 Good morning everyone, and welcome to Encompass Live. My name is Michael Sowers. I'm the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission in Lincoln, Nebraska. Happy Boxing Day to everyone, and we have a small group with us today, but we are recording, and we'll make this recording available to anyone who wishes to watch. Encompass Live is a weekly online show sponsored by the Library Commission, in which we talk about pretty much anything related to libraries and librarians, and this week is my monthly tech talk that I'm doing today, and it's, as I said, the day after Christmas, so not a lot of people in the office. In fact, we have some whole sections of the building at the moment where the lights aren't even on. So, Krista is out of the office. She's back east visiting her family, and so I'm taking this show solo, and so that's going to make things a little interesting, especially for me. So, as we get started here, before we get into Windows 8, our topic, just want to kind of give a few caveats to explain how it's going to work a little bit this time. First off, I'm here to kind of give you an overview and show you what's going on with Windows 8. I'm not here to make a case for Windows 8. I mean, I have my own opinions, but I'm not trying to convince everyone to move to it tomorrow. Second of all, I'm mostly talking about Windows 8 from a user's perspective, and a lot less from an administration perspective. There's all sorts of issues around Windows 8 if you're going to be administering a network or maybe offering this to the public, things like that. If you have questions about that, I can try to address them towards the end if you like, but I'm mostly going to be showing this from a user's perspective. Also, when it comes to Q&A, I really want to try to answer your questions as much as possible, but the way GoToWebinar currently works with Windows 8, I can only see the GoToWebinar interface when I'm activating the desktop, and I'll explain how the desktop works here in a few minutes. So not only do I not have somebody sitting next to me watching for your questions on another computer, I cannot always see the GoToWebinar interface as I'm going through here. So I will, at as many points as I can, try to take a look, see if any questions have been submitted. You're happy to raise your hand and submit them via audio, but it may work a little better this time around if you submit them in the Q&A panel so I can read them back and find them that way. So with that, what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to double check to make sure you're all seeing my title slide there. That's very good. And I'm going to go ahead and get started here with Windows 8 by going to the Windows 8 Start screen. Now, I don't know who in the audience has seen this or not, but this is now the Start menu. There is no orb down in the bottom left-hand corner that you used to see. This is the screen that you get after you log into your account. We'll talk about user accounts in a little bit later in this presentation. Excuse me. So this is your Start menu, now known as the Start screen. One thing I do want to say about Windows 8 is everything you want to do in Windows 8 can be done either via the mouse, via a touchscreen should you have a touchscreen device which I don't have on this laptop and via the keyboard. So in this case, what I did was I just pressed the Windows key which in Windows Vista, Windows 7 would bring up the Start menu and in this case brings up the Start screen. As you can see here, several of these tiles are changing as you watch them. These are known as live tiles and these are actually accessing current information in the program that they are related to or would launch if clicked. So you can see down here, this is accessing some photos and if I click that it would give me my photo program. Right here kind of bottom center is the finance program so I'm getting some financial headlines and stock information. Up here kind of center left is my weather program from AccuWeather. In this case, I'm not using the default one. I've installed one I think is a little better. So it's showing me the current weather. Above that is current news. Below that is my current calendar. Over here on the left you'll see people's faces. This is kind of the IM and people client that is available through here. So a lot of the tiles and a lot of programs that you can get for Windows 8 have these live tile functionality and the idea is that even on the starting screen, you have the ability to get up to date information without necessarily needing to go into the program. Now, if you find the live tiles kind of annoying, you can also turn the live functionality of a tile off and I'll try to get to that a little later. You'll see I have a scroll down bar down here at the bottom. I'm gonna go ahead and scroll using that scroll bar. I can also, if I have a wheel mouse, I can use that. If I have a touch mouse, I can also scroll through that. And you can see here, each of the programs that I've installed in most cases has its own start menu item and I have also organized this start screen kind of into categories. So back on the left, I kind of had that main area. I have my office programs here. I have media programs. I have utilities. I have a whole section on ebook programs, storage, and then kind of have a miscellaneous and a gaming area down all the way to the end here which I've not actually yet named. Now, rearranging this screen is actually pretty simple. If I wanna move this game untangle over to storage, I could just click and hold on that and then drag it over to where I want it to be and let go and I have now rearranged that and put it in my little storage area or I can drag and drop and move it back. If I wanna kind of up to the beginning, you can see the tiles will move around things. I'll just do one more here if I wanna move Amazon maybe down over here. You can go ahead and do that. One of the kind of semi-hidden things to the start screen is if I click on the bottom right-hand corner here, it kind of zooms out and now in this case, I can rearrange whole sections of my start menu if I wanted to so I can say, you know what, I'm gonna go ahead and move it around like that and maybe I'm gonna put that ebooks section over here and then just a mouse click, zooms me back