Chapter 2: Using Metro Mail, People, and Calendar Apps
In This Chapter
How the new Win8.1 communication apps hang together
Choosing a Mail, Contacts, and Calendar app
Navigating Win8.1’s tiled Mail
Placing all your contacts in Win8.1 People
Avoiding duplicates and other Win8.1 Calendar problems
The Windows “productivity” apps — Metro Mail, Calendar, and People — form the core of Microsoft’s Windows 8.1, tiled Metro app assault. The original Windows 8 versions of all of those apps were seriously, uh, challenged. That’s putting it politely. In Windows 8.1, they’re usable — although nobody who’s used them would confuse them with fully functional productivity apps.
On the one hand, they’re free — or, I should say, they come at no additional cost when you buy a Windows computer. So you can’t really expect too much out of them. On the other hand, they’re competing against other free communication apps — I won’t mention those on the iPad by name — so there’s a lot of pressure to deliver solid apps that people will want to use.
The productivity apps in Win8.1 don’t quite deliver the breadth and depth of features and ease of use that will draw many people to using them — at least as this book goes to press. However, by necessity, this chapter is a snapshot in time. You can bet that some of the features in Mail will have improved by the time you read this, simply because Metro Mail at this point is still struggling for some respect.
Improvements to the apps will arrive via the app update feature built in to Windows 8.1. Because of the way Windows is built, Microsoft can update the Metro productivity apps — indeed, any of the Win8.1 apps — with minimal fuss: Microsoft simply posts the update to the Windows Store. You go to the Store, perhaps drawn by the number on the Store tile that tells you updates are available. A few minutes later, you have a new version of the Metro Mail, People, and Calendar apps.
In this chapter, I talk about the three Windows 8.1 productivity apps that are joined at the hip and elbow: Metro Mail for handling your e-mail; Metro People for consolidating your contacts; and Metro Calendar for bringing together any calendars you may have on various services.
Although most people think of the three as being separate apps — after all, they have three different tiles on the Metro Start screen — for all intents and purposes, they’re one uber-app. You can’t update one without the other; if you connect one app to a particular service, they all get linked.
Choosing a Mail/Contacts/Calendar App
Life is full of difficult choices, and I swear Microsoft sits behind about half of them. For me, anyway.
Before you jump in to the productivity wallow, think about how you want to handle your mail, contacts, and calendar.
Comparing e-mail programs
Metro Mail has its benefits, but it may not best suit your needs.
Complicating the situation: Metro Mail isn't an either/or choice. For example, you can set up Hotmail/Outlook.com or Gmail accounts, and then use either Metro Mail to work with the accounts or the Internet-based interfaces at www.hotmail.com and www.gmail.com. In fact, you can jump back and forth between working online at the sites and working on your Windows computer.
Metro Mail functions as a gathering point: It pulls in mail from Hotmail/Outlook.com, for example, and sends out mail through Hotmail/Outlook.com. It pulls in and sends out mail through Gmail. But when it’s working right, Metro Mail doesn’t destroy the mail: All your messages are still sitting there waiting for you in Hotmail/Outlook.com or Gmail. Although there are some subtleties, in most cases, you can use Mail in the morning, switch over to Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.com when you get to the office, and go back to the tiled Metro Mail app when you get home — and never miss a thing.
As currently configured, Metro Mail can pull in mail from Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Exchange Server (a typical situation at a large office or if you use one of the Office 365 business editions), Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail, as well as IMAP (a method supported by some Internet service providers).
That’s the short story. Permit me to throw some complicating factors at you.
It’s becoming more and more clear that Microsoft has no intention of supporting the POP3 e-mail protocol. POP3 is the oldest and least capable of the e-mail interfaces, but it’s also the most widely used. Most major Internet service providers that support POP3 also support IMAP, but not all of them. So if your mail provider only speaks POP3, you’d be well advised to avoid Metro Mail. (Alternatively, if you absolutely must use Metro Mail, consider setting up a free Outlook.com account, set it up to retrieve your POP3 mail, and then set up Metro Mail to get the mail from the Outlook.com account. Meh.)
You can add your Hotmail/Outlook.com account to Gmail,or add your Gmail account to Hotmail/Outlook.com. In fact, you can add just about any e-mail account to either Hotmail/Outlook.com or Gmail. If you’re thinking about moving to Metro Mail just because it can pull in mail from multiple accounts, realize that Gmail (see Book X, Chapter 3) and Hotmail/Outlook.com (see Book X, Chapter 4) can do the same thing.
