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 all the sheets, and you can jump to the appropriate one with a single click.
Here’s a particularly large sales spreadsheet, for one:
Here’s a simple tip that most people probably know, but I wasn’t all that sure it would behave the way it does, without proving it through trying it out. If you’ve been adding pictures to email (either by Inserting from the new ribbon in Outlook 2010, or by pasting in an image, maybe one captured from the screen), it’s sometimes possible to end up with a huge message.
The tip is, if you add your image, then click the “Save” icon in the top left of the mail (which drops a copy in your Drafts email folder), you can then see the size of the message by looking at its properties: open the message up, and look on the File menu/backstage…
The above was from an image added to an email from a SharePoint site storing pictures from an event, and the picture was large – 2,736×3,648 pixels in fact. Now rather than trying to resize such a huge picture in a paint program, just let Outlook do the work by resizing it in-situ. In this example, I simply clicked the image, then dragged the top-left corner of the image down-and-right, since the picture was way too big to even fit on one screen.
After only 3 resizing drags, the image is now much less wieldy:
(take a bow, Ana Rosales and Shaun Frohlich, pictured… they were playing the part of the blushing bride and the proud father-of-the-bride in a murder-mystery game).
Saving and re-inspecting the size, still shows up as 4Mb but after sending, I can see it shrunk rather dramatically…
Many Microsoft folks have experienced the joys of scheduling Live Meetings with customers and partners, where they get an email or meeting request with lots of links, asking them to install software on their PC before they try to join the meeting. How often do the attendees not manage to click the right link, or fail to install the software beforehand, or even when they do, join the Live Meeting and can’t hear audio, or see slides?
Well, thanks to Microsoft UK’s irrepressible John Noakes and courtesy of Office 2010, here’s an easy alternative…
We would like to start using our Office 2010 technology in these meetings now by using PowerPoint Broadcast – a great feature of PPT 2010…
With this technology, all you need to set up is the voice conf call (arranged via simple Outlook addin, using Office Communication Server or Lync Server). See here for Microsoft IT’s own case study on using UC technology to save money and increase flexibility…
Once we have the customer on the line we can then broadcast our PPT deck direct to the customer over the web by starting PowerPoint Broadcast on our client. This then generates a simple URL that we email or IM to the customer.
All they have to do then is click on the URL and……… hey presto……….they see the slides and they hear the audio via Communicator!
If you want to try it for yourself, open PowerPoint, go to the Slideshow menu and look for Broadcast Slide Show
From the dialog which appears next, choose “Change Broadcast Service” and set it to Powerpoint Broadcast Service. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, and your URL is generated……… copy, paste, email/IM to recipient. And we’re off. SIMPLE.
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 in Outlook 2010 from the File Menu / Options / Mail / Spelling & Autocorrect… though if you add something to the auto-correct list in Outlook, it isn’t immediately available in Word.
There are some quite cool little tricks you can type in an email or in a Word doc, to make the content look better or to make it easier for the recipient/reader to consume, and these fall into AutoCorrect although they’re more like mini-macros.
A few examples…
Some of us use RSS, many of us use SharePoint, but all of use email. Did you know that you can combine these three great technologies to keep you up to date on what other people are doing?
Most areas of SharePoint allow you to request to be alerted when things change – in this picture, for example, we can get an alert when someone changes in the document library. The same is true of whole lists or for individual items inside the list.
If you choose to be alerted via email, you can then select under what circumstances (eg when something new is added to the library, when an existing document changes etc), and you can choose when to receive the notification – from an immediate “something has changed” mail, to a weekly summary of all changes.
The same alert mechanism can be fired separately on a single document – so if you are keeping an eye on someone changing a doc, then sign up.
I periodically update some sales data on a departmental SharePoint site, for example. Some people find it useful to find out who has bought what product, and when – maybe stuff they’d been working on months ago, it’s nice to see the revenue hit the books.
If you want to know when the report has been refreshed, look at the context menu against the document within SharePoint, and choose an email alert
– these screenshots were taken from SharePoint 2007 but 2010 has the same concept.
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), it makes sense to familiarise yourself with some common shortcut keys to shave a few seconds off regularly performed activities.
There are literally hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Outlook – see them all here.
A few samples:
I think you get the idea… the view switching ones are brilliant – CTRL+2 to switch to your calendar and CTRL+1 to switch back to email – must save a few seconds over clicking on the Outlook bar on the left…
Some hae meat and canna eat,
and some wad eat that want it.
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
and sae the Lord be thankit. – R. BurnsIf you’ve become a regular reader of these Tips, you may have spotted that we’ve skipped a few from the numerical sequence. That’s because they were either Microsoft-specific (and not of much use for external consumption), or were in fact regurgitations of stuff I’d posted to this blog before. Like the bulk Outlook Contacts updater tool that makes all your Contacts’ phone numbers conform to the standard – here.
