Ask Paul: March 12 (Premium)

One year ago this week, we were shutting down for “two weeks” because of the pandemic. Well, Happy Friday, everyone. Things are looking up.

This week in March 2020, my kids were off in Jamaica helping a church group make improvements at a school for the deaf. Richard Campbell was in town visiting, and we took him around the area, and he got to see our favorite restaurants and other haunts. And then the lockdown happened. Richard ended up having to leave like a thief in the night so he could get home to British Columbia while there were still available flights, and he barely made it. My kids flew home to a world in which school had been canceled, we thought, for 10 days. Instead, my daughter never returned to school, never had a prom, and had a sort-of graduation outside with no crowds, months late, that was a quick drive-through affair. The world had changed.

This week, Spring is in the air, my first vaccination appointment is scheduled for Tuesday, and there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I can’t wait for the world to return to, if not normal, then to something close to normal. Whatever. I feel good about the future, finally. What a crazy, crazy year.
Dark mode
ChrisG101 asks:

On WW713 you had a great discussion about dark mode on Windows. I wanted to know what dark mode browser add-in you use and if it works well with Office 365 web apps? I've had mixed experiences with Dark Reader. Midnight Lizard seems better but has way too many options so wonder if there are better alternatives.

I am using Dark Reader. It’s not perfect, of course, but displaying the web in a dark mode is so key for me because my eyes are very sensitive to light, and it’s easy enough to toggle.

I don’t really use the Office Web Apps, but looking at this now, what I see is actually pretty close to the new Dark mode in Word for Windows (which I love).
From Windows to the Store
wright_is asks:

You mentioned on Windows Weekly that some of the built-in apps would disappear in coming versions (I think the discussion was around Paint and Notepad?) and that they would migrate to the Store.

So the good news is that the apps that are heading to the Store are Paint 3D and 3D Viewer (not Paint and Notepad, though it’s probably valid to wonder about them going forward). These are apps that are used by only some tiny minority of users, and along with getting rid of the default 3D Objects folder in Explorer, those removals go a long way towards ending the silliness of the “Creator Update” years.

How will business users get hold of these standard apps? The App Store is often disabled by policy, so no apps, no updates. If it wasn't delivered with Windows, you don't get it and if it was, but it is updated through the Store, it won't get updated. I had a user recently, where the Calculator mysteriously disappeared. The only way to get it back, in the end, was a complete re-install of Windows - command line tricks didn't work, because t...