The main benefit to using Metro Mail rather than Hotmail/Outlook.com or Gmail is that the tiled Metro Mail app stores your most recent messages on your computer. (Gmail running on the Google Chrome browser can do the same thing.) If you can’t get to the Internet, you can’t download new messages or send responses, but at least you can look at your most recent messages.
Some people prefer the Metro Mail interface over Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.com. Personally, I prefer Gmail, but decide for yourself. De gustibus and all that. Moreover, the interfaces change all the time, so if you haven’t looked in the last year or so, it’d be worth the effort to fire up your web browser and have a look-see.
Hotmail/Outlook.com and Gmail are superior to Metro Mail in these respects:
Hotmail/Outlook.com and Gmail have all your mail, all the time — or at least the mail that you archive. If you look for something old, you may or may not find it with Metro Mail — by default, Metro Mail only holds your mail from the past two weeks, and it doesn’t automatically reach out to Hotmail/Outlook.com or Gmail to run searches.
Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook.com pack a lot more information on the screen. Although Mail has been tuned for touch, with big blocks set aside to make an all-thumbs approach feasible and lots of white space, Hotmail/Outlook.com and Gmail are still much more mouse-friendly.
But wait! I’ve only looked at Metro Mail, Hotmail/Outlook.com, and Gmail. Many, many more options exist in the mail game. To wit:
Microsoft Outlook: Bundled with Office since pterodactyls powered PCs, Outlook has an enormous number of options — many of them confusing, most of them never used — but it’s also the only app that can handle hundreds of thousands of messages. Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself. Outlook’s the Rolls Royce of the e-mail biz, with all the positive and negative connotations.
In fact, among the many, many different versions of Outlook, each has its own foibles. Many people settled on Outlook 2007 because that’s the last version without the Office Ribbon.
The Outlook Web App: It isn’t really Outlook, but Microsoft marketing wants you to believe that it is. It’s part of Exchange Server (or some versions of Office 365), so companies with big iron can let their employees access their mail without using Outlook.
Windows Live Mail: It’s still alive and kicking, although it’s going through a name change. For people who don’t want to jump into the tiled side of Windows 8.1 with both feet (and fingers) — particularly those who feel more comfortable working with a mouse and an information-dense screen — it’s a respectable, free alternative, and it works great with Windows 8.1. See Book VI, Chapter 5.
Free, open-source, inexpensive alternatives: These include Mozilla Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Eudora, and many more that have enthusiastic fan bases.
Your Internet service provider (ISP): It may well have its own e-mail package. My experience with ISP-provided free e-mail hasn't been very positive, but the service generally doesn't hold a candle to Gmail (my favorite), Outlook.com/Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or any of the dozens of competitive e-mail providers. If you use ISP-based e-mail, mail2web (www.mail2web.com) lets you get into just about any mailbox from just about anywhere — if you know the password.
The iPad Mail app has many of the problems that Metro Mail exhibits, but it has a host of advantages, including most notably the ability to easily merge inboxes so you don’t have to flip between accounts to read all your incoming messages. Truth be told, I use the iPad Mail app when I’m on the road and don’t expect anything important to arrive by e-mail. Most of the time, though, I’m still stuck on and in Outlook.
. . . and that’s just the Mail app!
Comparing calendar apps
Calendars can also be handled by a bewildering array of packages and sites. Among the hundreds of competing Calendar apps, each has a unique twist. The highlights:
Google Calendar is highly regarded for being powerful and easy to use. It's also reasonably well integrated into the other Google Apps, er, Google Drive, although you can use it — and share calendars with other people — without setting foot in any other Google app. Put all your appointments in Google Calendar, and you have instant access to your latest calendar from any computer, tablet, or phone that can get to the Internet. See Book X, Chapter 3 for details (http://calendar.google.com).
Hotmail/Outlook.com Calendar, on the other hand, lives inside Hotmail/Outlook.com. It’s reasonably powerful and integrated, and you can share the calendar with your contacts or other people.
Outlook also does calendars, ten ways from Tuesday, with so many options it’ll bring a tear to your eye. Or maybe that tear is from tearing out your hair.
If you want to schedule one conference room in an office with a hundred people, all of whom use Outlook, the Outlook Calendar is definitely the way to go. If you want to keep track of your flight departure times, Aunt Martha’s birthday, and the kids’ football games, any of the Calendar apps will work fine.
