Tip o’ the Week #9: Delay sending email

Posted on by ewand

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. Burns

If 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?

clip_image001It’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

  • create a new rule
  • “Start from a blank rule” / “Apply on messages I send”
  • Select “Next” to apply the rule to every message sent (on the “Which condition(s) do you want to check” tab)
  • On the “what do you want to do with this message” page, select the “Defer delivery” option and choose the number of minutes

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 …

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Tip o’ the Week #4: Telling others you’re on holiday

Posted on by ewand

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…

clip_image002

So, if you do want to let people know you won’t be around, create a 2nd appointment in your clip_image004calendar (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!

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Tip o’ the Week #3: IE8 usage tips

Posted on by ewand

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… clip_image002

· 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.

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Tip o’ the Week #2: Travel times in Outlook

Posted on by ewand

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.

clip_image002Those 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.

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Tip o’ the Week #1– New Mail desktop alerts

Posted on (Updated by 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 a bit to make them useful for the external reader, but I hope the process will be worthwhile.

The style of the ToW is informal, tends to be exxample-heavy and (I hope) densely useful – ie. in not many words, that takes a short time to read, the reader will generally learn at least one useful thing. Feedback I’ve had from Microsoft people who read these weekly emails has been so encouraging that it made me want to share them with others. I hope you like them – do give me feedback either way…

Tip o’ the Week #1

In this inaugural Tip o’ the Week, here’s a simple fix to prevent distraction during your working day.

Outlook 2007 introduced a really neat way of showing you a preview of incoming mail. It was so much more helpful than the simple “new mail” envelope, or the noisy bong to tell you that something new has just landed in your inbox.

SWITCH IT OFF. Seriously.

At least try switching it off to see how you get on. Though it’s really cool and everything, it is arguably the most distracting thing within the Office System.

To turn off, simply right click on the Outlook icon in your system tray, then click on the Show New Mail Desktop Alert, to stop it.

If you absolutely can’t live without it, reverse the process and you’ll be back to normal.
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OCS Custom Status updates – another update

Posted on by ewand

Some time ago, I wrote on OCS custom status fields and how to implement them…

Well, security changes in the way Office Communicator works mean that, by default, the client needs to download its configuration file from a secure location. This has caused a problem for a good many people who used to rely on the status file being on their hard disk.

If you don’t have access to a web site that can publish a file via SSL, then I’ve posted a few other samples here… thanks to Matt McSpirit for the tip on how to do it 🙂 I struggled for a while by using SkyDrive to do it, but the eventual URL kept changing – now I can host a bunch of these files on the blog server!

Applying the settings
Here is the Registry file which will configure Communicator to use the “Microsoft UK” custom status below. If you’re happy with that, just

  • Sign out of Communicator entirely, close the application (right click on the Communicator icon in the system tray, choose Exit).
  • Click on the Registry link above, choose “Run” from the dialog, then confirm that you want to allow the registry settings to be applied.
  • Restart Communicator again – if everything works, you’ll see custom status appear by clicking on the big coloured blob in the top left…

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If you’d rather use a different set of statuses, try downloading the registry file and save it somewhere, drag/drop it it into a new, blank Notepad window, and replace the URL with one of the following ones… then save it, and apply the settings as above.

Serious

Generic

Amusing

Microsoft UK