in again and allows me to access it. By zoom out one more time, you'll remember I don't have games labeled here. I can go ahead now and right-click on that and a little tool bar will pop up from the bottom of the screen and this is something you're gonna see over and over again in Windows 8. I can go ahead and click now name group. I'm gonna call this games, go ahead and click name. So now see it's called games and if I click and zoom back in again, you'll see that I now have a game group. So this is your start menu or excuse me, your start screen. Even I'm getting used to some of the new terminology. You notice that when I right-clicked, when it zoomed out, it gave me that ability to name a group. If I right-click while I'm here, you'll see pretty much no real options except for all the way to the bottom right-hand corner there you will see all apps. Now what is on my start menu does not necessarily have to be everything that I have installed on the computer. When you do install a new program, by default it does give you an icon on the start screen but you can remove that if you want or rearrange it as I've already shown. I'm gonna go ahead and click on all apps and what this is going to do now is it's going to show me kind of a smaller alphabetical format every single program that I have installed on this computer. And it's a pretty new laptop. Don't have a lot installed here. It's also a work laptop so I kind of have just the things I really need to get the job done installed on here. But in this case you can see that there are more programs that are available to me that are not necessarily on my start screen. And then all I have to do is I can hover over any one of these to click and run it or I can just press escape and that will actually take me back to the last program that I was running which was PowerPoint in this case. I'm gonna go ahead and click my start menu again and this will take me back to my start window. So let me real quick here go ahead and check the questions and I'm gonna go back to my desktop and see here, excuse me, this is why we usually have two people running this at any one time. Don't see any questions so far so we'll go ahead and continue. All right, one of the other big changes with Windows 8 besides the start screen and there is still the desktop and we'll get back to that in a little bit is if I take my mouse in this case and I kind of move it to either the bottom right or the top right corner, you'll see these charms kind of show up on the side and then if I just, if I wait too long, they disappear and then if I just kind of hover up, we get on the right what's called the charms bar and then in the bottom left hand corner you'll see the date and the time and the fact that I'm connected to a network and the fact that I'm plugged into a power outlet. There are five charms that are always going to show up in this charms bar. You can also get to this charms bar Windows C on your keyboard or if you're on a touch enabled screen you just kind of swipe from the right hand side of the screen. We'll cover each of these in turn. I'm just gonna cover one or two of them right now and then we'll kind of get back to others to show you some of the features but there's search, share, start, devices and settings. Now these are all context sensitive so if I was to click search right now it would search the start screen. If I was to click share it would probably in this case actually tell me there's nothing to share yet. Start will take me to my start screen. So I in using this the last month or so have mostly been getting the start screen by pressing on the Windows key on my keyboard. I find that pretty much the easiest but also you can open up the charms bar and click start. Devices is where you can access hardware that is plugged into your computer. We'll try to take a look at that a little later and then also settings. Settings is where I wanna take a look for just a moment. I'm gonna go ahead and click on settings and in this case remember I said it's context sensitive so we'll come back to settings a little later in other programs but in this case since I'm on the start menu it's I'm now in the start settings and I can get settings for the tiles or I can get some help. I go ahead and click tiles then it basically says okay what are my options in this case only a couple show administrative tools yes or no and clear personal information from my tiles. So if say this is a multi-user computer you might wanna clear out some of that personal information. You can go ahead and go back up maybe more importantly is this area down here in the bottom right. Here's where you can always access common Windows based settings regardless of what program you're using when you open settings. So I have network options, I have volume options, screen brightness, notifications I'll show you some of those notifications later. Power, this is where you can reboot the computer, shut down the computer and basic keyboard information in this case you can control which language is being used on your keyboard. So if I was to say just click on the volume here you can see I get my volume slider that's available to me. Brightness, again I can change the brightness of my screen not sure how well that's coming through. We'll kind of skip some of these others for right now. Change PC settings is kind of the big global settings area that is available. So this actually launches the Windows 8 settings program. And here you can see down the left hand side we have several areas, personalized, users, notifications, search, share, general privacy, et cetera. Let me talk about a few of these. Right now I'm on personalized and so what I can do here is I can change what's available on the locked screen. Now this is something I can't really show you live through the demo because I'm afraid if I lock my computer I will actually stop sharing the screen and you won't be able to see anything. But if I lock my computer this is the screen that will show up. This is a piece of wallpaper that I chose. I have some other choices available down here and I can also browse for more. And then what I find really cool is I can now also choose what sort of information shows up on that lock screen. So in this case I have messaging and mail and calendar and the weather showing up. So even if my screen is locked