The biggest problem with the Windows 8.1 Metro Calendar? It doesn’t sync with Outlook. A friend of mine runs Google Calendar Sync on his Windows 8.1 PC to sync his Outlook calendar with his Google Calendar. From there, Metro Calendar syncs with Google Calendar.
Checking out contact apps
Finally, the Contact managers, er, People programs. Windows has had Contact managers for so long I can’t even remember when I saw the first one. The web is packed with Contact managers. If you have a Skype account, you have contacts. If you have a mobile phone, you have contacts. If you run any Messenger, you have contacts. Facebook. Pinterest. LinkedIn. Google+. And on and on — they all have contact lists, and many of them will eagerly import contacts from other sources. So, too, with the Windows 8.1 Metro People app.
The biggest downside to the People app? It doesn’t sync with Outlook.
Choosing the right package
So how do you choose a Mail/Contacts (People)/Calendar program? Tough question, but let me give you a few hints:
The Win8.1 productivity apps — Metro Mail, Calendar, and People — work well enough if your demands aren’t great.
But if you have an iPad, consider using it instead. Until Microsoft improves its basic tiled apps, the iPad clearly offers superior Mail handling and arguably better Contacts and Calendar.
Online services — specifically Hotmail/Outlook.com and Gmail — have many more usable features than either Win8.1 Metro Mail or iPad Mail. As long as you can rely on your Internet connection, look at both of them before settling on a specific Mail/Contacts/Calendar program.
Gmail and Hotmail/Outlook.com make it easy to use their programs to read "ordinary" e-mail. I can set up my e-mail account, [email protected], to work through Gmail, for example, so mail sent to that e-mail address ends up in Gmail, and if I respond to the message, it appears as if it's coming from [email protected], not from Gmail.
A good compromise is to use either Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.com most of the time but hook up either iPad Mail or Win8.1 Metro Mail (or both!) to the Gmail or Hotmail/Outlook.com account, so you can grab your iPad when you’re headed out the door.
If you don’t feel comfortable storing your mail in the cloud, or you don’t want to go through the hassle of converting your e-mail account, try Windows Live Mail (see Book VI, Chapter 5).
Ancient dinosaurs will probably keep using Outlook until its bits rot away. It’s ponderous and painful, the embodiment of 19th-century dentist’s office chic. But it works. (I can’t tell you how happy I am that I finally moved over to Gmail!)
Drilling Down on Windows 8.1 Metro Mail
Tap or click the Start menu’s Mail tile, and you see the Metro Mail screen. This section walks you through the different parts of this screen, explains how to add an e-mail account to Mail, and how to search your e-mail. At the end of this section, I talk about the features Mail is missing as this book goes to press but that may appear as Microsoft releases updates for the Metro Mail app.
Microsoft allows you to use Mail, Calendar, and People if you supply a Microsoft account. Full stop. If you don’t have a Microsoft account and you want to use one of those apps, follow the steps on the screen and see the instructions in Book II, Chapter 4 to get one. If you used a local account to sign in to Windows (see Book II, Chapter 4) — one that isn’t known to Microsoft — you’re prompted to provide a Microsoft account, as shown in Figure 2-1.
Navigating the Windows 8.1 Mail screen
If you signed in to Windows or the Mail app with a Microsoft account that's also a Hotmail/Outlook.com ID (@hotmail.com or @live.com or @outlook.com), Mail reaches out to your Hotmail/Outlook.com account and pulls the last two weeks' worth of messages. The result is something like that shown in Figure 2-2.
Figure 2-1: Provide a Microsoft account, or you won’t get in.
Figure 2-2: Mail pulls your recent Hotmail/Outlook.com messages and gets you started. Yes, it still refers to Outlook.com as “Hotmail.”
If your screen is 1,366 pixels wide or wider, the first column expands to show you more details about each of your folders.
Mail’s standard layout takes three columns:
The left column lists your accounts at the bottom, and the folders associated with the selected account above. In Figure 2-2, I have two accounts, a Hotmail/Outlook.com account and a Yahoo! account. Because the Hotmail/Outlook.com account is selected, the Inbox, Favorites, Flagged, Newsletters, Social Updates and All Folders list are all the ones associated with the Hotmail/Outlook.com account. If I tap or click the Yahoo! account, the contents of the lower folders change to reflect my Yahoo! account.
