Published: Wed, 27 Nov 2024 18:39:51 -0800
The first issue I took care of today at work was one we semi-frequently run into. A student was unable to access a document because his personal MS account did not have a MS 365 subscription. Fortunately the school provides one through the student's school email. Unfortunately, on MS websites, if you are on Windows, it will use the account you are signed in to on your computer under by default. This kinda makes sense. However, even when you select your other account, IT WILL STILL USE THE DEFAULT ONE. This is such a pain, telling them to select their school account only for it to make no difference! We've had success setting up a different chrome profile where they never sign into their personal account, and it mostly works, but when we get a call regarding this sort of issue (or most issues actually), the person is not tech savvy and so you have to struggle through walking them through making one, hoping they didn't do anything wrong, or just have them open an incognito window each time.
The second issue came up immediately after I got off the phone with the student. A new staff member couldn't view a particular folder in our network drive. She simply wasn't added to the list of users who could view it, no biggie, that makes sense. The issue was that when you typed the path to it, instead of saying something like "Hey this is a restricted folder, you can't see it, punch sand" or something like that, it said the folder did not exist. Fortunately it didn't take long to troubleshoot because I had my admin account to verify that the folder indeed existed and it was straight-forward enough to add her to it.
The third issue was assisting one of our elderly faculty members with getting her personal laptop set up so she could use it for entering in attendance and viewing her work email. Fortunately another tech had set it up for her months ago, it was just that the time and date somehow thought we were in June and so all the TLS certificates were invalid. The old turning the auto-set time and date setting on and off again didn't work and so I just manually set them, and prayed it won't drift too much while it's still my responsibility. However getting her logged into everything was made all the worse with MS's stupid MS Authenticator for MFA. With every other MFA authenticator, you're able to have it either text you a code or set up a third party MFA app, But not MS, no that would be too good of them. No you have three times that you can use a text code before they force you to download their app, and you have to enter in a two-digit code each time, no simple "Verify login" button like Duo or Google's MFA through gmail. This sweet little old woman was struggling to tell the difference between a browser window and the start menu. I don't think she'll ever be able to log into her work email without a ticket to IT, which she can't send because she can't log into her email! Does nobody at MS have any older, non-tech-savvy relatives? Can they not see how forcing them to install an app on a phone they barely know how to work is just going to cause headaches? Are they not allowed to use modern tech?
The fourth issue I can't fully blame MS for. For whatever reason one of the departments uses excel to build their documents. I don't understand why, but they do and I'm not going to tell them to just use Word, and definitely not LaTeX or markdown. Well one of them was having an issue where the top of the text of one paragraph was being cut off because the paragraph before it was too long. Even though there was a solid third of the page that was still available and blank, Excel decided to put it on top. Of course there weren't too many good solutions online, because all of them were for formatting the cells in the application and not in printing, but adding a newline above the cut off paragraph fixed it, even if that's a little janky.
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