Tip o’ the Week #189 – Outlook View Tips

Posted on October 4, 2013 by ewand

clip_image001 Outlook 2013 introduced some changes to the way the standard inbox view is presented. It’s basically a good thing, though if you have a lot of email and a small screen, it will certainly reduce the number of items on your default view. This means that once an email is (say) 15 from the top on your mailbox, then it’s off the screen and, for some people, it might as well be dead.

You could adopt an Inbox Zero policy and keep your inbox to as few items as possible, or you could admit defeat and become a piler like most people. We have computers to search stuff for us, so why does it matter if we delete or file things away? Meh.

Anyway, there are a few tweaks you can make to your Outlook view if you don’t much like the new version. Let’s look at a comparison between Outlook 2010 and 2013:

Outlook 2010

clip_image003

Outlook 2013

It’s easy to see the screen real-estate effect – though 2013 is clearer, it’s a little larger.

If you’d like to restore the view to more like 2010:

In the main Outlook window, go to the View tab, and look under View Settings
Click on the Conditional Formatting button.
Create a new rule (Add), and call it something like “Look like 2010”. Choose a Font by clicking on the Font button, and select “Smaller”. You may want to try some italic and bold settings just to spice things up a bit, but you can always go back and change it later.
Press OK, and when you are prompted, say that it’s OK for this rule to run on everything (since we haven’t created a condition for it to apply).

Now this will apply to all messages and will reset the default view to have smaller “From” lines.

If you’d like to change the way unread messages are displayed (where, in Outlook 2010, they were just emboldened and with an appropriate message icon), repeat the exercise above but instead of creating a new rule, just edit the “Unread Messages” rule – set the font and colour, and party on!

There are many other inbox formatting tips which will take the views back into the mists of time – if there’s demand to find out more, maybe I’ll cover them in future ToWs.

Tip o’ the Week #185 – Outlook, offline!

Posted on August 23, 2013 (Updated October 8, 2021) by 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 potential solution to the problem, where the user forces themselves to focus for a period of time by avoiding distraction. The continuously excellent series of Photo Tips from Robert Deupree (JR) featured a simpler solution…

Robert also recommends a shortcut for the keyboard junkies so dedicated to extreme productivity that they can’t afford to lift their hands away to touch a mouse – to toggle Online and Offline modes in Outlook, simply press ALT+S then W.

When Outlook is offline it obviously won’t receive any new email, but it will let you work on existing mail, calendar etc and you’ll still be online for Lync distractions, and able to while away time browsing the web.

Whilst on the subject of Outlook and distractions, do yourself a favour and switch off the new mail alert – it’s even more intrusive in Outlook 2013 than previously. We all get enough email that we don’t need to know when another one has arrived, so try it now and you can always switch it back on if you feel that nobody loves you anymore.

Simply go to File / Options / Mail within the main Outlook window, and tweak the settings as required:

Tip o’ the Week #184 – ActiveSync account limits

Posted on August 16, 2013 by 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) client as if it was a new PC connecting to your mailbox.

Now, one gotcha you might not be aware of is that Exchange Server can impose a limitation on how many ActiveSync devices are connected – it’s part of the numerous controls IT departments could place on synchronising with mobile devices, such as not allowing certain types of device (eg inherently insecure Android phones) to connect and sync, or by forcing a certain password policy on the phone so it locks when not used for a while.

Windows 8 and 8.1’s inbuilt Mail client uses the ActiveSync protocol to connect to the server, rather than the “Outlook Anywhere” method that the regular Outlook mail client uses. This means that if you reinstall/upgrade your Win8 PC, it could start to chalk off entries on the list of ActiveSync clients associated with your mailbox – and if you think how many phones you might have had in recent years, that number may be close to the limit. You may receive a notification email that there was an “error with your new mobile phone partnership” – strange stuff given than you may be just installing Windows…

To solve the problem (if it affects you) or to prevent it from happening at some future and doubtless inconvenient moment, simply:

Go to Outlook Web Access (whatever the URL is for your installation), and login
Go to Options in the top right and See All Options (after selecting a Groovy Theme, should you so desire)
Go to Phone / Mobile Phones and look at the list of devices set up to synchronise – you may have a number of WindowsMail “phones” as well as a couple of kosher mobile devices.