The middle column lists all the messages in the selected folder. If you don’t specifically select a folder — perhaps by using the All Folders list — Mail selects the Inbox for you.
The right column shows you the selected message and has the buttons that let you quickly react to the message.
If you swipe from the bottom or top, or right-click in the body of Mail, the additional tools appear (see Figure 2-3).
Figure 2-3: Extra tools that may come in handy — but only for Hotmail accounts.
If you noticed the Move icon, you probably asked yourself, “How do I create a new folder to move stuff into?” The answer: Click or tap on the Folders icon on the lower left and choose Add a Folder. Type in the name of the new folder, and it will appear in the All Folders folder on the left.
The Pin to Start icon is also quite remarkable in that it allows you to pin a Metro Mail account to the Start screen. If you want to bring up Mail with that account pre-selected (saving yourself one tap in the process), you can place a tile for the account on your Start screen.
The Move, Sweep, and Junk icons at the bottom work very much like the analogous icons on the Hotmail/Outlook.com page. See Book X, Chapter 4. You can also click and drag a message to one of the folders — just as you could in Outlook Express in Internet Explorer 4. Progress!
Adding a new account
The Metro Mail app has built-in smarts for you to connect to any Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, Exchange Server (including Office 365 business edition), AOL, Yahoo!, or IMAP accounts. You can add any number of different types of those accounts — two different Gmail accounts and a few Hotmails — no problem.
To add a new account:
1. From the Metro Mail app, swipe from the right edge of the screen or hover your mouse in the upper-right corner, and choose the Settings charm.
2. Tap or click Accounts; tap or click Add an Account.
The Add an Account list appears, as shown in Figure 2-4.
3. Tap or click the account type that you want to add.
Yes, where Metro Mail says “Hotmail,” it actually means Outlook.com.
The Other Account entry is for adding e-mail accounts that can be accessed using IMAP. If in doubt, contact your e-mail provider to see if it supports IMAP.
When you add an e-mail account, you’re also adding the contacts from that account, which go in your People app, and the calendar(s) attached to that account, which go in the Calendar app. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition.
Figure 2-4: Add a new e-mail account to the tiled, Windows 8.1 Mail app.
4. Enter your e-mail ID, password, and any ancillary information that may be required. Tap or click Connect.
Metro Mail is probably smart enough to look up or find any other information it needs, but you may have to provide something from your e-mail provider.
When Metro Mail comes back, your new account appears on the left.
If you want to change the details about your account — in particular, if you don’t particularly want to see the name Hotmail, Outlook, or Gmail as an account name — bring up the Settings charm, click or tap Accounts, and then tap or click the account you wish to change. The Account Details pane appears, as shown in Figure 2-5. In the top box, you can type a name that will appear in the first column of the Mail main page. You can also choose when to download new messages and how far back you want the messages to go.
Figure 2-5: Change the details of an account.
Creating a new message
When you reply to a message, Mail sets up a typical reply (or a reply to all) in a two-column screen, as shown in Figure 2-6. Similarly, if you tap or click the + icon in the upper right, Mail starts a new, blank message. Whether you reply or start a new message, your message is all set up and ready to go — just start typing.
Figure 2-6: When you reply to a message or compose a new message, Mail gives you these options.
Here’s a quick tour of the features available to you as you create your e-mail message:
Format the text: The new text you type appears in Calibri 11-point type. If you want to format the text, just select the text, and you see the formatting options in Figure 2-7.
Those who have a keyboard and know how to use it will be pleased to know that many of the old, formatting keyboard shortcuts still work. Here are the most commonly used shortcuts:
• Ctrl+B toggles bold on and off.
• Ctrl+I toggles italic on and off.
• Ctrl+U toggles underline on and off.
• Ctrl+Z undoes the last action.
• Ctrl+Y redoes the last undone action.
Figure 2-7: Select the text and apply formatting in the usual way.
Insert emoticons, smiley faces, bulleted or numbered lists: You can bring up the formatting options shown in Figure 2-7 — which includes emoticons, undo, redo, and bulleted and numbered lists — by simply swiping from the top or bottom, or by right-clicking inside the message. There’s even an emoticon that looks like Steve Sinofsky with glasses.
Add an attachment: In the first column, the Attachments link jumps to the file picker and starts in the Pictures library. You can move around to all your files, choose whichever file(s) you like, and then tap or click Attach. The file(s) are attached to your message.
