Forum Discussion
Canary & Collections
I strongly urge anyone running Canary to enable the Collections flag! I say this for 2 reasons. (1) feedback is most welcome & will be SO helpful in finalizing Collections and (2) because it is such a cool & powerful tool. Likely it will be put to extensive & fruitful use as time lapses. It will probably be appreciated & enjoyed. Anyway, I do urge Canary Folks to give it a whirl and comment (to the Team).
Cheers,
Drew
25 Replies
Drew1903 A useful feature would be syncing Collections to Mobile Edge on Android (or IOS). Having done research on useful, having them show up in the mobile browser is a must.
Oystein Johnsen
Please, submit your thought to Feedback via
or via https://microsoftedgesupport.microsoft.com/hc/en-us/requests/new. Thanks.
Cheers,
DrewI am excited about the Collections feature but I have a few suggestions:
- The ability to right click on a page and send it to the proper collections folder. This could be accomplished, I think, by the use of drop down menus. This process would be much simpler than having to open the Collections side bar, scroll down to, and open, the appropriate collection, and then add the page.
- I would like the ability to customize how the sidebar looks.
- I would like an option of a compact, text only view that would allow me to see a couple of dozen or more collections at one time rather than the current, on my laptop, six. Pictures are nice but consume a lot of space. I would like the same options within each collection.
- The ability to sort collections by date, name, etc. This includes the collections list and the list of pages within each collection.
- The ability to edit the name of saved pages. Similar to what happens when you create a link - the underlying link remains the same but you can put in a more descriptive title.
- Been playing with chrome extension development — which is clearly what this product uses— been able to duplicate what ‘collections’ does in a matter of weeks, so what is to stop others from doing the same, I suggest Microsoft be cognizant that other players will come with some competition, and they have to put their resources to work and convince the web world to embrace ld-json and schematic, .org and then export, and excel, will be worth it. Oh, and awesome move in embracing chrome, brilliant
- Thank you for the Tip!
Hi Drew1903
I have not been able to get the export to excel/word feature to work on my mac install of edge. I have installed both dev and canary Chanel
its prompting me to sign into edge to enable export and i am already signed in
Do you have any advice
Thanks
Akin_Akinjogbin
Hi
I apologise, but, will bow to someone who is more familiar with the Mac side of things. Doing the exercise myself, does not Reproduce your issue on my Windows machine/install; for me, did as expected with none of what you encounter. I trust a Mac expert reads your note, soon.
Cheers,
Drew
Hi Drew1903 and everyone. I'm Darryl, one of the PMs working on Collections. Feedback is so very welcome! I'd like to learn about how you and others are using Collections.
How are you using Collections? What is working for you? What is not working for you?
Dennis5mile, you mentioned you have early thoughts on it already, what are those thoughts? Same as above, I'd like to know what's working for you and what's not.
Robin Nilsson, let me know how send to excel is going for you, and any feedback that you have. What possibilities do you see for it?
Deleted, I heard you that you want send to OneNote, what else would you like to be able to send to? Do you have other early feedback?
JordanQ, what would you want to do with the ability to send to OneNote? What else would you want to send to? Also, what are some examples of the uses you see for Collections?
Thank you all so much,
Darryl
Hi Darryl! Darryl_B
Just started using collections. I am a biomedical sciences PhD student and I have started trying to use it for organizing my research! I find it very helpful to be able to highlight the take away from a research paper and drag it to the collection I want and have it maintain the link to the paper it was from. Super useful for writing papers in the future and making citations easier.
A few suggestions that I think would make the process easier:
1. The ability to drag text from a PDF. Often the literature I am reading is from a PDF I am reading in browser. However highlighting and dragging from this can't be done right now.
2. The ability to link or merge dragged text/images that come from the same URL. Often I have a few take aways or images I want from a given paper. Right now I am dragging each one over which makes a new section with a link. It would be super useful if somehow by dragging text/images from the same URL led to combining the notes or linking them in some way so I keep them all together and know they are from the same place, without having to look/click the links to each.
3. In collection snipping tool. The papers I read have integrated figures. It would be awesome if there was a way to use a snipping tool over a figure I want to save which could then be saved the same way as the text and links, with the link to the website it was clipped from.
Thank you! Awesome feature.
Darryl_B Hi, Darryl. To give one perhaps silly but real life example, I was looking for different aftershaves, and used OneNote to collect different webpages with aftershaves. Now, I can do this in Collections, which is a much faster drag-and-drop or one-click solution. That's the beauty of Collections, but OneNote allows you to do a lot more, such as adding additional notes, tables, annotations and even drawings, and to contextualize your info by placing it within a page within a notebook. So you could use Collections to easily toss together related info, then send it to OneNote to build on that with more robust tools. However, the challenge is whether the webpages and notes in your Collection would be sent to a single OneNote page or to separate pages. Still, OneNote seems like a more ideal receptacle for this kind of thing than Word.
Deleted I agree that Send to OneNote would make a lot of sense for Collections.
Drew1903 Me too. Only gave it a couple of minutes testing. Still trying to figure out the 'send to excel' - and how to use it the best way. I put a couple of laptops in a collection and wasn't sure what I'd get. I like the possibilities of the export - I think this will be very useful indeed. Especially for research. Now I print web pages to a OneNote notebook.
Same:
- I enabled it first thing after installing the update yesterday morning... It will be a great tool to have.... 👍 I have some thoughts on it already...
Dennis5mile
