The Electric Wand

Weekly tips from the "Tip o' the Week" email distribution inside of Microsoft.
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The Electric Wand

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  • Outlook Thread Compressor download now available

    Posted over 5 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of...

  • Tip o’ the Week #183 - Screen Grabs on Windows 8.1

    Posted over 1 year ago
    by EwanD}
    If you’ve taken the plunge and updated to Windows 8.1 , you may have spotted a mix of improvements (like the updated Search pane behaviour which needs a little getting used to, but works well) , and some funnies (compatibility issues with IE11, internal...

  • Tip o’ the Week #173 – LinkedIn Contacts in Outlook

    Posted over 1 year ago
    by EwanD}
    This week’s tip focuses on the power of LinkedIn . Some people use it as their system of managing customer and partner contacts. Some find new employment by schmoozing their network – some even use it as the launchpad for their next career. Hands up who...

  • Tip o’ the Week #239 – OneNote templates

    Posted 4 months ago
    by EwanD}
    As we’ve covered on ToW before , OneNote is an application that attracts legions of fans like few other productivity apps. The average user probably snips and clips, pastes and types into their OneNote notebooks, but may not realise the depths of functionality...

  • Tip o’ the Week #238 – quiet hours on Windows Phone 8.1

    Posted 5 months ago
    by EwanD}
    The time of year has rolled around where many of us are travelling – maybe time for a last, late Summer Holiday . Now, if you take your phone on vacation, you’ll know how important it is not to have colleagues phoning you up in the middle of the night...

  • Tip o' the Week #153 - Lync 2013 shortcuts

    Posted over 2 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Happy New Year! On the topic of Year (2013) and New, the Lync 2013 client introduced a whole load of new UI functionality compared to the previous release; for details of what’s new, check out the What’s new in Lync 2013 post on the Lync team blog. One...

  • Streaming music at home

    Posted over 1 year ago
    by EwanD}
    Those of us who like the idea of streaming music around our homes have a plethora of technologies available to make it a reality. Sadly, all of them – at least all the ones which work well – are proprietary and have some degree of “lock...

  • Tip o' the Week #223 – Clear your inbox

    Posted 9 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Some people live a disciplined existence and manage to keep a very tidy desk, their to-do list at the end of each day is empty, and their inbox is clean. Many others aspire to be so organised but either convince themselves that they’re too busy to tidy...

  • Tip o’ the Week #219 – OneNote takes flight

    Posted 8 months ago
    by EwanD}
    In case you missed it, OneNote had some interesting news a few months ago. The application has a great following amongst fans who crave being organised (at least some GTD aficionados too) , more so than maybe any other application (even Outlook). If you...

  • Tip o’ the Week #228 – Lync Q&A

    Posted 6 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Presumably, we’ve all been on a Lync conference call where there may be a presentation going on and in parallel to the voice conversation, there’s a rampant side-channel of IM traffic which the presenter has no chance of keeping up with or maybe even...

  • Tip o’ the Week #211 – Manage your battery on WP8

    Posted 10 months ago
    by EwanD}
    The world – at least if you listen to ex-PayPal squillionaire Elon Musk – is destined to move from fossil-fuel-fired transport to electric vehicles that might be charged by the power grid rather than carrying around their own means of energy conversion...

  • Tip o’ the Week #44 – Making Outlook show only email from external senders

    Posted over 3 years ago
    by EwanD}
    This tip came about after one reader asked if there was any way to highlight email, in Outlook, that came from a set of external addresses [in short, it kind-of is, but it’s not so straightforward] . There’s a more universally useful tip lurking...

  • Tip o’ the Week #229 – Cortana, let’s rock!

    Posted 7 months ago
    by EwanD}
    (Another slightly out-of sequence tip as this could be more timely now than in a few weeks) One of the most written-about and eagerly-awaited features in the soon-to-appear Windows Phone 8.1, is Cortana – the “digital assistant”, named after the character...

  • Tip o’ the Week #227 – Moving around Outlook

    Posted 7 months ago
    by EwanD}
    What’s the most-used application on your PC? Maybe it’s your web browser (IE, of course), but if you’re a corporate email slave like many of us, then it’s quite likely to be Outlook. As you spend so much time in the application, it’s worth getting to...

  • Tip o’ the Week #30 – Sending emails from the past

    Posted over 3 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Following on from ToW #9 , regarding delaying sending email, this week’s episode was asked for by another reader, since he eagle-eyed-ly spotted that the email was send on one date but didn’t arrive in his inbox until a week later. Aha...

  • Tip o’ the Week #241 – Where did that email come from?

    Posted 4 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Most people don’t really pay much attention to where emails originate from or how they got to be in your inbox. This is clearly exploited by scammers and spammers of all sorts, as many consumers will happily click on a link in a genuine- looking email...

  • Tip o’ the Week #220 – Wireless networking, 15 years on

    Posted 8 months ago
    by EwanD}
    It’s amazing how quickly technology goes from an expensive frippery to a cost-insignificant near-essential. It’s not so many years ago that WiFi and Bluetooth first arrived (remember the Ericsson T29 or T68 , the latter of which not only had a COLOUR...

  • Tip o' the Week #235 - Present on Lync

    Posted 5 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Tip o’ the Week #111 covered how to present within a Lync meeting. Given that it was 2+ years ago and many things have changed in that time, not least the version of Lync many of us use, here’s a chance to revisit the topic. Anecdotal evidence suggests...

  • Tip o' the Week #231 – Linking LinkedIn and Outlook, look!

    Posted 6 months ago
    by EwanD}
    LinkedIn has been going for over 11 years and has resurged in user base and usefulness after seemingly getting really popular initially, and then fading a bit (remember Friends Reunited , anyone? – somebody should come up with Fiends Reunited.com , though...

  • Tip o’ the Week #221 – Stay safe on WiFi

    Posted 8 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Following last week’s misty-eyed retrospective on WiFi and Bluetooth , it’s worth pausing a little to pass on a few safety tips too. If you’ve a WiFi network at home which does not have encryption enabled (using a decently strong password – known as a...

  • Thread Compressor for Outlook - do you want it?

    Posted over 7 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Here's an appeal - nearly 8 years ago, I wrote* a little COM addin for the-then new Outlook 2000, which "compressed threads". The idea was that it could take an email thread (eg a discussion over a period of time and a number of responses, from any number...

  • Tip o’ the Week #29 – Filtering email to reduce the noise

    Posted over 3 years ago
    by EwanD}
    Anyone who gets lots of email will appreciate the importance of Outlook rules. Most rules run on the Exchange server, but some (like rules which move messages to a PST folder on your PC) will run client-side. In Outlook 2010, the Rules settings are available...

  • Tip o’ the Week #225 – Surveys R Us

    Posted 7 months ago
    by EwanD}
    Have you noticed an increase in online surveys asking if you have a few minutes to complete them, when you visit web sites? Do you duck & dive when walking along the street and are confronted by a just-a-little-too-friendly student in high-vis and...

  • Tip o' the Week #200 – Top Ten Greatest Hits

    Posted over 1 year ago
    by EwanD}
    If I was to ever write a style guide for these Tip o’ the Week emails, it would say to never use the first person, and to maintain a degree of relatively irreverent humour that hopefully makes it easy to read and not get in the way of the content. When...

  • Tip o’ the Week #214 – Trouble connecting Outlook at home?

    Posted 9 months ago
    by EwanD}
    If you see Outlook behaving strangely while working at home, there are a few things you might want to try. Symptoms include steadfastly refusing to connect to the server, even though everything else appears to work fine. Or connecting fine for email but...