Alternatively, if you start in the Photos app, navigate to the picture you want and bring up the Share charm (swipe from the right, or hover your mouse in the upper-right corner and then choose Share). This way, you can take advantage of larger images to find the pic you want. If you go this route to share a picture, Metro Mail starts a new message.
Add a BCC or message priority indicator: At the top, under the recipient’s name, click or tap the More link. From there, you can add a blind carbon copy (BCC) that sends a copy to someone without alerting any of the other recipients, or you can set the mail priority to High, Normal, or Low.
Tap or click the Send icon in the upper-right corner, and the message is queued in the Outbox, ready to send the next time Mail syncs for new message.
If at any time you don’t want to continue, tap or click the trash can button in the upper right and choose Yes to permanently delete the draft. To save the draft, confusingly, bring up the App bar at the bottom and in the lower-left corner, tap or click the icon to Save Draft.
Searching for e-mail in Metro Mail
Searching for mail is relatively easy, if you remember two very important details:
Navigate to the folder that you want to search before you actually perform the search. If you search while you’re looking at your Inbox, for example, you won’t find anything in your Sent Items folder. In fact, Metro Mail won’t even download the messages in your Sent Items folder unless you select it.
Don’t use the Search charm. Yes, Mail is a typical tiled Windows 8.1 Metro app. Like most other Microsoft Metro apps, it doesn’t use the Search charm.
To search for e-mail messages:
1. Tap or click the folder you want to search.
2. Below and to the right of the folder name, tap or click the magnifying glass.
3. Type your search term; then press Enter or tap the magnifying glass icon again.
Mail may or may not search all your mail — Microsoft hasn’t released details on exactly which messages are searched, but the search appears to be limited to the number of messages shown on the screen — two weeks’ worth. To find older messages in your search, click the link under the results that says To Get Messages Older than Two Weeks, Go To Settings. That takes you to the Account Details pane (see Figure 2-5) where you can choose to download more than two weeks of mail.
MIA in Metro Mail
By the time you read this, Mail may have mended its wayward ways. But as it stands now, Mail just misses the boat in many important respects:
The Inbox automatically shows all graphics, triggering web beacons. Many e-mail programs are smart enough to wait for permission before they show you graphics that originate from the web. The reason is to stop web beacons — graphics that, when opened, will tip off the sender that you actually viewed the e-mail. It’s a spammer’s technique, and one that Mail should be smart enough to handle.
Spam handling is rudimentary. While you can right-click (or tap and hold) a message and send it to the Junk folder, there’s no way to block (or whitelist) a sender or sender’s e-mail domain. There’s also no way to create rules, as you can in Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook, for sorting through mail.
Changing interactions. Google announced that it wouldn’t support Win8.1 “push” mail notifications for new, free Gmail accounts. The jury’s still out on whether Microsoft will try to improve the situation.
You can’t see a message’s header. This is an important ability if you want to find out who really sent a message.
You can’t import old mail from, for example, Microsoft Outlook.
Hundreds of additional features that are common to almost any e-mail program are missing in Metro Mail. It will be interesting to see how quickly or whether Microsoft fixes any or all the shortcomings.
Putting All Your Contacts in the Metro People App
If you set up Mail with a Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail, or Exchange Server account, all the contacts belonging to that account have already been imported into People. If you set up more than one Hotmail/Outlook.com account, for example, all the contacts in both accounts have been merged and placed in People.
But you aren’t even halfway done yet.
Adding accounts to Metro People
Before you start pulling all your contacts from Hotmail/Outlook.com, Gmail’s Contacts, Exchange Server, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Sina Weibo (a giant Chinese blogging site), realize that there are side effects, not just in establishing Microsoft-controlled links with outside applications, but even inside the core Win8.1 Metro productivity apps, Mail, People, and Calendar.
Before you add an account to People, be aware of the effects that adding that account has in other tiled apps. Here’s how connecting the following accounts with Metro People impacts other tiled apps:
Facebook account: Brings your friends to the Metro People list. In addition, lists your friends’ status updates in the What’s New section of People. (In Windows 8, adding Facebook would also copy your Facebook photos over to the Metro Photos app, but Facebook put an end to that in Win8.1.) You can use the Metro People app to post on your Facebook Timeline and you can view (but not import) your Facebook photos.
