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  • Showing only topics in ~tech with the tag "microsoft". Back to normal view / Search all groups
    1. Microsoft Teams is/was down. What's your fallback?

      Teams is down or was down for pretty much everyone I know (work context). Thinking in terms of business continuity, what is your fallback plan. Is your fallback a managed, enterprise class...

      Teams is down or was down for pretty much everyone I know (work context).

      Thinking in terms of business continuity, what is your fallback plan. Is your fallback a managed, enterprise class service?

      Might get everyone internally to install Signal since it's end-to-end encrypted, has a desktop client and can handle file transfers. That's just off the cuff.

      Thoughts?

      21 votes
    2. Teams bluetooth audio compatibility sucks. What options do I have?

      Hey! So I used to be fairly warm to MS Teams but I utterly despise its call handling. I have three Bluetooth audio devices that I used regularly - a set of Edifier earbuds, my expensive Sony...

      Hey! So I used to be fairly warm to MS Teams but I utterly despise its call handling. I have three Bluetooth audio devices that I used regularly - a set of Edifier earbuds, my expensive Sony WH-1000XM5 pair, my CX-5 audio, and my Bluebus that integrates into my old BMW's hands free system. All of these work perfectly fine when I call someone via regular-ass phone calls. When I use Teams, all hell breaks loose. The edifiers work perfectly fine, so I know Teams is QUITE capable of handling these all ok. My CX-5 system won't do microphone audio when Android Auto is connected, but works fine on Mazda's infotainment call handling. In my BMW it won't handle the microphone but plays audio. On my Sony pair of headphones, it works great... And then about every ten minutes it disconnects, consistently, so I can't use them.

      In theme with the other ongoing thread, nothing gets my gears moving like tech not doing what I'm asking it to. Teams barely has any options on Android for audio, so there isn't much of anything to tweak. Does anyone have any ideas of where to start? Is there something similar to Windows solutions like Virtual Audio Cable which could set up a virtual BT device to pipe audio through and simulate it being something else for Teams? Thanks all!

      19 votes
    3. Help with converting PDF to Excel and back to PDF?

      I may be asking a dumb question or going about this wrong but I'm not sure what to do here. So right now, I receive an estimation from one company in a PDF. It has a bunch of fields such as...

      I may be asking a dumb question or going about this wrong but I'm not sure what to do here.

      So right now, I receive an estimation from one company in a PDF. It has a bunch of fields such as customer name, product, address, etc. Then I type that data and put it into Excel, where I add additional data that I have. From there I have a second PDF which has form fields that I fill with the data of the Excel spreadsheet.

      My problem is with the first PDF that I get from this other company, unless I am doing something wrong I am unable to get that first PDF to show the data as fields. If I convert the first PDF into an Excel then the table data is very messy.

      The amount of typing or copy and paste that it's not hard but it is time consuming. What is the best way for me to go about doing this? I've been Googling things but I'm not sure the right words of action I'm looking for.

      I hope this all makes sense, but if not please ask questions and I'll do my best to try and clarify further.

      12 votes
    4. My experience with Windows 10

      I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4...

      I'm a longtime Linux user, and I haven't used Windows in a while aside from just launching games from Steam on my living room computer, but my new work laptop is Microsoft's flagship Surface Pro 4 so I figured it'd be the best experience you can have on a Windows machine.

      I got the laptop in yesterday, and here's the summary of my experience:

      • I am required by IT to use Chrome. To install Chrome, I had to click through no fewer than three "Are you sure you don't want to use Microsoft's more secure, faster browser?" banners to do so.

      • When I plug in my external monitor, by default, the two monitors were mirrored; when I went into display settings, it didn't show the external monitor until I closed and reopened the settings menu.

      • I have an Apple Magic Touchpad 2, and I had some issues getting it set up on Ubuntu 20.04 when I initially got it. These problems are now solved on the latest version of Ubuntu, but I was expecting a nice contrast in a good plug-and-play experience on Windows. Instead, I had to install sketchy drivers from some random GitHub page to get it to work properly.

      • I've had some minor annoyances with my audio interface (a Zoom R-22) not being set as the default when I want it to be on Ubuntu, and I was really looking forward to getting a smooth video calling experience with my nice mic and interface on Windows. Lo and behold, the R-22 audio input - the whole reason I have it - doesn't work at all, at least in the Zoom video calling app.

      • On Ubuntu, I use QV4L2 to configure the framing, zoom, exposure, etc of my camera. It's a bit clunky, and I was looking forward to having a smooth experience with this on the premier business OS. Unfortunately, the camera on this laptop has extremely aggressive aperture priority mode enabled, and there is no first-party app to configure it! The documentation tells me to go to Settings -> Devices -> Camera but there is no such menu item. So, I just look either washed-out or ultra-dark in every video call.

      • After running Windows Update and rebooting, I was greeted with a full-screen and quite annoying to exit tutorial for Microsoft Teams - an app I did not install, because my company uses Slack.

      This in addition to some setup papercuts, but I think those were probably due to my corporate IT's process rather than Windows itself.

      Is this common? Do people who use Windows just... put up with this kind of thing? Or am I having an exceptionally bad experience for some reason?

      15 votes