and this might be a little more useful on a tablet I will admit that on a laptop. But if my screen is locked that information is still being updated live and being shown to me on that lock screen without actually being logged into my computer. I can also choose some background and color schemes for the start screen. So instead of those gears I can change it to something really flowery or a little more underwater, spacey sort of thing or these sorts of flowers. I'm gonna go back to my gears. I can also change the color scheme so I want it a little more pink or a little more gray, green, excuse me or I'm gonna kind of leave it back to my blue here. And then I can also control what picture I use to create, to represent me. You can upload an image, you can use the built-in camera here as you see right here or you can browse for a photo. Users, users let me talk about accounts for a few minutes. You can see here it says your account I'm logged in as me. This is my personal email address and it also has the ability to switch to a local account. There are two kinds of accounts available in Windows 8. It's what's known as a local account and a Windows live account. What I have done is I have created an account with Microsoft and it's like when you create a Google account and you log into Google, I've created a Microsoft account, I log into Microsoft. By having a Microsoft account there are several benefits over a local account. Benefit number one is you can see here that it says you can switch to a local account but your settings won't sync between the PCs you use. Well, since I'm using a Windows-based account certain settings are now synced between any computer I log in with my Windows account such as that lock screen settings, some photo synchronization, a few other settings that will sync. So what was really kind of cool was I was able to set up this laptop first and got all my account settings set up and then my home desktop I got and installed Windows 8 on it and signed in with the same account and those settings just kind of synced between the two machines. Personally, I find that really useful. If you have a local account that will not happen. You can't log in, you can't sync between local accounts. It's only for that particular computer. Now, the other issue I wanna raise is if you want to install applications from the Microsoft Windows Store which I will show you later in this presentation then you must have a Microsoft account. Just like if you have a Google phone and he wants to install apps from the Google App Store you have to have a Google account. Similar things here. So if you wanna be able to install things from the store you will have to have a Microsoft account. Notifications, these are the ability to control what apps notify you of certain things. Okay, and I'll show you one example of a notification a little later on. Search, this allows you to control what that search button does in the terms. Okay, and again I'll talk about that a little later. Just one or two other screens I wanna show you because I don't wanna spend time showing you all of the settings here. But wireless, here's where you can turn on wireless and wireless sharing. And here are the settings for what you want to sync across computers. And lastly we have the Windows update area and in this case it will check for updates automatically, install important updates automatically and notify you of optional updates and then you can choose to install them. Now, for those of you who are used to running a lot of this stuff out of the control panel in Windows 7, Windows Vista, the control panel still exists. Everything you can do in Vista on the desktop through some sort of other program is still completely available to you. But what they're trying to do, kind of an underlying philosophy of Windows 8 is to simplify everything, to make the core things that just about everybody does easily accessible. And so right here what they've done is they've said these are the settings that most people use the most often. So we're gonna put them in this settings program and give people easy access to them. Everything else if you've said but what about this setting but what about that setting? You can still get to it through the control panel and I will show you that a little later. So I'm gonna go ahead and pause here for just a moment. I'm gonna go back and see if there are any questions that have come in and it looks like we've got one or two here so let me change my screen up so I can read them. The default weather app Pam is asking, Pamela, excuse me, it's just called weather. It's Microsoft's weather application. I just find it kind of boring in a moment. I'll go into the weather app that I installed and I think it's a lot more animated and gives me a little more detail. But the weather app actually just comes with Windows. Weather Underground, I don't know if they have a Windows 8 application yet but we can look in the store. We'll do that when we get over there. Darmea is asking, is hotmail a Microsoft account? I do believe so. I believe any Microsoft application that you may have or you have to sign in, that login information should work. So yes, hotmail would work. I personally don't have a hotmail address so I'm not 100% sure but pretty sure on that one. Okay, so let me go back to my start menu and so let me just, I'm gonna run the weather app here. Now, before I do that, there's another kind of important difference between Windows 8 and what you're used to. And this is where a lot of people kind of complain about how Windows 8 works on a laptop or a desktop computer. It's sort of a hybrid. Don't know how many of you have smartphones but here's the best analogy I can come up with. If you say you have an Android phone or an iPhone, think about how that works differently than your desktop Windows computer or even your Mac. You run a program, it runs full screen and you don't run things in Windows and then when you want to, you go back to the home menu and you can run another program that runs full screen. You might be able to also switch between full screen apps but you're really just running one application at a time. That's kind of the central core of Windows 8. The idea of Windows 8 native programs is they run full screen and they run one program at a time but you can't switch between programs if you