Selectively delete some WindowsMail (or old phone) entries that haven’t synched for a while – they’re presumably old and dead. If in any doubt, select a device and click on Details to see the OS type and name of the machine, amongst others.

Tip o’ the Week #181 – “Working Elsewhere” status

Posted on July 5, 2013 by ewand

This week’s tip comes courtesy of Phil Cross, who discovered it one day whilst trying to tell his colleagues where he was going to be. In Outlook, as you know, you can set the “Show As” status of an appointment or a meeting (and ToW readers of long standing may recall the difference – an appointment is in your calendar only, whereas a meeting is when other people are also invited).

The new “Working Elsewhere” status adds a welcome dose of granularity: what if you’re working at home, you’re available, but you want to make it clear that you’re not sitting at an office desk? “Out of Office” might not cut it, as that could signal that you’re OOF and therefore unavailable…

You could, of course, combine the appointment status with an appropriate Lync status too – you can tell people where you are/what you’re up to through your Location and even your “What’s happening today?” status.

There’s a new status in Lync too – “Off Work”. For all those times when you’re online – using your laptop at the weekend or on a day off, for example, but when you want people to know you’re not actually available to work. Just remember to set it back when you return, or else you’ll just look like a skiver.

Finally, a reminder for everyone planning a summer holiday and who would like to make sure their boss/colleagues/occasional collaborators know that they’re not going to be in the office. Don’t send people a meeting request to remind them you’re on holiday, without setting the status to be Free, the Reminder to be switched off, and the Request Responses to be blank.
[Sorry for the shouting, but so many times I’ve tried to book someone for a meeting only to find their free/busy status is obliterated by some other numpty politely informing that they’re away].

This topic was covered 2½ years ago in Tip o’ the Week #4 …

Tip o’ the Week #180 – A touch of magic

Posted on June 28, 2013 by ewand

As more and more of us continue to enjoy new laptops courtesy of the Windows 8 Refresh program, the fact that most of them are touch-enabled is causing delight and surprise. The best things about touch on traditional laptop devices may be the less obvious uses – scrolling up and down a web page with a lazy flick, or highlighting something to a colleague by pinching to zoom.

Tim Hall suggested a couple of cool tips, namely the new icon that’s appeared on the Office Quick Access Toolbar, to enable Touch Mode – a feature covered in the Office Preview, in ToW 142, but it’s changed the UI and become a good bit more functional. Tim also points out on his Lenovo X1 Carbon Touch, if you double-tap on the screen it will zoom in.

Meanwhile, Darren Strange has also become a huge fan of the Touch Mode in Outlook – not only does it space out the menu options and folders, but it introduces a new shortcut icon list on the far right (beyond the Reading Pane). Darren advocates triaging email by holding the sides of the super thin screen on his shiny Asus Zenbook, then tapping with his right thumb. It’s especially easy to flick up and down through the mailbox, then tap on Reply, then drop your hands to the keyboard for when you need to type.

Here he is, poised to delete some nonsense email that’s cluttering up his inbox:

Tip o’ the Week #173 – LinkedIn Contacts in Outlook

Posted on May 10, 2013 by ewand

This week’s tip focuses on the power of LinkedIn. Some people use it as their system of managing customer and partner contacts. Some find new employment by schmoozing their network – some even use it as the launchpad for their next career.

Hands up who’s ever thought that a work colleague suddenly connecting with them, means that work colleague is a soon-to-be-ex one? Or been in the middle of a meeting and had a LinkedIn request from someone (external) who’s currently in the same room?

LinkedIn is undoubtedly a powerful business connection tool, and using it in Outlook makes it even more so. First step, if you haven’t done so already, is to enable the Social Connector. In the past, this was a separate addin to Outlook, but in 2010 was included (though you had to install each social network provider as a separate addin). Now in Outlook 2013, Facebook, LinkedIn and internal SharePoint services are all built in.

There was a recent issue with LinkedIn that could mean even if you had previously configured it to work with Outlook 2013, it may have broken – to check all is well, look at the bottom of the preview of an email (in the “People Pane”) from an external user who is in your LinkedIn network, and see if there is an error message, or if you’re seeing LinkedIn status messages. To ensure you have everything configured correctly, go into the View -> People Pane menu in Outlook, then click on Account Settings to ensure you have the correct username, password and options set.

