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Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #26 – multiple time zones in Outlook Calendar

EwanD

Sometimes you need to create appointments that will make sense when you’re in a different time zone - it helps to use Outlook, Exchange and its phone integration to put relevant stuff in the calendar, so you can make sure you’re in the right place and at the right time. Now there are a couple of ways...

on 6 May 2011
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #19: Navigating multi-sheet Excel workbooks

EwanD

Here’s a quick tip for Excel junkies. If you are using workbooks with many sheets, or where tab names are long, it can take a fair bit of scrolling around at the bottom of the Excel window. If you right-click on the navigation buttons shown to the left of the tabs/sheets, Excel will throw up a list of...

on 11 Mar 2011
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 #101 - Finding files for dialogs

EwanD

How many times a month do you have a file (a picture, maybe, or a document) that you want to upload to some website, or attach to an email. and you know where the file is, but then have to navigate through a dialog box to locate it from within the application? I can sometimes think of 2 or 3 such scenarios...

on 2 Mar 2012
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: Tip o' the Week #145 - Fun with Drag 'N Drop

EwanD

Some things in computing have been around for so long, that it’s hard to envisage or remember a time before them. Take the humble mouse – Mr Scott might not recognise what it’s for , but at least until touch and gestures take over the world, we are all familiar with its basic operation. Doug Engelbart...

on 30 Nov 2012
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 #76 – Have you got the Lync effect?

EwanD

If you’re lucky enough to be using the Microsoft Lync IM & communications platform, it’s worth sharing a few tips on making the Lync client software a little more useful and productive. Let’s kick off with some shortcut keys you might like to try · WindowsKey + Q – Brings the Lync window to the foreground...

on 25 Nov 2011
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #183 - Screen Grabs on Windows 8.1

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 tools like GMOBI or CRM not working so well, etc...

on 9 Aug 2013
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #109 - SkyDrive on the move

EwanD

Everyone should know about SkyDrive - the free Microsoft service that gives users with a Live ID (including MSN, Hotmail etc) a 25Gb storage space online, accessible ostensibly from anywhere? Well, it's just been made more convenient to access SkyDrive files from mobile devices, thanks to SkyDrive Mobile...

on 13 Apr 2012
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #191 – Lync meeting updates

EwanD

Lots of people (including Office365 users) should have been moved to Lync 2013 by now, though the impact may not be all that obvious, since some of us have been using Lync 2013 client for a while, even if the back-end wasn’t running the latest and greatest. Some of the changes will only be apparent when...

on 18 Oct 2013
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #190 – PowerPoint slide picks

EwanD

Everyone in the developed world seems to have been subjected to PowerPoint at some stage. PowerPoint is an unusual tool – one that is immensely popular by the people who use it, and one which invokes shudders amongst some of the victims of bad presentations down the years. One even coined the term...

on 11 Oct 2013
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #10: Navigate Outlook with shortcuts

EwanD

More Outlook tippery this week. Many of these may be familiar to the “ Mouse? Mouse? We don’t need no stinking mouse! ” keyboard fanatics – if you’re a shortcut junkie, think of this as a refresher. Since we spend more time in Outlook than any other application (with the possible exception of the browser...

on 4 Feb 2011
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #40 – monitoring your PC’s innards

EwanD

Everyone can see their PC slow down inexplicably, but getting to the bottom of why can be tricky. It could be an occasional task that’s running (like an update being applied to Anti-Virus software), or perhaps something more sinister is going on – a badly constructed web page causing IE to use up system...

on 1 Jul 2011
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 #104 - Windows 7's clock & date

EwanD

One of the neat little design touches of Windows 7 that changed as a result of usage analysis was the calendar that is shown when you click the clock on your system tray. User feedback taught product designers that in previous versions of Windows, users would often go into the " Date & Time Properties...

on 16 Mar 2012
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 #164 – Work Anywhere with Windows 8

EwanD

Recruiter Nick Papé recommended this week’s topic. Escalation Engineer with spare time on his hands Ben Phillips wrote a cracking Windows 8 app to inspire Nick , and UC overlord Steve Tassell had this to say about it: “The app is another step in the consortium providing practical advice and guidance...

on 22 Mar 2013
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 #197 – When to use apostrophe's

EwanD

Grammar and punctuation fundamentalists (the Basterds !) will almost certainly have read Lynn Truss ’ ( or should that be Truss’s... discuss… ) seminal book on why punctuation is so important. The title highlights the difference adding simple punctuation makes to a term said of a Giant Panda, that it...

on 13 Dec 2013
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #28 - Windows Key is your friend

EwanD

Some people love keyboard shortcuts – producivity guru David Allen (not to be confused with the the late comedian ) recommends, as part of his Getting Things Done methodology, that learning a few keyboard shortcuts will make everyone more productive in doing routine things more quickly. ToW #10...

on 13 May 2011
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #98 - OneNote calendar front-end

EwanD

Here's a doozy of a little application that provides a great front-end to OneNote 2010, from Omer Atay of the OneNote development team. In short, it's a separate app which shows a calendar view of all the OneNote pages you've written, arranged by date. If you have several notebooks open (maybe a Work...

on 17 Feb 2012
Blog Post: Tip o' the Week #194 – Windows 8.1 Reading List

EwanD

Windows 8.1 is now available free for existing users of Windows 8, and in a break with tradition, will not be sold as an upgrade to existing installed Windows versions – it’ll just be the full version, and that’s it. Upgrading from Windows 8.1 Preview isn’t officially supported – though it can be done...

on 1 Nov 2013
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #71 - Formatting tips for Office apps

EwanD

In various Office applications, pressing the F4 key will repeat the last command (if possible). Examples could be applying formatting to document elements (like turning text in Word into a header, or the borders of a table), where you could do it once then simply hit F4 to repeat it to other parts. The...

on 4 Nov 2011
Blog Post: Tip o’ the Week #174 – Presenting tips from the pros

EwanD

This week’s tip comes after another successful “ Tech.Days Online ” session in late April, delivered by a host of specialists covering a range of developer and IT Pro topics. The Tech.Days Online programme of events is interesting in that it’s delivered “live” to thousands of virtual attendees: in other...

on 24 May 2013