In this post:

• File Preview Pane in File Explorer
• Remote Website Share Drive in File Explorer
• Shift + Right Click on File for more options
• Controlling Macros on Start when opening programmes Maximized
• Remove Image background with Online free PhotoScissors or in MS Office programmes

 File Preview Pane in File Explorer

This is like QuickLook with the Spacebar, but it is already in Win 10 File Explorer and very handy to peek at the files. An easy setting. See about 3 minutes in on the video below.In File Explorer, go onto View Pane & Click Preview pane and it shows.

Another nice little feature I learned was that if you right click on an image you have the option to rotate it (from eg landscape to portrait) without opening a image viewer, really handy. I did that with the feature image, as uploading Portrait images to Remove.bg & PhotoScissors (see item below)  rotate them to landscape. In PhotoScissors the download is in Landscape so you need to rotate it back again.

Remote Website Share Drive in File Explorer

About 4 minutes in, in the video above, it shows how to to make a connection to a remote Network. In my case this linked to my VPS (Virtual Private Server) which is really handy. I used the FTP location for the VPS . That is really handy to have. Here is an article about setting it up.

I can now transfer files between my PC and my VPS without using FileZilla (although it is handy for working in the background, and if the task is interrupted it just carries on from where it left off) .

Shift + Right Click on File for more options

In File Explorer with Shift + Right Click you get also Copy as path which gives the path to the file and the file name all as one. Brilliant.Ccheck this article.

The video below shows more choices for ‘SEND TO’  with Shift + Right Click but that did not come up when I did it, I only had the same choice as before.

Controlling Macros on Start when opening programmes Maximized

One issue with macro’s, especially if you are using Mouse Clicks to open programmes and select menu items from the ribbon, is that you need to know how your programme is opened, what size window is it opened in? It can be opened Minimized, Normal or Maximized. So to ensure that the macro works you need to know this setting. Here is an article on how you can set a specific programme to open Mazimized.

This issue of being able to determine how to run an application window size got me thinking, as it could have different settings on different computers. So if you want a transportable macro app you need to be able to manage this. https://www.tenforums.com/software-apps/73866-how-automaticaly-start-program-minimized.htmlThis article discusses a method using a .bat file to do this. This question led me onto looking at PowerShell. I discuss it in the next article.

So the above is handy if you want to set it on your application but does not solve my issue with the macro.

Remove Image background with Online free PhotoScissors or in MS Office programmes

In my earlier post Firefox productivity and other free tools I talked about remove.bg tool, and this morning I had a post in my feed from FreeTech4Teachers Remove Image Backgrounds With PhotoScissors. At the end of the article there was a mention of MS Office PowerPoint being able to do this so I did a lookup on that too.

So first of all, PhotoScissors comes as either a FREE On-line tool, you can download a trial version to your desktop or buy a copy of the programme.  It has a couple of features that I think are nicer than remove.bg.

1.   It does foreground for whatever you choose, it does not need to be a person, it could be a flower, an animal or a building,
2.   When uploading image you do not need to go through the Capcha process (something I get irritated about as it messes up my flow and I get it wrong at times and need to redo it).

MS Office article Remove the background of a picture shows how In Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook, you can remove a background from a picture to accent or highlight the subject of the picture or to remove distracting detail.

I tried it in PowerPoint and had to go looking for the button, it isn’t immediately office, so follow the process in the article. It did a good job of it for the test I did.

As you are loading the images into your Documents on your PC in Office there is not a max file size. For both remove.bg & PhotoScissors I had to open the image in photo programme and reduce the file size before I could upload them. Just an extra step. Depending on your frequency of use and if you are uploading to a photoeditor with layers as I did in the previous article, file size may be an issue for your workflow.

End comment

This article is about noting a few useful File Explorer productivity tools so that they can be referenced later. Also I’m pleased with the PhotoScissors article as well as the MS Office background removal. The original remove.bg tool only worked on people and these tools are more flexible.