want to. Now, and that works great in kind of a tablet-based environment. When it comes to a laptop or a desktop computer environment, Windows 8 still has that desktop, the thing we're used to with the Windows and the bar across the bottom of the screen that's still available to us. So there's two kinds of programs that you can run in Windows 8. You can run a Windows 8 app or you can run a desktop program. The most of the programs that you see kind of in this area are apps. Google Chrome is also an app, although you can choose. Thunderbird is my email program, that's a desktop program. So let me run the weather program just to show you what happens. It's going to kind of load up. It does kind of this animated thing. It's updating its information and I don't know how well it's coming across here but we're kind of having a cloudy day so the clouds are kind of moving across the screen for me. When it's raining, there's actually rain on the screen. When it's snowing, there's snow on the screen. I find it pretty cool. I can switch between daily and hourly. I can scroll to go into the future and then I can actually scroll the whole page to see what's available, including an ad over on the right hand side so we won't focus on that. And you'll notice in this case, the background is changing as I moved in through the future. Now, I showed you settings before. I'm going to go ahead and go to bottom right, move up here to my charms and click settings and now what you see is we still have those kind of computer settings down at the bottom but if you see up here, we now have the settings for this program. So the idea behind these Windows 8 applications is that you always get to the settings the same way. You open up the charms and you click settings and then there are the settings for your application. No, going up to a menu at the top and going, well, is preference on your edit or file. So again, different way but they're trying to consolidate everything to move it all together. I'm going to go back. Now another way to get to the start menu is I can go to the bottom left-hand corner and go ahead and click on that start. Excuse me. All right, let's talk about the Windows app store. Basically, if you've been to the iTunes store or the Google Play store, you understand the concept of a store. So I'm going to go ahead and you notice here it's a store one. Okay, well, what does that one mean? Okay, well, let's find out here. Let me go ahead and open the store and again, it's kind of this horizontal scrolling ability to see what's going on here. In this case, if you look in the upper right-hand corner here, it says update one. So one of the apps that I have installed has an update. So I'm going to go ahead and click that and it's going to say, hey, one update available for the nook. All right, so what would I like to do here? Okay, well, I'd like to install it. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that and it's going to say that it's updating and boom, we're done. Nice small update. Funny, I was kind of trying to not run updates for the better part of a week to show you more. It turned out only one update has come out this week. So, you know, hey, Christmas. And I have this back button here, so that'll take me back to my store. If I want to find a program, okay, now if remember over in the charms, if I go ahead and type window C, there's a search. Okay, let me use the store to show you how to search. Now, want to point out here, here's my search box, okay? Here are some things I've searched for recently and here it's saying because this is highlighted that I'm searching the store because I'm currently in the store. But look at all these other programs that are listed. These are all Windows programs that I've installed that I can search for from here. So just like with settings, they're trying to put the settings all in one place regardless of what program you're running. In this case it's saying, hey, here is search and it will search across everything but by default it's going to search in the program that you're currently in, all right? So let's say I'm looking for a weather underground. So I'm gonna go ahead and search and it turns out that weather underground doesn't have an app available in the app store. That doesn't mean I can't go to the weather underground website and download a program if they have a desktop program. It's just there's not one available through the store. If I just go ahead and try to search for weather, you will see here that I now have a whole bunch of different weather programs available for me to install, all right? Some of them are free, some of them cost money. So I'm gonna go ahead and quick pick a free, here's the weather channel and just go ahead and show you kind of how this works. I have an install button, I have an overview, I have details and I have store reviews and I can scroll up and down here to see a little more information about it. Go ahead and do a quick install. I'm assuming this is not gonna take too long to download here. It's gonna go ahead and up in the upper right telling me that it's installing and then here's a notification. It says, hey, the weather channel was installed. At this point I can run it right from here and let's go ahead and do that and load up the weather channel and it's gonna say, hey, do you want it to automatically figure out where you are? I'm gonna go ahead and do that. I can also add a location and we'll go ahead and do that right now and here's the weather channel app. If I go back to my start menu, what this is going to do by default is it's going to add the new tile for the program I just installed at the end of my start screen. You can notice it's also a live tile. If I right click on that tile, again my menu bar at the bottom shows off. I can unpin it from the start screen. I can uninstall it. I can make it a smaller square or I can turn the live tile off. Or I just don't want it there. Press escape and I can move it around and say put it over here under miscellaneous. One other thing I'm gonna show you real quick while I'm here at the start screen and then I'll check for some more questions is on the start screen you can always still start typing. So you might be wondering, hey, where is the control panel? I don't see an icon for the control panel. Well, I'm just here on the start