Google account: Brings in your Gmail contacts but not your Google+ contacts. In addition, adds your Gmail account to the Metro Mail app. (Apparently Microsoft hasn’t dug in to the Google+ social networking mill yet.)
Hotmail/Outlook.com account: Brings in your Hotmail/Outlook.com (and Windows Live) contacts. In addition, adds your contacts’ Windows Live status updates to the Metro People What’s New page.
What? You didn’t know that you and your contacts (er, People) have Windows Live status updates? Sure you, and they, do! Microsoft tried to get into the Facebook business years ago, and added the almost-never-used Share Something New option at the top of the Windows Live landing page — the page that used to greet most people when they first logged in to Hotmail. With the ascendancy of Outlook.com, that page has gone away, but vestiges of Share Something New persist. If your, uh, People are verbose enough to actually type something in the Share Something New box, it’ll get shared in your Metro People app. Sharing is good, right?
LinkedIn account: Brings only your LinkedIn connections into the Metro People app. That’s the way it should be.
Sina Weibo: Apparently this only brings in your Sina Weibo contacts. I say “apparently” because I don’t read enough Chinese to tell for sure!
Twitter account: Adds the folks you follow on Twitter to your Metro People contacts. In addition, their tweets are siphoned into the Metro People What’s New page.
Now that you understand the implications, you’re ready to add accounts. Here’s how to add many/most/all your contacts (you get to choose how many accounts to connect) to the Metro People app:
1. Bring up the People app from the Metro Start screen by tapping or clicking the People tile.
If you’ve added only a single e-mail address to Mail, you may see an Add People to Your Contact List window on the left.
2a. If the Add People to Your Contact List window appears, tap or click the Add More Accounts link.
2b. If the window doesn’t appear, slide from the right or hover your mouse in the upper right of the screen, choose Settings⇒Accounts⇒Add an Account.
However you get there, the Add an Account pane appears on the right, as shown in Figure 2-8.
Figure 2-8: Merge contacts from various accounts into your Win8.1 People app.
3. If you have Facebook, Google, Hotmail/Outlook.com, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Exchange Server accounts, think carefully about which ones you want to add to Metro People.
If you have old information in one or more of those accounts, you may want to think carefully about whether including all of the contacts in your Metro People list will be more of a pain than it’s worth. Modifying existing contacts, er, people is intensely time-consuming: You have to tap or click each contact one by one, review the information about the contact, and modify accordingly. While Metro People tries to identify duplicate entries — the same people coming from two different sources — and merge the data, it’s not real good at resolving differences.
4. One by one, tap or click accounts that you want to add, and provide login IDs and passwords.
In some cases, you have to go to the account’s site to verify your identity before People can import your contacts.
When you finish, your contacts appear in the People app.
5. As you import each set of contacts, take a few minutes to review the combined list.
You’re bound to find many duplicates, and a lot of mismatched data. Hang in there and do the best you can.
No, there's no way (at least at this moment) to directly import Outlook, Windows Live Mail, or Windows contacts into Metro People. (Windows Contacts come from the little-used Windows Contacts program in Vista and Windows 7, or from the Windows Address Book in Windows 95, 98, and 2000.) You can, however, sync Outlook contacts with Gmail and bring them into People through Gmail. Look for the GO Contact Sync Mod program at http://sourceforge.net/projects/googlesyncmod/files.
Navigating the Metro People app
The People app has four different personas.
You see the People main page when you first go into the app (see Figure 2-9).
The Metro People screen shows your picture, the most recent notifications waiting for you, mug shots of people in your Favorites list, and an alphabetical index into your All Contacts list.
Figure 2-9: The Metro People app main screen.
The Me Screen
From the main Metro People screen (Figure 2-9), click or tap the Me link, and you see the Me, Me, It’s All About Me! screen shown in Figure 2-10.
From the Me screen, it’s easy to post on your Facebook wall: Just type something where the screen says What’s On Your Mind?. (If you’re new to Facebook, there’s a great quick introduction in Book V, Chapter 3.) The latest Facebook Timeline posts for your account appear in the lower right. Scroll farther to the right, and you see a list of Facebook notifications. Scroll farther and there’s a link to your Facebook pictures — but there’s no way to copy those pictures onto your computer.
Click or tap on the Me screen’s View Profile, and you hop directly into your Facebook profile. Changing your Facebook profile won’t change anything here on the Me screen.
