In this article, we’ll cover how you can build your own customized 3D tour with no code using Bing Search.  This is a great way to share your local points of interest (like the stunning Burj Al Arab – warm sun bathing photo taken two days ago my frigid friends) with friends and family. This is particularly helpful if you moved halfway across the globe and need to fly friends shortens a 12 hour flight into 12 seconds.  Let’s explore how I created my own Bing collection to fly my NYC friends to Dubai and back.

Build a 3D Tour of your favorite POI (not the kind you eat in Lanai)

• Go to Bing.com – sign in with your live ID (this way you can save all the customization into your account)
• Click on the Maps tab
• Type in : Dubai Marina (or whatever neighborhood you call home)
• Change the view to be Aerial Satellite

Fred lives Underwater (no, not a new band)

• Here you have two options to add a point of interest (POI).
  1. Zoom and pan around until you get to a point of interest. For me, I choose the Burj Al-Arab. OR
  2. If your POI is something fairly well known, it is easier to load the lists create by other users. In the left hand side, click on the link for “Explore user-contributed places” The results will include news, Wiki articles, and other URLs contributed by users. Like our friend Fred, who apparently lives under water. You will see pushpins next to these points and you can adopt them as your own by clicking on the pushpin link.  Once you do that, a small window opens up with more information and metadata about the POI. From there you can click on the Save button to save it to your own personal collection (Again, you need to be signed in first, in order to see this option).
  3. Keep adding POIs until you are satisfied with your list.

Create a custom Tour

• Create a custom itinerary or tour, by adding several POIs to My Places Editor. Each time you save a location, it gets added to your list.
• Click on the My Places button to create new lists and tours by clicking on the “New List” button.
• You can also import and explore other people’s lists. 

Fly first class with Photosynths

• You also have the option to filter the user contributions by toggling the options at the top of the list. You can choose only to see items with photos, 3D buildings, MapCruncher, or Photosynthwhich enables you to combine multiple photos into one first person type view, as you can see by visiting Times Squareor by visiting the observation deck of the tallest building in the world, Burj Khalifa

Create a 3D tour to fly your friends to Dubai

• After you are satisfied with the order of the locations in your list, close the My Places editor and select the Actions drop down button. Now you are ready to fly your friends over by creating a 3D tour. Choose the “Tour & make videos in 3D” link .
• When you play the tour, the globe will spin as your friends fly over to visit.
• When the video plays, the user flies from spot to spot. You can even customize the flying behavior to include panoramic spin around and speed up or slow down the animations.  Hit  the “Go To” Play button when you and change the drop down from Asli’s favorite building to Home in New York to fly from Dubai to New York in 12 seconds.
• You can right click on a pushpin in the map and choose Edit, and then modify the behavior of the 3D animation in the 3D Tour tab. You can change the viewpoint – to be from ground level or above or circle a building clockwise. You can do this for each POI and really create a unique experience for your friends and family.
• When you are ready, you can share your map via link or email.  

Most of us at Microsoft spend most of our time in Outlook and the flow of email sometimes can get overwhelming. Categories, Rules and Alerts are one way to prioritize the flow. You can take this one step further and color code your inbox as such:

Outlook 2010 moved the location for Automatic Formatting. Although I had set this up on my previous machine, today when my teammate, MM asked me where it was, it took me a bit of time to remember.  Instead of Tools, Options, it is now located under the View menu. Click on the View Settings menu to begin.

Click the Conditional Formatting button

You can change any of the existing ones for Unread messages (bold), Expired messages (strike through). Or you can add your own. Let’s do that! Click the Add button.

Now you need to add “rules” or in this case they are called – conditions. Click the condition button. In my case, I want to change the “Where I am” option. I choose the “on the To line with other people” option. You can create as many of these as you would like.

Select a formatting font for these messages – Click on the Font button and then adjust the settings for the Font. In my example, I opted to see any emails that have me in the To with other people as red:

Now I can see any email sent directly to me in red:

A fun one to add is “Not to me” – I code those in light grey. This takes a bit more advanced work to set up.  Follow the same steps as above, and after you click on the Condition button, instead of selecting “Where I am” choose Advanced. Then in the Fields box, select All Mail Fields and pick To.  And another criteria that uses the CC field and doesn’t contain your name. Then select “doesn’t contain” and type in your name. For Font, choose Silver.