Signatures… button.
2. From an email message: on Home tab click New E-mail (or CTRL+N)

Not only this, but you can have a number of signatures that are automatically inserted whether you use different e-mail account, write new message or reply/forward a message to someone. That action is defined on the right side, under Choose default signature.

Editing signatures is done on the left part. At the top left is the list of signatures you have created with buttons to Delete, make new, save after editing or rename a signature.

The bottom half of the screen is where editing of the signature takes place.

We have some basic controls for editing text, the same that you will find in Word or in other Office applications. Font type, size , style, color and horizontal alignment.

Three remaining buttons are used to insert Business Card, picture and a hyperlink.

That’s it! That’s all! What? Show me some other commands and buttons! I want to have a professional signature with my company logo aligned on the left, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn icons on the right and my name in the middle! (I don’t know if anyone could call this professional signature, but you got the point).

How to have complete control of the text in signature(s) if we don’t have tools to that? Well, easier than you think. We have the tools, but not in Outlook. We have to go to Word.

Before you open Word, create new, blank signature and name it. I chose an innovative name: Blank.

Open Microsoft Word 2010 and start with a blank document. I will create a sample signature just to show you that you can insert in signatures pretty everything that comes to your mind.

I have made this ‘professional’ signature in Word. Here it is:

 

Press CTRL+A, that is: select all.

Once my signature is in clipboard (guess what is going to happen), go to Outlook, to Signatures and Stationery dialog box that you’ve left open, left click to editing area to put text cursor in it,

And press CTRL-V or paste. Alternatively, right click in editing area, menu pops out, and click Paste.

What?!? Nothing happened!?!

Not really. Notice how text cursor changed its position. It means that something is in there. (I’m scared, previous sentence is like from some horror movie commercial).

It did happen, signature is here but it is not visible right now, not until you insert it.

Press OK button to close Signatures and Stationery. Now you are ready to insert a signature you’ve created in Word.

1. on Home tab click New E-mail (or CTRL+N)
2. Click Signature icon to display menu
3. Click Blank

And that’s it, here it is!

Your custom signature, just the way you wanted it!

Although I have not tried every single combination, I bet that you can create (almost) any signature you want.

The key here is that you can use Word’s tools and features to create any kind of text and objects, align them the way you want, apply the effects you want and insert it later in Outlook to use it as an e-mail signature.

Just to try, here is another ‘signature’ example in Outlook:

 

You can even edit chart inside email message. Look how Outlook displays contextual menus (Chart Tools: Design, Layout and Format). Cool, isn’t it?

Good luck in creating signatures, this time the way you exactly want!

(Automatic) Numbering Using Fields in Word 2010

The other day a colleague of mine had a question about numbering. She was writing a rather long document and wanted to do (or have) few things in her document:

1. To number paragraphs automatically,

2. To start numbering from a given paragraph number.

How? It is easy. Let see how to do that.

First, let me explain a little more about Fields and associated options. There are not many of them and knowing fields better will help you creating better documents and save your time.

Here is the document and I want each article to have its own number, starting from number four (4). I also want Word to number paragraphs automatically when I copy/paste the text “Article 4” by increasing number 4 by 1 (one).

Sure, I can copy/paste the text “Article 4” and change the value manually. But what would happen if I had a hundred (200) articles and wanted to delete Article 9? I would have to correct all remaining values to correct sequence number: I would have to make 91 corrections. And I would have to do that each and every time I add or delete an article.

Imagine what would you have to do if Word was lacking its page numbering feature? I don’t want even to think about it. You would have to manually correct page numbers every time you add or delete a page. That’s exactly the same. (Believe it or not, I remember typing on a typewriter and making a mistake, adding and throwing pages away, making corrections and typing into the night…)

I can’t use Numbering feature here because the text would look like this:

Fortunately there are Fields to ease our tasks, to automate and enhance documents. There are lot of them, and and we are going to meet some. This time the ones that deal with numbering.

To have auto numbering feature automatically update a number we need to insert Field first.

1. Type a text, for example, Article, and press Space to separate the word from the field.

2. Go to Insert tab, click Quick Parts and choose Field…

This opens the Field dialog box:

This dialog box has two parts:

1. Narrower part on the left, where you choose a field from a list of available fields. On the top there is Categories pull-down menu that can help you narrow down the field list. Description is on the bottom.

2. Wider part on the right, where you can change Field Properties of the selected field.

Word 2010 has 9 field categories and 77 fields.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click on Numbering category to filter and display fields that are related to numbering.

Take a look at the Field Names on the left. Have you noticed something familiar? No? Take look again.

AutoNum is selected and first in the list that look familiar. Click on Page field. Familiar too? Yes! These features you were using are Fields actually!

Numbering and Page Numbers are fields and we were using them without even noticing!

Like two mentioned before, you’ve heard of other well known fields: table of contents, total number of pages, outlined numbered lists, date and time, index and tables, mail merge and others. In fact, all Fields have a shared feature (guess what ): they are updated automatically!

