Canary & Collections

Silver Contributor

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
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25 Replies
I enabled it first thing after installing the update yesterday morning... It will be a great tool to have.... :thumbs_up: I have some thoughts on it already...

Dennis5mile

Same:

 

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@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.

Using it already. However for me, Send to OneNote will be much more useful than Send to Excel.

@Deleted I agree that Send to OneNote would make a lot of sense for Collections.

@Drew1903 I'm trying Collections on my laptop at home now. It's the unique Edge feature I'm most excited about and have been waiting for. I can see a lot of uses for it.

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

@Darryl_B 

Hi Darryl,

It should send to OneNote & E-mail & SM like Twitter.  People like it when things are easy to share be it through and to business channels & contacts or personal friends & family.

Cheers,
Drew
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Thank you, @Drew1903. That's helpful to know how you want to share.

@Darryl_B 

You're welcome, Darryl.  Although, point is, probably not just a "want" of mine... Sharing & collaborating is the trend now & in the future for many Users. 

Cheers,
Drew
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PS: In spite of automation-tech & this is meant in the nicest most casual way... see ⬆ a person's name CAN be written, in context, in a normal fashion & not looking like a computer User Name.  It, really, is  possible. (& nicer)

Hi Darryl, @Darryl_B 

 

Here is a good thread that was started by @HotCakeX with lots of good feedback on Collections.

 

You could do lots of things with Collections. Anything from making up a Christmas shopping list for each person you shop for.  And then share it all through email, OneNote, etc.......  

 For me I will make use of it, by adding all the years of how to's for different work arounds, short cuts and the like for different beta's I'm in and so forth..  Over the years I've got a bit of a collection of information about different software programs and PC hardware configurations and such.  What a great place to have all that info handy.....

 

There is really no limit to what can be done with this.  Even a home inventory "Collection of all my junk"....  

 

my20centsworth

Dennis5mile

p.s. you will also find photos of errors while coping items into a collection....

@Darryl_B I really like the Collections concept, trying out different things to see where I can fit it into my day. So far, just sending links to Excel doesn't do much for me - I'm not a big Excel user actually. What I'd really love is a send to One Note that would display each entry with the page preview image and text along with the link - would make more sense than just the link text. Right now when I want to save special pages for reference I print to OneNote. Example - I collect different pages that have example of Flow constructs - I'd love to send all of those to a single page in OneNote - it would show me the title of the page, a preview image if possible, preview text.. - like a little table of contents..

 

Otherwise right now it's only an easier way to do the same thing as a folder in favorites - but easier to get to. In fact, that's one way I'm testing it now - saving different Tech Community posts and blogs instead of in my Favorites.

@Darryl_B I want to modify the "title" that gets saved for the web page. Right now, the work around is to add a note right above it. Secondly, having the ability to edit the URL after saving would be great, but lower priority. CollectionsTitle.png

@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.

@JordanQ 

"OneNote seems like a more ideal receptacle for this kind of thing than Word"

Absolutely!

Cheers,
Drew
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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. 

 

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
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Thank you for the Tip!