I am of the opinion that many people don’t fully use the Windows Live “More” menu. Several of the options on it appear to reproduce the functions available on the left hand side of your Profile page as shown below. This may cause some to conclude they are the same. The truth is, these are quite different.
Here is a simple guide to finding all the comments, notes, guestbook entries, file comments, shared favorite comments and the like. And this will all be pretty much in the same place. Just follow the pictures.
First, from anywhere in Windows Live you can access the “More” menu:
You’ve probably been here before to get to your calendar or to any groups you belong to. Groups is the middle selection above. If you haven’t noticed, it’s now enhanced with group updates. Any group you belong to will show its updates (from others) on the page from “More>Groups” and allow you to go to your group. It’s a very handy addition to Windows Live.
The other two options open summary pages for either SkyDrive or Spaces. SkyDrive is where your photos, shared files and shared favorites live. Your synced personal (private) favorites are also located here. And Spaces is where your customized page is which can include your blog – or your blog can be on its own page.
The thing is, all these things can have comments. And keeping track of these comments can be difficult if you don’t know where to look. Many people spend a lot of time jumping around from one area to another to find new their comments, and some invariably get lost or go unnoticed.
So, click on “SkyDrive” from the menu shown above. A page like the one below will open:
This page tells you about recent activities on your SkyDrive as well as the activities of all the other SkyDrives on your network. Let’s now click on “Recent comments” to open the page shown below:
Here you’ll see a summary of comments on all the files stored in your SkyDrive. I sometimes upload a pdf of a web page or some other document here. This allows others to read it and comment on it almost like it was in a blog by itself. But these comments can be overlooked if you’re not careful. Also note the “View:File comments” link above. We’ll come back to this shortly.
Had you clicked on “Spaces” instead of “SkyDrive” you would see a page similar to this one:
And it has a “Recent comments” too. If you click on it, then a page like the one below opens:
And this page gives comments from each of your blogs and your Guestbook. But the real trick is clicking that link I pointed out before. Clicking the link for “View:Spaces comments” or “View:Files comments” opens a menu.
This menu is comment central. From here you can select which comments you want to see. You can jump back and forth without having to drill down the menus to get to this page. This is a direct access link to each areas comments pages.
Here is the menu:
From here you can select any of these four options, and the comments you’ll see will be specific to this area of the application. In each section, if there are more comments than room to display them then a direct link to where all the comments are is provided. If you select the “All comments and notes” then you get just that. Everything that was recently commented on appears on this page in chronological order of the most recently commented on items and their comments also in chronological order. You can select the link again to change to a different area to filter the comments. Very handy!
So, now you can find all your comments no matter where they’re buried!