screen. I'm gonna start typing. And again, it automatically starts a search for me. You can see here I have control panel it also brought up default programs. It found two apps for me, 15 different settings. I mentioned the word control and 46 files that mentioned the word control. And then I can also search these other programs if I want. And if I wanna see my control panel, I can just go ahead and do that. And that brings me up. So where I've gotten now and if I close this, excuse me, don't save that, I am now on my desktop, okay? We still have the desktop. We still have the control panel as I mentioned. I have my clock down here in the bottom right. I have my volume. I have all of my system tray icons. I have my running programs that I can pin to the task bar down at the bottom. Just the biggest difference here is there is no start button in the bottom left-hand side of the screen. So it is kind of a hybrid environment. I wanna stress that. It is kind of an interesting experience. I have my desktop, but I still have my charms. And if I go into settings now, I now have desktop options for my settings, such as general information about the PC. I can personalize it. I can go to the control panel, okay? If I close my control panel, I can still right-click on the desktop and I still have my view and my sort and my new folders, new shortcuts, change my screen resolution, personalize it. All of those options are still available. They're just on this thing called the desktop. Okay, so Pamela's asking a really great question. How long did it take you to become comfortable with the Windows 8? Well, thank you for thinking I'm completely comfortable with it. I wanna start with that because this is the first time I've actually presented it to other people. So if I'm coming across as comfortable, I guess I'm doing my job. So thank you very much for that. Let me, let's see, okay. Before NLA, before conference this last fall, I had a touch screen desktop computer running Windows 8 on my desk for about three weeks. So at that point, I got to really kind of, I wanted to get used to it intentionally with kind of the touch screen. So I almost tried not to use the mouse as much as possible. I used the touch screen as much as I could. I then got this laptop about a month ago. Maybe a little less and immediately installed Windows 8 on it. And I also got my new desktop computer also about a month ago and installed Windows 8 on it. So kind of maybe ignoring those two or three weeks in advance, I would say about a month of just using it. Now I still have my main computer in my office that's running Windows Vista. All the other computers in my house are still running Windows 7. So I'm kind of in that like hybrid environment. I've even got computers running Linux. So but I got comfortable pretty quick. I would say within about a week or two, I was able to do what I needed to do. Now I still have to sometimes look things up. I still have to say, hey, where did they hide that? But that's kind of the minimum. So kind of about a month, I would say. Other questions, do you think it's more dependable than 7 Vista or XP? Oh boy. I'm going to say yes, but don't make me defend that all that much because I'm maybe not sure what you mean by dependable. It's faster. I haven't had a crash yet. It boots really, really fast. So there are some definite benefits to it. If you want to, Ron, maybe explain dependable a little more, you might want to do that. Is touchscreen important to this, Pamela is asking. I would say yes, but not necessary. In other words, what Microsoft is trying to do is trying to create one operating system that works with a mouse, with a keyboard, and with touch. I don't know if you've ever tried to use Vista or 7 on a touchscreen device, but it's awkward. It's not designed for it. This is designed for it. I even have a, I'll try to put a link to it in the show notes when we publish this, but I do have a chart that says, okay, this is what you want to do. Here's how you do it on the keyboard. Here's how you do it on the mouse. Here's how you do it on a touchscreen. Everything you can do, you can do on all three platforms. So it's designed for that, but not required. On my home computer, I got what's called a touch mouse. It's, excuse me, it's shaped just like a mouse, but where you put your two-finger tips to click is actually touch. So I can actually do some on-screen simulation of touch on my mouse. So I have the way of kind of changing what program I'm accessing, which on a touchscreen, you would kind of touch the screen and swipe left or right. I can actually do that on my mouse. You can actually get swipe-enabled touchpads. So if you really want to take advantage of the touching interface without having a touchscreen device, there are peripherals you can do that with, okay? And so those are pretty cool. On this laptop, I've got a regular touchpad which doesn't have the swiping and a regular wheel mouse. And like I said, as you can see, I've gotten used to it pretty quickly. Have you heard about using the start button and X to bring up the control panel and other common commands while on the starts screen? Karen, is that okay? Oh yeah, there are shortcuts. So let me see if I can, I'm gonna go back to the start screen and I think it's winX, okay? This also you can get by clicking in the bottom left-hand corner. This so to repeat, you can click in the bottom left-hand corner, excuse me, right-click in the bottom left-hand corner or do windowsX. And this brings up some administrative features. There's your task manager, your control panel, file explorer, things like that. Again, file explorer still exists, but I'm gonna show you the new one in just a minute. I'm gonna go back to my desktop. I know we have some other questions. Pamela is asking, no problem downloading over Windows 7. No, I actually did the downloadable online install both on this laptop and my home desktop. Now, yes, I was upgrading these machines, but they were brand new machines. I have not done an upgrade to Windows 8 on a machine that has been running Vista or 7 for a couple of years, but the experience should be the same. I had absolutely no problems during the install process. I did have some problems with the purchasing process, but that's a separate issue. I went to the Windows site. I said, I downloaded a little