Enter your own LinkedIn username & password, and if you also check the “by default, show photos…” option, then you’ll see the LinkedIn photo of any contact – external, or in fact internal too – within any emails etc that sit in Outlook.

An interesting point – if you look at any standard LinkedIn list of people, or of the individual profile of any one person, their photos are typically shown on the left side of any text. Since we mostly read text (in western cultures) from top left, and all the way down to the bottom right, this lends itself to preferring photos which are facing left-right, especially if placed on the left of the page; so it looks as if the individual is looking on approvingly of their own profile, rather than dismissively starting away from it. Thanks to Eileen Brown for pointing this out.

Try it as an experiment on Linkedin.com: look at all your own contacts, then open up a few who are facing left-> right and others facing right-> left, and see if you agree. Time to change your picture?

Anyway. LinkedIn contacts, once the Social Connector is configured, show up in a separate contacts group within Outlook’s People view – you can “Peek” by hovering the mouse over the People icon on the shortcut bar, and search details of contacts there, both those in your existing Outlook contacts list and those from LinkedIn. If you click on the People icon, you’ll see lists of Contacts that can be searched in or filtered as appropriate – so if your contacts in LinkedIn have allowed it, you can see email addresses and phone numbers within Outlook.

If you open up a LinkedIn contact and make a change – let’s say, added a mobile number that you’ve gleaned from their email – then Outlook will make that a copy of that contact in your own Contacts folder, and make the change there. Synchronisation of content from LinkedIn appears to be one-way – and if you get into creating custom fields and categories on LinkedIn itself, they might not synchronise at all. Best try a few experiments out before relying on information being available everywhere.

There are other ways of using, and benefitting from, LinkedIn integration – and we’ll explore some of these in a future Tip o’ the Week: how LinkedIn plugged in via your Microsoft Account can mean you can share info across Facebook, Twitter and other services, for example.

Careful though – It sometimes makes sense not to cross the streams of “work” and “life”. Like Monty Python said, “…don’t take out in public, or they’ll stick you in the dock, and you won’t come back.”

Tip o’ the Week #159 – Avoiding breakers on the side

Posted on February 15, 2013 by 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 was always the possibility that someone else could either come in and crash the conversation, or they might be on that channel already.
Which was often interesting.

This week’s Tip comes after a day of being on both sides of the modern, Lync-based equivalent – that of having a conference call which has unintended participants. This often happens because the organiser of the call is using the same conference ID for multiple Lync meetings – by default, when using the Outlook addin to create an online meeting (or to add Lync meeting details to an existing appointment), the user’s default Conference ID is used to create that meeting. And that can lead to unexpected and potentially embarrassing behaviour.

It’s possible when you’ve finished a conference, that new people will start to join for the next one, and previous attendees will still be online (they may have hung up the audio piece, but if they haven’t closed their Lync window and they haven’t been booted out specifically, they’ll still appear as attendees). Worse, if there was material – such as slides – being presented in the conference, it could still be available to the newly joined people. Another scenario is that if a call is over-running, and new attendees for the next one scheduled join straight into the tail end of the previous call. They’ll probably be all, “Hello? Hello?” when they come online, and of course they’ll hear the dregs of the previous meeting as it wraps up. Bad enough in an internal meeting, but terrible in a customer or partner one.

In order to make sure this doesn’t happen, when you create a new appointment and make it a Lync Meeting, check out the Lync Meeting Options on the ribbon – the default will probably be to use your dedicated meeting space, but you might want to create a new space… with its own conference ID, and its own settings regarding whether people get to wait in the lobby, who’s a presenter etc.

Thanks to Chris Parkes for suggesting this timely tip.
Now, 10-10, see you again.

Tip o’ the Week #154 – Outlook 2013 searching – reprise

Posted on January 18, 2013 by ewand

Sometimes, the best bits of content benefit from revisiting, improving or just being done in a different way. It was good enough for Sgt. Pepper, and a mainstay of any self-respecting 1970s concept album (try and hear the Supper’s Ready lyrics at the end of the Squonk reprise in Los Endos, for example. Now, take the anorak off and get back to work). Actors reprise previously-starred roles, to keep the tills ringing, if not the critics singing.

Anyway, this week’s Tip revisits and reprises a topic that’s had a bit of coverage of late – namely, searching in Outlook 2013. See ToW’s passim: #130, #144… and numerous other snippets.

