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Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #259 – Manage your Christmas Cards in Outlook

EwanD

Happy New Year ! For many of us, time to chuck out trees, and pack away any and all decorations, never to be seen again until December ‘15. Before you recycle the cards you may have received over the holiday season, here’s a quick way of using Outlook to make the job of sending your cards that bit easier...

on 2 Jan 2015
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #251 – Toasting a new email message

EwanD

You got a new email – hurray! Back in the early days of using email, it was expected practice for your email program to play you a little fanfare, pop up a message box to tell you that you’ve got mail, put an envelope in your system tray etc. In the last decade, nobody in most companies needed to know...

on 21 Nov 2014
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #231 – Linking LinkedIn and Outlook, look!

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 there are many such strange things already on...

on 25 Jul 2014
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #227 – Moving around Outlook

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 know how to move around it a little more efficiently...

on 27 Jun 2014
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #223 – Clear your inbox

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 everything up, or they try hard but just don’t quite...

on 18 Apr 2014
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #214 – Trouble connecting Outlook at home?

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 hanging when you need to do something “real time...

on 4 Apr 2014
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #212 – Filing and piling of email

EwanD

The topic of filing vs piling of email has been had on ToWs passim ( here & here ) , but this week’s gem comes courtesy of a recommendation by productivity guru Tim Pash . Tim says he couldn’t live without a cracking utility which plugs into Outlook, called SimplyFile . The premise is very simple...

on 21 Mar 2014
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #135 - Outlook 2013 Calendar first look

EwanD

You may have seen news of Office 2013 (aka “Office 15”) , and if you’re a committed early adopter, you might even have started using the preview. It’s possible to run Office 2013 alongside an existing install of Office 2010 using “ Click To Run ” application virtualisation technology, so there’s perhaps...

on 31 Aug 2012
Blog Post: Using Outlook Search Folders to filter only external mail

EwanD

Following on from my recent post about search folders, I got a few questions and comments via mail. One, from Christian, asked if it was possible to use a search folder to filter out only mail which came from "outside" - eg Only show me the last day's mail from external senders , thus filtering out all...

on 9 Jan 2007
Blog Post: Outlook 2010 beta and E.164 number format updater

EwanD

Well hello again; it’s been a while. Normal service should now infrequently resume. I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “ Contacts updater ” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant. (see blogs passim...

on 7 Oct 2009
Blog Post: The lost art of the .sig

EwanD

Whatever happened to elaborate and amusing '.sig's? It used to be common practice to have a signature with some kind of witty/pithy quote appended at random to every email. Nowadays, the autosignature that most email programs can insert (such as Outlook's ability to have multiple autosigs , which vary...

on 30 May 2007
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #1– New Mail desktop alerts

EwanD

In an attempt to resurrect this blog (again… I know, I know…), I’ve decided to repurpose some “Tip o’ the Week” emails that I’ve written and published for an internal Microsoft audience. Some of the internal ToW’s are very specific to Microsoft so I’ll probably skip them. Others will need polishing up...

on 31 Dec 2010
Blog Post: The lost art of the OOF

EwanD

Some time ago, I posted about how the ".sig" has faded from grandeur. I'd like to add the somewhat terminal dryness of the OOF message to that list, and propose a solution. OOF is a Microsoft term for Out of Office. It should really be OOO, but is stuck in the days of the predecessor to MS...

on 30 Dec 2007
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #184 - ActiveSync account limits

EwanD

Various people have commented on issues they’ve had whilst setting up new PCs, especially after the upgrade to Windows 8.1 Preview. The upgrade process is a lot like a reinstall which happens to remember a bunch of settings, and one of the side effects is that it sets up the Mail (and associated Calendar...

on 16 Aug 2013
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #37 - Quickly create a new task

EwanD

If you’re super-efficient and use Outlook’s tasks functionality a lot, here’s a tip that might help you create a new task in double-quick time. Obviously, you can create tasks directly from Outlook itself (clicking on the New Items ribbon menu option, by pressing CTRL-N when you’re in the Tasks view...

on 17 Jun 2011
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #81 – I’m Late!

EwanD

We’ve all had that feeling when you just know you aren’t going to make it in time for your next meeting… You know, you’re in Building 1 and the meeting’s at the top of Building 5, or you’re stuck in traffic, or in another meeting that’s already running over and isn’t going to end any time soon..? Obviously...

on 9 Dec 2011
Blog Post: Business continuity – it’s a people thing, not just a premises one

EwanD

I had a really interesting discussion with a customer last week, when we were musing over the effects that the snow had on UK businesses. It was another example – like the floods which have hit parts of the country over the last few years – of a threat to business continuity which it’s easy to overlook...

on 12 Feb 2009
Blog Post: Office 2007 SP2 now available

EwanD

I’ve been beta testing Office 2007 SP2 since the beginning of the year, and it’s been great – the single biggest reason to use it is the myriad improvements made to Outlook, in terms of stability & performance (particularly relating to search and to startup & closedown). Download Office 2007...

on 28 Apr 2009
Blog Post: Keep the Item count in your mailbox low!

EwanD

I've been doing a little digging today, following a query from a partner company who're helping out one of their customers with some performance problems on Exchange. Said customer is running Exchange 2000, and has some frankly amazing statistics... ... 1000 or so mailboxes, some of which run to over...

on 9 Aug 2007
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #159 - Avoiding breakers on the side

EwanD

What’s that you say? A Breaker on the Side ? Well, Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, no self-respecting furry-dice-toter would be without their Chicken Box in their Roller Skate . The radio was channel-based, and though the users could agree to move a conversation onto a specific channel, there...

on 15 Feb 2013
Blog Post: Bulk update Outlook Contacts' phone numbers to be E.164 compliant

EwanD

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly important once you get into using click-to-dial...

on 30 Nov 2007
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #143 – Share your calendar externally

EwanD

Organising our home lives is increasingly done digitally, from keeping in touch with friends and making arrangements over social networking, to just the basics of communicating intra-family – how many readers have multiple laptops or <cough> “ tablet type devices ” (soon to be Surfaces for Microsofties...

on 26 Oct 2012
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #16: All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

EwanD

Even the best of us make common typos – “teh” instead of “the”, “Exchnage” instead of Exchange etc. Microsoft Word’s Autocorrect feature has mopped up a lot of the common ones – have a look if you’re interested, from the File Menu/BackStage in Word 2010, under Options… The same options can be accessed...

on 18 Feb 2011
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #99 - Is your hard disk just "on"?

EwanD

One frustrating aspect of a modern PC is when it seems to slow down inexplicably, even when it's not obviously busy. Sometimes that could be evidenced by the hard disk light flickering a lot of the time, or in extreme cases, solidly lit up. There are a number of reasons why this could be the case - here...

on 24 Feb 2012
Blog Post: Thread Compressor for Outlook - do you want it?

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 of people, and typically sent to a distribution...

on 24 Apr 2007