program. It said, hey, these programs are gonna work. These programs are gonna have to be installed. It's called the upgrade assistant. Did the download, did the install, rebooted and I had Windows 8 and the whole thing took maybe half an hour now. So basically it's gonna depend on your bandwidth, but I have done the online install in both cases and worked beautifully. Ron is saying, dependable equals no crashes, moves quickly or easy to use. Excuse me, I have had absolutely no crashes on either machine in the month or so that I've been using them, so zero there. Moves quickly, I am getting excellent response rates or moving really, really well. Though I will stress, these are brand new machines. The laptop is an Ultrabook with an SSD hard drive in it, so that's gonna move fast no matter what you put on it. The new desktop PC I got has like 12 megs of RAM and is a three point something gigahertz. So I am running this equipment on some, or excuse me, Windows 8 on some pretty heavy equipment. The touchscreen device that I ran it on was an older HP that was running Windows 7 and not super duper under the hood and worked great. So basically my understanding is if the hardware can run Vista or 7, you can run Windows 8 and you should actually get noticeable improvements. Excuse me. Darme is asking, what about old PCs running XP? Would they be able to handle Windows 8? I don't know about XP. And as you can hear from my voice, there's some hesitation in there. What any of you wanna do if you're thinking of running an existing computer and installing Windows 8, you get a program called the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant. And what that will do is that will scan your hardware, scan your software and give you a report back that says, this software will work, this software will not work, this software you'll have to reinstall because it won't survive the upgrade and the weather or not the hardware can actually handle the upgrade. So when you say old PC running XP, A, is there an upgrade path? I'm not clear you can actually update or upgrade from Windows XP. You may have to do a clean install. And then if you do a clean install, it's ultimately gonna depend on what sort of hardware is under the hood. Like I said, 99.9% sure anything running Vista or 7 will run Windows 8, no problem. XP gotta be a little more iffy. So check that Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant. Okay, so keep sending in the questions, I will come back and check with some questions more and thank you for having questions because I really wanna answer what you wanna know. All right, let me show you a few more things. I'm gonna go back to the start menu here and I'm gonna go ahead and plug in an SD card. If nothing else, I would have plugged in a flash drive but I'm using all three USB ports on this computer right now. And I'm gonna show you what happens here and so just plug that in, okay, does the little note and then here's one of those notifications in the upper right, okay, it says, hey, you've plugged in an SD card, what do you wanna do when you plug in memory cards because I haven't done it before. So this little window opens up and again, very simplified. If you're familiar with Vista or 7, you'll know that, hey, you've plugged something in, here's the 17 things you can do with it or do you wanna set the default or whatever and basically he's just saying, hey, you've done this for the first time, what do you wanna do with memory cards? Do you wanna import the photos and videos into the photo program? Do you wanna view them? In this case, since I have Dropbox installed, it knows that I have VLC installed or I can just do nothing or I can open the folder to view the files in File Explorer. File Explorer is Windows Explorer. I'm just gonna go ahead and do that and you'll see we have over here, this is, we're back to the desktop and we can just browse those folders and files as anybody else would as you're used to. Ron, I'm just noticing your last question was easy to use. You said no crashes, moves quickly or easy to use. I'm gonna leave the easy to use up to you. I think it's easy to use however I'm not yet installed this on my wife's computer at home. It is different. I personally tend to force myself to adapt because part of my job is adapting quickly so I can help others. Other people may look at this and go, this is insane, this is ridiculous and trust me those reviews are out there. So I'm gonna say I think it's easy to use but it is different, there is a learning curve. Okay, so let's see here. We have about 15 more minutes. I'm gonna go ahead and go back to my Start menu and let me just show you a few other things real quick that are kind of built in and available on Windows. I already kind of showed you the weather program. The calendar program I think is really, really nice. Again, very simplified. In this case, I have hooked it up to my Google calendar so it's automatically syncing all that information. I go ahead and bring up that settings term. I can just go into accounts and you can see here I've hooked it up to my Windows calendar which I don't really use and my Google calendar. Go ahead and add an account and it will pull that information in real quick. Okay, go back to Start, the messaging program. I like the messaging program but, excuse me, it's simplified but it doesn't integrate very well with lots of things at the moment. At the moment, it only works with Facebook messaging and the Microsoft messaging. It doesn't do Google Chat, it doesn't do AOL Instinct Messenger, it doesn't do some of the other IM programs that are out there but it does work pretty well for what it does so like you said here, kind of that simplified interface. The People app, this is basically your online address book which I find pretty cool. It will pull in information if you look in the upper right here. It's got my Microsoft contacts, my Facebook contacts, my Twitter contacts, my LinkedIn contacts and I think if I pull in more as my Google contacts so you can pull in all of your contacts from lots of different sources into this. It also has this What's New and again, because I've linked it to things like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, this is kind of a client that will pull in and show you different information to the people you're following from