Newsletter Archives

• Windows Terminal arrives?

  Posted on February 26, 2024 at 02:42 CST by Will Fastie • Comment in the Forums

  WINDOWS 11

  

  By Will Fastie

  Microsoft’s Windows Terminal is not a new thing, but it arrived by stealth in Windows 11. It’s quite a change.

  Windows Terminal is a replacement for the Windows Console that can run any command-line-interface (CLI) app within a tabbed interface. It was developed for Windows 10 and has been around since 2019, but it has suddenly appeared in Windows — apparently with no warning.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.09.0, 2024-02-26).

  Windows 11 Cascadia, CLI, Command Prompt, Consolas, JetBrains Mono, KB5026435, Newsletters, PowerShell, Windows Consoles, Windows Terminal

• Learning to program PowerShell with AI

  Posted on November 6, 2023 at 02:44 CST by Bruce Kriebel • Comment in the Forums

  WINDOWS

  

  By Bruce Kriebel

  The media has been ablaze with headlines shouting that AI will put programmers out of jobs.

  Less discussed is how AI can help professional and even novice programmers learn a new language. An excellent case for this is Windows PowerShell.

  PowerShell is, well, powerful. It’s a great tool for writing scripts, especially special-purpose or time-saving scripts that solve tiny problems in a way that allows customization so that you get the exact result you desired. But PowerShell is very different from the command-line language handed down from the earliest days of MS-DOS. That makes learning it daunting.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.45.0, 2023-11-06).

  Windows AI, Bing Chat, ChatGPT, Google Bard, Newsletters, PowerShell, Scripting

• Why PowerShell?

  Posted on July 17, 2023 at 02:45 CDT by Bruce Kriebel • Comment in the Forums

  

  ISSUE 20.29 • 2023-07-17

  WINDOWS

  

  By Bruce Kriebel

  For nearly 50 years, we’ve all been using the commands that originated from MS-DOS command line interpreter (CLI).

  This wasn’t a bad thing. Even when Windows came along, Microsoft provided a means to get to the CLI (the program cmd.exe) and continued to flesh out its capabilities. I’ll bet nearly everyone reading this has written a simple batch file using those commands.

  But there’s a better alternative.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (20.29.0, 2023-07-17).
  This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

  Windows CLI, Newsletters, PowerShell, PowerShell 7, PowerShell Core, Scripting, Windows

• Using PowerShell to manage Word documents

  Posted on August 22, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by Peter Deegan • Comment in the Forums

  MICROSOFT 365

  

  By Peter Deegan

  PowerShell for Word document management? Yes, of course. That’s something the plain old command prompt can’t handle.

  The more-complex and more-capable PowerShell can open Office apps (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint) to automate the making or editing of documents, sheets, or decks. Command prompt can do basic file management only. (As a little bonus, this article lists the DOS commands that still work in PowerShell.)

  The point of this article is to provide an “entry level” script for performing a basic document-management task. So let’s go through a PowerShell script that can deal with a Word document, while showing off some clever PowerShell commands.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.34.0, 2022-08-22).

  Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365, Newsletters, PowerShell

• How to access Microsoft 365 from PowerShell

  Posted on June 20, 2022 at 02:43 CDT by Peter Deegan • Comment in the Forums

  MICROSOFT 365

  

  By Peter Deegan

  PowerShell can be daunting at first, no doubt about that. But it can be very useful and sometimes essential for managing Microsoft 365, so I’ll explain how to use PowerShell from the very start.

  From the Microsoft 365 Web dashboard, it is difficult (and sometimes impossible) to make certain changes. Only PowerShell can make them, but the online help makes a lot of assumptions and isn’t easy for beginners to understand.

  Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (19.25.0, 2022-06-20).

  Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365, Newsletters, PowerShell

• Win10 version 1803 shoots PowerShell dropdown list

  Posted on May 14, 2018 at 15:02 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  I’m still amazed at how many bugs are floating around.

  If you’re in the Windows Insider program, I recommend that you look at Thomas G’s feedback and vote it up:

  When using commands, PowerShell no longer shows a list of suggestions of commands (dropdown list).

  It just shows a . below the command as if it’s unable to open the list.

  Windows Patches/Security PowerShell, Win10 1803

• If you’ve used the Windows command line,or ever futzed with a BAT file, you’re ready to learn PowerShell

  Posted on October 3, 2016 at 05:26 CDT by woody • Comment in the Forums

  Amazingly powerful and easy to catch on.

  InfoWorld

  Other PowerShell