Category: OneDrive

Bing Rewards members have a great new freebie from Microsoft.  Now through the end of February members can simply click a button and get 100GB of free OneDrive storage for the next two years.  No complicated application process.  No endless hoops to jump through.  Simply click the OneDrive offer button on the Bing Rewards page and the 100GB is yours free for two years.

The assumption of course is that you are a Bing Rewards member and you have a OneDrive account.  So, if for some reason you are not, here

Bing Rewards 100GB Free OneDrive Storage

are links for you to join.

First, to join Bing Rewards, visit this link.  If you aren’t familiar with Bing Rewards, it’s a simple program that allows you collect points which you can then use for free rewards from Microsoft.  The more you search the more you earn.

Second, to get a OneDrive account, visit this link.  A free account gets you 15GB of storage (Unlimited if you also have an Office 365 account) so you see the value.  Straight away you will have 115GB of cloud storage you can access from your Windows PC, Tablet, Phone as well as your iOS, Android and Mac devices.  Plus, you will get another 15GB of storage if you automatically upload photos from your smartphone’s camera to OneDrive.

The key is that you have to do this before February 28, 2015 to get this extra storage.

One of the most powerful and handy apps for enterprise users of Windows Phone, Office Lens, has been updated with the ability to send your photos of documents and whiteboards directly to PDF.  The update, version 1.4.3727.0 for those keeping score at home, allows those PDFs to have selectable text and can be saved directly to your OneDrive account for safe keeping.

If you aren’t familiar with it, Office Lens for Windows Phone allows you to snap a photo of a flip chart, wallboard or piece of paper from virtually any angle and it will straighten it and to give you a front looking view.  It’s one of those PFM (Pure Frickin’ Magic) apps because when you see it in action for the first time, you’ll be blow away.

Office Lens for Windows Phone – Free – Download Now

Microsoft has made an important and powerful update to the Outlook.com platform that allows you to save email attachments directly to your OneDrive folder.  The update was quietly rolled out to some users over the weekend but is now available to all users and is a powerful step forward for the online email service.

On the OneDrive User Voice blog, Microsoft Program Manager Casey Penk has confirmed that offline file access is coming to OneDrive for Windows Phone.  While no official timeline was given on when users can expect this feature, the official-unofficial announcement is great news for Windows Phone users of the Microsoft cloud storage service.

If you are like me, one think you get use to in Windows 8.1 is how your Start screen is configured on your PC.  With a swipe to the left or right, I know exactly where certain apps are located that I access, making my user experience certainly more personal but equally faster for me day-to-day.

As I posted earlier in the week, I picked up a Toshiba Encore 2 tablet on Black Friday.  You can read my first impressions of the Encore 2 here on the site but now that I have two Windows 8.1 devices, the ability to sync my settings across my devices has finally come to age for me.  The settings have always been there as a part of OneDrive but they are a bit buried and if you aren’t using multiple devices, there isn’t much of a point (although you can sync your theme colors to your Windows Phone).  This is a small but powerful feature as it immediately allows you to have the same computing experience with the Start screen on any of your devices.  In this How To I will show you how to sync your PC settings across your Windows devices using this small but powerful feature in your OneDrive settings.

OneDrive has been in the news a lot this past week with the expansion to unlimited storage in the service for those who subscribe to Office 365.  That expansion has already started with many users, including me, seeing totals of 10TB of storage available to them now.  With that added storage space, now the question is how to get as much of your content into OneDrive as possible for safe keeping and for easy access, especially photos and videos.

One challenge users may encounter however is limited disk space on their PC when it comes to moving all of that data.  Let me give you an example.  I run Windows 8.1 Pro on my MacBook Pro (non-Bootcamp, straight up Windows baby) and I have a 256GB SSD hard disk in it.  My photos and videos top out at 286GB which, simple math says, is bigger than 256GB.  That means if I wanted to copy photos over I would have to do one of two things:  Drag-and-drop folders of pictures onto my hard disk, wait for them to sync, then designate them as offline only.  It works but it is clunky.  Or two, move my OneDrive folder to an external disk.  Fortunately this is pretty easy to do in Windows.