those different applications. So what Microsoft is trying to do with a lot of these things is pull it all into one place, pull it all into one particular program. Go ahead and go back to my Start menu. Now, something I haven't showed you is actually switching between running programs. And again, there are several ways to do it. I'm an old school keyboard junkie. I like my Alt tab. So if I go into Alt tab here and keep tabby, you can see I can run through the running programs and switch between what's going on here. So if I wanna switch back to the store, I can just go ahead and switch back to the store. I can also use my mouse or my keyboard to pull up kind of the Windows 8 method of switching. Which in this case is if I go to the bottom, excuse me, left of the screen, if you can see all the way to the left-hand side of the screen there, there's kind of little lines showed up. I don't wanna point to them because the moment I point to them, they'll do something. But I'm just gonna take my, I've moved my mouse pointer all the way to the bottom left and now I'm just gonna kind of run it up the left side of the screen. And you can see here, here are the running programs. If you were using a touchscreen device, you would just swipe in from the left-hand side of the screen with a finger and this would show up. And so from here, I can switch back to my calendar. If I do this with the keyboard, I can do Windows tab and tab through. So instead of Alt's tab, I can do Windows tab and bring that up. If I bring that up again, I can right-click on things and I can close them. And what's kind of a little more cool, this is something I have not really played with all that much and I think works a little better on a touchscreen device. If I right-click on this, notice there is snap left and snap right. I'm gonna go ahead and I'm looking at my weather program, but I'm gonna take the people program and tell it to snap left. And what that's gonna do here is it's gonna give me a split screen. And as you can see here, I can actually kind of change it so that that one's bigger and the other one's smaller. So the idea here is that I can, instead of running things at full screen, I can actually run two programs at once and still have the ability to do all those other things. And let's see if I messaging snap right. Now I've got my messaging program running down the right-hand side of the screen or I can snap it to the left-hand side of the screen. So if you have kind of a program you're working in but you wanna keep another program with constantly updating information off to the side, you can do that. Now I will say, and you might have been able to figure this one out, this is really designed for a widescreen device. So if you've still got a square monitor, this might not work nearly as well. So I'm gonna go here and switch to my desktop. And you can see here that I'm now running my desktop but I still have that messaging program going on over on the right-hand side. So if someone wants to chat with me, I can run things on my desktop here and I can still have the chat window open on the right-hand side. All right, looking here, not seeing any other questions. Pamela's saying too bad about chat. Yeah, I'm really hoping that Microsoft will add additional chat features to this. They've definitely integrated Facebook pretty solidly and they obviously want you to use their chat program also. So I'm kind of crossing my fingers on that one. I'd really love to see Google Chat worked into this. All right, let me show you another feature that's kind of cool, that's kind of built into Windows 8 here and that's one of those terms called share. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna open up the NBC News program. I'm also gonna close this out so it takes up the full screen here again. And so this is a program I've installed from the App Store and you can see here I can scroll through and the interface of these new programs I really like. So we've got this article here. First lady gives kids a special thrill for Christmas. By open that up, it actually, and a lot of these programs do this, it's this full screen immersive environment that I can now scroll through here and it's really easy to read. It's web-like but it's not really a webpage and you can go on to the next article. In this case, we've got an embedded video. You can kind of page through it with your scrolling. I'm just really impressed by this style of application. But let's say I wanted to share this. Now I've already told Windows about my LinkedIn account and my Facebook account and my Google email accounts and things like that. So because it knows about that, if I click on the share charm, it's going to give me the ability and to share this out via email, in this case via Evernote or to people because maybe I wanna send it to somebody in particular. So if I go ahead and click on people, it's gonna load up the people program and it's gonna say, okay, do you wanna share it on Facebook or on Twitter? Well, okay, I'm gonna share that on Facebook. So I can type in my own message from Windows 8 as a demo. I can change which picture is being used, send without an image. Can change the text here, it's kind of built in and I just go ahead and click send and it sends it and off it goes. So I didn't have to copy a link, I didn't have to switch over to Facebook, I just sent it right from this application and it knew where to send it for me. So I think that's pretty cool. I have not really taken advantage of it all that much yet. I've been kind of focusing on a lot of other features to Windows 8, but I think that one's pretty cool. Let me go ahead and check questions real quick here. Pamela says, sweet. Yeah, I do like that sharing sort of interface there. All right, let me go back to start and show you one or two more things. Kind of as a side note, Office 2013 is available in a beta mode right now. It's not officially out and it is not an actual Windows app, it's actually a desktop app, but it looks like Windows 8. So let me just give you a quick look and say what the new word looks like. This is what we're coming and so what we've got here is the word 2013 preview. Open it up. We have the recent documents that I've worked on here. We have different kinds of documents that I might want to actually create in here. I'm gonna go ahead and open