The What’s New screen
From the Me screen (Figure 2-10), click or tap on the What’s New link, and you get the What’s New screen, shown in Figure 2-11. You can get to the same place by clicking or tapping the What’s New link on the main Metro People screen (Figure 2-9).
Figure 2-10: The Me screen.
The What’s New screen shows Facebook status updates and tweets from people connected to those accounts. Check out how it looks in Figure 2-11.
I have no idea why you’d use this view instead of running Facebook’s or Twitter’s tiled app, or one of the many Metro Apps that combine the two.
Swipe from the bottom or top, or right-click the What’s New page, and you can refresh the tweets and status updates. Although Metro People refreshes itself from time to time, if you don’t refresh, the stuff you’re looking at is probably stale.
The All Contacts screen
As you may imagine, if you click or tap on the All Contacts link on the main Metro People screen (Figure 2-9), you get a tiled list of all of your contacts. The list is alphabetized by first name or the first word in a business name, as in Figure 2-12.
If you click on an individual contact, Metro People brings up a screen similar to the Me screen (Figure 2-10) with a picture, links to profiles on Facebook or Twitter, and the latest posts from the person.
Figure 2-11: The What’s New page.
Figure 2-12: The All Contacts list shows all of your People.
If you want to show your All Contacts list sorted by last name, swipe from the right (or hover your mouse in the upper-right corner, or press Windows key+C) to bring up the Charms bar. Choose Settings, and then Options. There you can tell Metro People to sort by last name. You can also tell it to show or hide People from various sources (for example, hide every contact from Facebook).
Editing a contact
If you want to change the information associated with a Metro People person — a contact — here’s how to do it:
1. Inside Metro People, tap or click a contact’s tile.
The contact details appear (similar to Figure 2-10).
2. Swipe from the top or bottom or right-click the desktop to bring up the App bar at the bottom. On the right, tap or click the Edit icon.
The Edit Info pane appears, as shown in Figure 2-13.
Figure 2-13: Change the contact’s information here.
3. Change the information you want to change.
See the next section for a list of the different data fields.
4. Tap or click the Save icon. (It’s the one that looks like a 3.5-inch floppy disk in the upper-right corner. What? You’ve never seen a 3.5-inch floppy disk? Yeah, I can sympathize.)
If your contact suddenly disappears, there’s a reason why! If you changed the name, and the new name matches the name of a contact that’s already in your People list, Metro People consolidates the two contacts, throws away the picture for one of them, and presents you with the merged result.
A word to the wise: If People threw away one of your contacts, it’d be a very good idea to look at the details of the surviving contact and make sure they’re accurate.
Adding people in Metro People
Adding a new contact in People isn’t difficult, if you can keep in mind one oddity: You add accounts via the Charm bar’s Settings charm, on the right side of the screen, but to add a contact, you use the App bar at the bottom of the screen.
A people, er, contact doesn’t have to be a person. Your local animal shelter is a person, too. Or at least a contact.
Here’s how to add a new contact. Keep in mind that, unless you change things, People alphabetizes by the first name, or by the company name if there is no first or last name.
1. Start Metro People. That’ll put you on the main screen (refer to Figure 2-9).
Actually, you could try to add a new contact while you’re looking at the Me screen, but that would probably lead to some sort of existential dilemma, so I won’t go there.
2. Swipe from the top or bottom or right-click the screen to bring up the App bar at the bottom. Tap or click the New Contact icon on the right.
The New Contact screen appears, as shown in Figure 2-14.
Figure 2-14: Add a new contact.
3. At the top, under Account, choose the e-mail provider that you want to sync this new contact to.
You can choose from any account that's been identified to the Mail app. When you add a contact to that account, Metro People goes to the account and puts the person in your contact list for that account. So, for example, if I add Phineas Farquahrt to my [email protected] account, as soon as I'm done, the Metro People app will log on to my [email protected] account and add poor Phineas to my contact list.
4. Type a first and last name, keeping in mind that People alphabetizes by the first name, by default.
For additional name options — phonetic names, middle names, nicknames, title, or suffix — you can tap or click the Name button.
5. If you have an e-mail address for the contact, choose what kind of e-mail address — Personal, Work, or Other — and type the address in the box.
6. Similarly, if you have a phone number, choose the type — Home, Home 2, Work, Work 2, Pager, Work Fax, Home Fax — and type it in the indicated box.