Two examples are shown below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to our Field dialog box.

On the left click ListNum. This is the field we were looking for and it has some “switches” and “levers” we can pull to make some adjustments to fit our needs.

Now you have Field Properties and Field Options. Field Codes button on bottom left is used to reveal Field Codes of the selected field. Fields are, essentially, data placeholders and Field Codes define what data fields are made of and what kind of data is filled and updated in it.

When pressed, Field Codes button changes to Hide Codes button and reveals Advanced Field Properties that displays (1) Field Codes for the field, (2) field syntax, and (3) Options… button.

Options button reveals Options dialog box specific for the chosen field where you can adjust its various options.

Dialog box on the left displays Field Option specific to ListNum field.

Different fields have different field options.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four different Field Properties control type of numbering displayed in the document:

In combination with Level in the list Field Options, the results are as follows:

List Name	(none)	LegalDefault	NumberDefault	OutlineDefault
Level in the list=OFF	1)	1.	1)	I.
Level in the list=1	1)	1.	1)	I.
Level in the list=2	a)	1.1.	a)	A.
Level in the list=3	i)	1.1.1.	i)	1.
Level in the list=4	(1)	1.1.1.1.	(1)	a)
Level in the list=5	(a)	1.1.1.1.1.	(a)	(1)
Level in the list=6	(i)	1.1.1.1.1.1.	(i)	(a)
Level in the list=7	1.	1.1.1.1.1.1.1.	1.	(i)
Level in the list=8	a.	1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.	a.	(a)
Level in the list=9	i.	1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.	i.	(i)

 

If selected, fields are highlighted in gray color.

 

 

 

Left-click on the field you’ve just entered displays menu with two options related to field: Edit Field… and Toggle Field Codes.

Toggle Field Codes has its keyboard shortcut for faster switching between field codes and text: SHIFT+F9. When field code is shown in the document you can type directly in the field and change its values, without opening Field dialog box. That way, changing field values and adjusting it to fit your needs, is faster.

IMPORTANT: Field codes have their syntaxes. If the syntax is not correct, the field won’t update and, eventually, work. Make sure you don’t leave some extra spaces or letters after editing, and add space between brackets and text if its needed. Just make sure that the syntax is correct.

Finally, here is the option that will solve our problem: Start-at value. If you check this option and enter a number, Word starts counting from that number. It works only with positive numbers and negative numbers don’t have any effect.

If you have not typed any text yet, take a look at my post about generating dummy text.

1. Generate some text to practice if you want to, but you don’t need any. It works fine on blank page, too.

2. Type a text before a paragraph, for example, Article, and press Space to separate the word from the field.

3. Go to Insert tab, click Quick Parts and click Field…

4. On the left, in Categories pull-down menu, click Numbering.

5. Under Field Names, click ListNum.

6. In the middle, under ListName, click LegalDefault.

7. On the right, under Field Options, select Start-at value: checkbox and type value 4 in the space provided.

8. Click OK.

There it is! You have created a field with an automatic numbering feature turned on. Now, if you click onto number 4 it will be highlighted grey. Press SHIFT+F9 and Word will reveal field codes for the selected field. It looks like this: Article { LISTNUM  LegalDefault \s 4 }

Press SHIFT+F9 again and it will switch back to Article 4. text.

Wait! Just few steps more and we’re done:

1. Select Article 4. text and copy it to clipboard (CTRL+C, for example).

2. Paste it in the next line or before some other paragraph, if you practice on text (CTRL+V).

3. Click on number 4 in “Article 4.” text

4. Right-click on Field and click Edit Field…

5. Un-check Start-at value checkbox.

6. Click OK.

What happened? It displays “Article 5.” now!

Now you can select “Article 5.” text and paste it around as many times as you want. Each time you paste it, it will increase its number by 1. If you delete any field(s) or add field(s), Word will update its number. You don’t have to update manually article numbers anymore because Word and fields are doing it for you.

If you want to break the sequence and start at different number just repeat what you have done before (steps 2. to 8.) and Word will start numbering from the number you typed in.

Take a look at other fields, you might find something useful to use at your workplace.

Good luck!

Take the OneNote 2010 MOS Beta Exam!

Microsoft OneNote 2010 Beta exam is here and waiting for you to take the challenge at selected Certiport test centers!

For a long time Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access exams have been available. Then the SharePoint MOS exam became available in June 2011. Now, for the first time, OneNote will have its place (and exam ) in Microsoft Office Specialist series of exams and certifications.

The Beta exam will be alive September 12 through October 4, 2011, meaning you will have three weeks to arrange your schedule to take this one. Here is the list of participating test centers. If you have questions, ask Stacey Tilley, Beta coordinator at Certiport: betacoordinator@certiport.com.

Review what skills you will be tested on at 77-853: OneNote 2010 Skills Measured tab and hurry, reserve your seat early!

Good luck on your exam!