The Electric Wand

Weekly tips from the "Tip o' the Week" email distribution inside of Microsoft.
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  • Blog Post: Tip for finding when an appointment was created

    EwanD
    Here's a tip for when you suspect someone has magicked up an appointment to coincidentally collide with an Outlook meeting request you sent them... In your own calendar (and other people's), you can see when a meeting was scheduled (ie request was sent or created), as well as other facts (like when you...
    on 21 Apr 2008

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #133 - The Art of Cut n' Paste

    EwanD
    Like many concepts in everyday computing, the widely-adopted functionality of Cu t & P aste has its descriptive roots in an antiquated process. A bit like a floppy disk as the “Save” icon, or an envelope for the email/send functions, the scissors used in Cut refer back to the old method of compositing...
    on 24 Aug 2012

  • Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #130 – Searching in Outlook

    EwanD
    Ever since the 3 rd party “ Lookout ” add-in was built for Outlook about 8 years ago, the pilers have inherited the earth. That’s pilers . No connection with Chaka Demus . Research as far back as the early 1980s into how people organise their desks suggested there were “ filers ” – meticulously organised...
    on 10 Aug 2012

  • Blog Post: How to handle URLs with spaces in Outlook, Word etc

    EwanD
    I was talking to a customer earlier today who was envisioning frustrations around using click-to-dial type functionality within OCS, where they'll be copying & pasting phone numbers around. Now if the number is nicely formatted (and E.164 compliant ...) then it won't be problem, but the nearer number...
    on 3 Jul 2007

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #46 - Reduce your influx of Corporate Spam

    EwanD
    We’ve all had unwanted emails from external sources – so-called “Spam”, after the famous Python sketch that featured a café with Spam in every dish on the menu. A further menace is “Corporate Spam”, or stuff that you don’t want, but which originates from within the corporate network. Usually, C-Spam...
    on 15 Jul 2011

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #52 - OneNote on 3 screens & a cloud

    EwanD
    After the first year of ToWs, let’s start the 2nd with a short celebration of a cool feature in OneNote – not revolutionary, but the kind of thing that makes one smile when encountering it – somebody really thought about how OneNote was likely being used. Try typing a sum – like 52x1045= (that’s the...
    on 5 Aug 2011

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #111 - Sharing PowerPoint in Lync?

    EwanD
    If you're regularly part of a Lync call which involves presenting slides, here's some best practice that everyone should know about. In a nutshell - don't share your whole desktop to show the PowerPoint slides; don't even share PowerPoint as a single program (something that Lync would allow you to do...
    on 11 May 2012

  • Blog Post: The power of SmartArt

    EwanD
    Careful you say it, " SmartArt ". It's a new capablity in Office 2007 which is designed to make manipulation of graphical representations more easy - you know, instead of a boring list of words, a presentation or document can have more impact if a diagram is used instead. Here's just one example a colleague...
    on 10 May 2007

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #185 - Outlook, offline!

    EwanD
    Previous ToW entries have covered the need to sometimes tell Outlook to pipe down and let you get on with what your job is supposed to be. Where, after all, does it say on your job description, “Sits in front of a screen reading & writing email all day” ? The Pomodoro time management method is one...
    on 23 Aug 2013

  • Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #65 – SharePoint 2010, a starter for 10

    EwanD
    There are many advantages to SharePoint 2010 if you’re coming from 2007, especially from a usability perspective, and there are a few nice tips to get the best out of it. SharePoint guru Jessica Meats provides a couple and will have more in weeks to come… Update your MySite profile & picture Head...
    on 9 Sep 2011

  • Blog Post: Outlook Thread Compressor download now available

    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 a thread, and remove all the others. Way back...
    on 11 Apr 2009

  • Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #36 – Using bookmarks in long emails

    EwanD
    “The most valuable of all talents is that of never using two words when one will do.”  ~ Thomas Jefferson Brevity . That’s one, important, word. Better to write a short, thorough email, than to overwhelm with info no-one will ever read (something a few folks in Redmond have yet to appreciate, perhaps...
    on 10 Jun 2011

  • Blog Post: More Office Grooviness

    EwanD
    Whilst mucking about with Word the other day with my buddy Steve, he was talking about the improvements that Word has introduced (common with the other Office 2007 apps) in the way it handles pictures. Let's take a standard looking Word doc... and drag & drop a picture right into the middle of it...
    on 11 May 2007

  • Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #77 – Saving docs straight to SharePoint

    EwanD
    Here’s a simple tip inspired by Luke Debono , who was asking how he could save directly from within an Office application to our departmental SharePoint site, using Office 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010. Now, if you open a document from a SharePoint site then you might get to view/edit it in a browser...
    on 2 Dec 2011

  • Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #110 - Tracking Outlook responses

    EwanD
    Most of us regular Outlook users are well-versed in the Request/Response model of doing things other than email. Take an appointment in your own calendar: add an invited attendee or two, and you've created a meeting . What's different? The meeting invitations were sent out and the list of attendees is...
    on 20 Apr 2012

  • Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #69 – Keep your favourites and Office settings synchronised

    EwanD
    We covered using Windows Live Mesh to synchronise OneNote files between computers in ToW #52 , but overlooked one really simple but useful check-box capability – the ability to sync your IE favourites between PCs, and to sync your Office settings too. Jamie Burgess suggested this would be worth covering...
    on 23 Sep 2011

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

    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! Now, it’s possible in Outlook to set that a...
    on 27 May 2011