Clearly Microsoft Teams is a significant application than can effectively make working from home more productive.
To better understand how and why and when to use Microsoft Teams, I ran my topic search process to explore the various aspects of Microsoft Teams as well as gathering a collection of resources related to Microsoft Teams.
My topic search report begins with a list of search strings which are then passed individually to Google Search.
The resulting Google source page is captured and parsed for each search string.
There are three sub reports that are extracted from the Google source page:
Landing page for each discovered URL
Title for each discovered URL
List of Google suggested search terms
Once the list of search terms has been processed, then a secondary process is executed to aggregate the collection of sub reports that were generated for each of the input search terms.
The composite reports are presented here.
Collection of URLs – landing pages listed by the number of occurrences for the individual search strings. Scanning this list of landing pages can bring to light new resources. Note that since this is PDF document – each URL is a hyperlink. Some of the links listed in the search string count PDF may not function because I have prefixed “www.” to the landing URL. This prefix may need to be removed.
Collection of Direct URLs – details of each discovered URL, giving its title and identifying the search string that returned the URL. Again note this is a PDF document hence the URLs are hyperlinks. Double click and your browser will open to the web page.
When executing a Google search, one is presented with a
statistic that reports the number of results that were found and the time it
took to find them. For example:
This statistic is frustrating because
it shows that there is a whole universe of results out there but only the
smallest fraction of results is presented for examination.
TSRP Topic Search Report Processor
This frustration has motivated me to
develop an Excel-based process that attempts to expand the collection
of search results.
The process is built on two main
ideas:
Formulate a “Composite Topic
Search”
Make use of the Google Search Engine for both “All” and “Image” search choices. This new process supersedes the original GISP reported earlier.
A “Composite Topic Search” is a search that starts with a collection of search phrases that explore various aspect of the topic of interest. The individual search results are then collected and organized into a composite report.
Making the individual search using both the Google All Search and Google Image Search Engines gives an expanded collection of results.
I have joined these ideas together into what I call the Topic Search Report Processor (TSRP)
How to start TSRP – the Topic Search Workbook
The TSRP begins by preparing an Excel Workbook that contains a collection of search phrases or search strings that capture the essence of the desired Topic. A preliminary set of search strings can be extracted from Google.
For example, consider the following topic: how to exchange worksheet data with VBA arrays
After the search string is entered into the Google search box, Google will sometimes display a collection of searches that complement the original search.
Here is a screenshot of the suggested searches:
Using a screen capture tool to copy this list as an image,
one can then take advantage of the OCR functionality that is built into
Microsoft One Note 2016
OCR capabilities are also available within the GreenShot freeware utility. ( http://getgreenshot.org/)
TSRP Reports
Two Important Definitions
Before describing the details of the GISP Reports, there are
two terms that need to be defined.
A Direct URL is a
URL captured by GISP, pointing directly to the web page that was discovered by
GISP.
A Primary URL is the leftmost part of a Direct URL with the html prefix HTTPS:// or HTTP:// removed.
The VBA code to extract a Primary URL from a Direct URL is
as follows:
Reporting Search String Counts
The Search String Counts report shows the effectiveness of each search string.
Note – the information shown here is from an earlier effort that does not reflect the integration of searching Google “All” and Google “Image”
This Topic Search returned 172 Primary URLs.
The first page of the Search String Counts report is shown
here.
All counts greater than or equal to 5 are highlighted.
The three main features of this report are:
It identifies the more effective search strings
and it gives a starting point to expand the Topic Search.
By ranking the Primary URLs from the most
frequently found to the ones that are not frequently visited or not widely
known, it identifies the outstanding resources to study a Topic.
Reviewing the list of Primary URLs and looking
for those that are not frequently visited or not widely known, lead to the
discovery of new resources.
When executing a Google search, one is presented with a
statistic that reports the number of results that were found and the time it
took to find them. For example:
This statistic is frustrating because it shows that there is a
whole universe of results out there but only the smallest fraction of results
is presented for examination.
GISP Google
Image Search Processor
This frustration has motivated me
to develop an Excel/VBA process that
attempts to expand the collection of search results.
The process is built on two
main ideas:
Formulate a “Composite Topic Search”
Make use of the Google Image Search Engine.
A “Composite Topic Search” is a
search that starts with a collection of search phrases exploring various
aspect of the topic of interest. The individual search results are
collected and organized into a composite report.
Making the individual searches
using the Google Image Search Engine returns an interesting collection of
results.
I have joined these two ideas
together into the Google Image Search Processor (GISP).
How to
start GISP – the Topic Search Workbook
GISP begins by preparing an Excel Workbook containing a
collection of search phrases that capture the essence of the desired Topic. A
preliminary set of search strings can be extracted from Google.
For example, consider the
following topic:
how to exchange worksheet data
with VBA arrays
After the search string is
entered into the Google search box, Google can then display a collection of
suggested searches complementing the original search. For example:
Using a screen capture tool to copy this list as an image, one
can then take advantage of the OCR functionality that is built into Microsoft
One Note 2016 to extract the list as text.
OCR capabilities are also
available within the GreenShot freeware utility. (http://getgreenshot.org/)
The GISP Input Workbook for this topic search looks like this:
Note the report title must not
duplicate the search string.
Note also the search strings
shown here could have used advanced Google search constructions.
The first page of the Search String Counts report is shown here.
All counts greater than or equal to 5 are highlighted.
The three main features of this report are:
It identifies the more effective search strings and it gives a
starting point to expand the Topic Search by selecting more search strings.
By sorting the Primary URLs from the most frequently found to
the ones that are not frequently visited or not widely known, it identifies the
outstanding resources to study a Topic.
Reviewing the list of Primary URLs and looking for those that
are not frequently visited or not widely known, lead to the discovery of new
resources.
alfred-excel-vachris 