7. If you want to add an address, tap or click the Address button and choose among Home, Work, and Other address.
8. Type as you feel inclined for Other Info, such as Job Title, Significant Other, Website, and Notes.
9. In the upper-right corner, tap or click the Save icon, which looks like an ancient floppy disk that your cat chews on.
It takes a few seconds — you can actually see Metro People going to your mail account and updating it — but you come back to the People screen.
Avoiding Metro Calendar App Collisions
The first time you bring up the Calendar app, you may think that you’re seeing double. Or triple. In Figure 2-15, you can see what I mean.
Don’t panic.
The reason for the duplication? Assuming you have added two or more accounts into Metro Mail or Metro People, the calendars associated with those accounts came along for the ride, and any appointment that appears in both calendars shows up as two stripes on the consolidated calendar.
Figure 2-15: The first time in Win8.1 Calendar may make your head spin.
Fortunately, it’s easy to see what’s going on and to get rid of the duplicates. Or at least some of the duplicates. Maybe. Here’s how to re-organize your Calendar:
1. From the Metro Start screen, tap or click the Calendar tile to start it.
If this is the first time you’ve looked at the Calendar app, it may look like the one in Figure 2-15.
2. Swipe from the right or hover your mouse in the upper-right corner, choose the Settings charm, and then tap or click Options.
The color-coded Options pane appears, as shown in Figure 2-16.
Figure 2-16: Set calendar colors and eliminate some duplicates here.
3. See whether two or more of your calendars have a source that overlaps. If so, turn off one of the interfering calendars.
For example, in Figure 2-16, I have two Hotmail/Outlook.com accounts, both of which have the U.S. Holidays calendar turned on. That’s why the holidays are double entries on the main calendar.
By simply turning off one of the U.S. Holidays calendars, the main calendar goes back to looking somewhat normal, as shown in Figure 2-17.
Figure 2-17: Getting rid of the second U.S. Holidays calendar cuts down the clutter.
4. Go through the calendars, one by one, and set the color coding for each calendar component to something your eyes can tolerate.
5. When you’re done, simply tap or click outside the Options pane.
If you swipe from the top or bottom or right-click the calendar, the App bars appear on the top and bottom. On the top, you can choose the detail of the calendar that you want to see:
What’s Next shows a flashy background with small tiles for all of the soon-to-arrive events.
Day brings up an hourly calendar, for two or more days (depending on the number of pixels across your screen).
Work Week lists Monday through Friday of the current week only.
Week shows Sunday through Saturday.
Month brings up one month at a time.
In call cases, there are left and right arrows at the top of the screen to move one unit (day, week, month) earlier or later. If you click or tap on the header (for example, November 2013), a calendar appears to make it easier to zoom to whatever set of dates you wish.
Adding Calendar Items
To add a new appointment, or other calendar item, tap or click the New icon in the lower-right corner. Calendar shows you the Details pane, as shown in Figure 2-18.
Most of the entries are self-explanatory, except
You must choose a calendar — actually, an e-mail account — which will be synchronized with this appointment. As soon as you enter the appointment, Calendar logs on to the indicated account and adds the appointment to the account’s calendar.
You may optionally specify e-mail addresses in the Who box. If you put valid e-mail address(es) in the Who box, Calendar automatically generates an e-mail message and sends it to the recipient, asking the recipient to confirm the appointment. When you finish the appointment, in the upper-right corner, tap or click Save or Send, depending on whether you’re setting the appointment or sending invitations.
If you click the link marked Show More at the bottom of the entry, Metro Calendar lets you choose How Often, when to send up a Reminder, and how to mark your status for shared calendars. At this moment, the How Often box is very simple, inviting you to repeat the appointment every day, weekday, or week at the same time; or once a month or once a year on the same date. Presumably you’ll see more advanced controls sooner or later.
Figure 2-18: Create a new appointment or calendar entry.
Struggling with Calendar shortcomings
The Calendar app is a just-barely-passable calendaring program. It doesn’t have any of the goodies you would expect from more advanced calendaring apps — notably, Google Calendar.
For example, you can set an alert for any given appointment — it appears as a toast notification, rolling in from the right — but there’s no additional notification and no way to “snooze” the notification.
On the plus side, you can have Calendar notifications placed on your lock screen. The notifications list individual appointments for the current day. See Book II, Chapter 2 for details.