So that I can keep the sequence the same for the internal and external versions of these tips, I’ll periodically skip a few numbers.
Have you ever sent an email then wished you hadn’t?
Or thought “whoops”, just spotted a mistake?
It’s easy to set Outlook to give you a safety net, where emails sit in your Outbox for a few minutes before being sent – you can fish them back out, make changes and resend if necessary.
In Outlook, go into the Rules & Alerts settings (in Outlook 2010, it’s on the File menu), and
On a Message-by-message basis, you can set delivery delays too – in Outlook 2010, when you’re writing a message and about to send, look on the ”Options” tab on the Ribbon …
An Outlook calendaring tip today, brought to you in plenty of notice of the summer holiday season. It concerns a practice used in Microsoft – and I suspect, elsewhere – where you set up an appointment in your own calendar when you’re going to be on holiday, and you invite your colleagues/boss/etc to the meeting, so they know you’re away.
If you invite someone to your holiday, it’s a good idea not to annoy them by blocking out their calendar and waking them up with a reminder. By default, if you invite someone to an all-day event, it will require them to accept your invite, it might fire a reminder at 6am on their phone on the day (grrrreat), as well as potentially blocking their calendar out and making them look unavailable…
Here’s an “anonymised” attempt to book someone for a meeting when their whole day has been obliterated by someone else being on holiday…
So, if you do want to let people know you won’t be around, create a 2nd appointment in your 
calendar (set the start and finish dates to whatever is appropriate, and tick the “all day event” box … no need to set up a recurring meeting lasting several days).
Make sure the time is shown as “Free”, that reminder is “None”, and if you want a truly low-annoyance footprint, don’t even request a response.
Of course, Microsoft UK’s Toni Kent suggests a couple of alternatives…
Sick of other people’s holiday’s cluttering up your calendar? Don’t accept them!
Mail tips (in Outlook 2010) & shared calendars (published on SharePoint and synchronised with Outlook) remove the need for:
1. you to spend time sending your holiday requests to all & sundry and
2. you being depressed by seeing other people’s time off when you’re hard at work!
This week, we’re all about Internet Explorer. IE9 will be with us in a while, but in the meantime make sure you get the best out of IE8. ZDNet’s Ed Bott published a nice overview of some of the good usability functionality, when IE8 came out: read here.
Here are a collection if tip-ettes to make your browsing more bearable, to make your surfing sublime. In fact, some of these have been around for years and applied to other versions, but weren’t popularly known.
Tip-pette #1
· You don’t need to type http://. If you type anything into the Internet Explorer address bar, it will pre-pend the “http://” bit for you if it’s not already there.
Tip-pette #2
· When you have an IE window, you can move the “focus” to the address bar by pressing ALT-D. This also selects the entire address of the current page, so you can quickly copy it to your clipboard (CTRL-C). For other shortcut keys, click here.
Tip-pette #3
· If you press CTRL-ENTER when typing an entry into the address bar, IE will automatically add the http://www. And the .com bits for you… 
· If you press SHIFT-ENTER, IE will jump to the URL at the top of your most recent list …
So, putting it all together… in IE, press ALT-D, type bing, and press CTRL-ENTER, and you’ve gone to the world’s best search engine in 6 key presses.
Another Outlook tip this week.
There have been some calls for Microsoft to include a “Travel Time” capability to Outlook, that lets you automatically add getting-to and getting-from time to an existing Outlook appointment. There is one internal addin which integrates Bing maps to calculate the time taken to get from point A to the location of an appointment, and creates appointments in your calendar which bracket the original, for the travel duration as calculated by Bing. It even includes turn by turn directions and a bitmap of the route. There are a few existing, external addins which do similar – see here.
Those Brits of you who like to travel by choo-choo will doubtless be familiar with the National Rail enquiries website – and the eagle-eyed may have spotted that the results you get from searching now allow you to Add to Calendar. This opens a file which contains the details of the train times and lets you save it directly into your calendar.
Nice.
If the above process is a bit too click-happy for you, the National Rail folks have built an Outlook Addin to not only add the times to your calendar, but to allow you to search for train times from there too. Simply create an appointment, right-click on it and you’ll see the National Rail Journey Planner listed as an option – select that, and once you’ve located the appropriate trains, it will add them to your calendar automatically.
Click here for more details and a video demo.
Sadly, at this point, the addin doesn’t appear to work with Outlook 2010. Feel free to contact NRE directly to suggest they update the addin to be compatible with Outlook 2010.