up this, let's see, open up eBooks training document. And so you're on the desktop. This is a desktop application. I can go ahead and change this down into a smaller window or I can open it back up to the full screen. It has the ribbon across the top, but you kind of get that Windows 8 feel to it. They're kind of hoping that when it comes out it will actually be along the lines of an actual Windows 8 app, but at the moment it is still a desktop app with that Windows 8 feel. So this is kind of where that sort of hybridization between the desktop and the Windows 8 sort of interfaces starts to kind of bump into each other just a little bit. Last thing I want to show you, and if you've got more questions please do that, is another one of these aspects of the hybrid between the two. I'm gonna go ahead and show you Internet Explorer. So I don't have an icon for it. So this is going to be Internet Explorer 10 in, oh, Windows mode. This is where things get really, really interesting. And probably a better way to show you this is I'm actually gonna launch Chrome, because Chrome is my default browser. Browser is this weird area in Windows 8 at the moment. So let me launch Windows 8. And as you can see here, Windows 8 is running full screen as if it is a Windows 8 application. It's not running on the desktop. You can install multiple browsers in Windows 8. So I actually have Internet Explorer, which came with it, Firefox and Chrome. But only the default browser can run in the Windows 8 full screen mode. So notice when I launched Windows, or excuse me, Internet Explorer, it came up as a window on the desktop. But when I launched Chrome, it came up as a full screen application. But in these cases with browsers, you can actually switch between the two. So in Chrome, if I actually go here to its settings menu built in, okay, and change it to relaunch Chrome on the desktop, what that's going to do is it's going to exit the Windows 8 mode, and it's going to relaunch it as a regular old window on the desktop like you would be used to. And now we can maximize it, and we can make it smaller and rearrange it however we want. If I want to put it back, I just can choose relaunch Chrome in Windows 8 mode. And you'll see there after a couple of seconds. So Ron, you were wondering if I could crash this thing. I might just have, okay, I have not crashed Windows, but I seem to have crashed Chrome. So there you go, it's not perfect. So what I'm going to do here is I just need to close Chrome. And then let's see if I can run it again. There we go. And it didn't close correctly, so please restore all my tabs. Internet Explorer, let me show you this real quick, is really different. If you're concerned about a learning curve, if you used to Chrome and you just looked at Chrome even in the full screen mode, it still works like Chrome. If I set this as my default browser and it says, okay, what do you want it to be? I want it to be Internet Explorer. And when Internet Explorer launches in full screen mode, it's different. I mean, you've got no menus at the top, you have got no address bar at the top, nothing. It is in full screen mode. Here's my scrolling. How do I get to an address bar? Right click, okay? And when you right click, if there's not a menu, the menu will show up. And in this case, now here's my address bar. Here is, I can pin this site to the start menu. I can go to another website such as libraries.ini.gov and there is that full screen again, okay? Over on the left, this is my back button and then over on the right will be my forward button, okay? This thing is different. So if you are an Internet Explorer user and you want to keep using Internet Explorer, which I'm not saying you or don't, I'm just, I'm not an IE user. IE 10 in Windows 8 is very different. So this might be the single biggest hurdle you have to get over. All right, so Firefox, Pat was asking, yes, you can install Firefox. I will just launch that here. And again, it is not my defaults, no. So it does run in a Windows mode. It is completely available, completely compatible. We'll do everything that Firefox does on your existing machines. So that also works. So we are coming up on 11 o'clock. That is a very fast tour of Windows 8 and kind of hitting the highlights as to what is out there that is available. So my defaults are all screwed up now. Oh yeah, IE is my default. So we're now back to running Chrome with a window on the desktop. So are there any other questions or comments about Windows 8 that you may have? I'm glad you all had so many. It was, I was really hoping you would have some questions that I could answer for you. If any other questions come in, as I'll kind of wrap it up, I will happily stay on the line to answer those. But seeing no other questions coming in the moment, I do want to thank everybody for taking this hour to spend some time with us here. And yes, Darme, it is cold here. It's right about single digits still at the moment. Six degrees according to the clock across the street. So thank you all for attending. I want to remind you that we do have some upcoming episodes of Encompass Live. And this is not the screen I wanted to be on. So excuse me, there we go. Next week, Chris and I will be on the line to talk about 23 things the next generation. That'll be on January 2nd. On January 9th, we have a show Internships Cultivating Nebraska's Future Librarians. And then on January 16th, Day in the Life of the Scholarship Student Conference at 10D. So it sounds like we got some very interesting sessions coming up. Don't know what my tech talk will be in January quite yet. Got some ideas, but need to get some people back from the holidays before I can get them scheduled. Crystal also, I'm sure appreciate me reminding you that we do have an Encompass Live Facebook page that you're welcome to like us on and follow along. We post upcoming shows there and when the recordings come out and things like that. So if you're a Facebook user, go ahead and like us and follow us there. So with that, don't see any other questions. Thank you all for attending. I'm gonna go ahead and wrap this up and thank you very much. And if you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a line and we'll get this recording up in a day or two and good luck with Windows 8. Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.