Woody wrote a blog post about today’s topic – namely the way that Outlook now handles searching. Outlook has had built-in search capabilities for ages, but in 2013, it’s much easier to switch between searching within just the current folder (eg Inbox) and searching everywhere. It has also introduced further granularity like searching across just the current mailbox (or archive file).

Care must be taken, though – you might search for a term and find that the results include folders where you’ve archived stuff, or could be your Sent Items folder… so take it easy on the Delete key. The “Current Mailbox” | “Current Folder” selection is remembered for certain folders, so might change as you move from one to the other.

If you do search across multiple folders, when you hover your mouse over a result that’s of interest, and you’ll see a little bubble which tells you the folder that it’s in.

Alternatively, right-click on the “ALL Unread” menu immediately below the search box and choose “Folder”, and you’ll see your search results grouped by the folder the messages come from.

Tidy.

Tip o’ the Week #150 – It’s a date!

Posted on December 7, 2012 by ewand

Some tweaks and tips are basically not all that exciting unless you find they solve a problem you’ve had to deal with directly, maybe on a number of occasions, at which point they’ll transform to being a miraculous time saver that you’ll continue using for years to come. One such example, is the Copy As Path trick in Windows Explorer.

Date and time functionality in applications is a particularly humdrum area to go looking for life-changing solutions, but it’s one that we all deal with a lot, perhaps subconsciously. We’ve covered date stuff before in Tip o’ the Week – #104, #102 and others.

Windows 8 – where’s the clock?

One of the strangest things to get used to in the Windows 8 world, is there’s no clock visible for most of the time – whether you’re used to the Date/Time display from the System Tray or if you’re still missing the Vista-era clock desktop gadget, the simple fact is that when you look at the start menu, and when you’re in the vast majority of full-screen Modern UI applications, there’s nothing telling you the time. Is it a bit much to have to switch to the old fashioned Desktop (press WindowsKey+D), just to see what the time is?

Fortunately, there are Apps which can solve this annoyance. There’s a free one that’s just a simple live tile showing The Time, or if you’re a jet set type who needs to know the time in different parts of the world, what about a World Time app that scrolls between all the places you list?

Tickety-boo.

Some date shortcuts

Did you know that if you’re using OneNote, and you press ALT+SHIFT+”D”, it will insert the date in whatever you’re editing – handy if you collect notes about a particular subject all in one page, but you want to annotate when you did something or spoke to someone. If you’re particularly time critical, press ALT+SHIFT+”T” and it’ll insert the current time too. The same tricks work in Word, and when you’re writing an email in Outlook, too.

If you live your life in Excel, then CTRL+”;” inserts the date and CTRL+”:” pastes the time – again, useful if you’ve got columns in your sheet about when you last called that contacts etc. Of course, you should be using CRM, not a spreadsheet; tsk tsk.

Outlook and its dates

Way back in the mists of time, 130 weeks ago if the numbering of ToW was consistent (which it’s not, quite), there was a tip about Outlook dates, but I bet most of you weren’t reading then, and if you were, well, you’ve probably forgotten.

In a nutshell, ever since Outlook 97 was released, it’s had some smarts built into every date field that you can edit without using a date picker – you know, date fields on appointments, Tasks, reminders etc. Instead of just picking the date from a calendar, you could enter it “9-11-12 or 9/11/2012 or 9 Nov, would all resolve to the right date (well they would if you have your system date formats set to the UK one…)

You can also enter real expressions, like tomorrow, 3 weeks, this Sunday, next Friday, Christmas Eve. Not dates that change – like Easter Sunday, or Thanksgiving day, though there are some static “holiday” dates such as Lincoln’s Birthday, Halloween, New Year’s Day etc. Have a go, it’s really rather useful

Tip o’ the Week #144 – Office 2013 Templates

Posted on November 2, 2012 by ewand

A short and sharp tip this week, courtesy of Louis Lazarus, concerning the way the New Office handles template files… and how to configure search in Outlook 2013 to be a bit more fullsome. See more templates online, and now, over to Louis…

When you create a new document in Office 2013 with Word, Excel, etc, you are not given a choice of the templates on your local machine. You can fix this by…

1. Click File, Options

2. Select the Save item in the menu on the left

3. Enter the location of your templates folder in the “Default personal templates location”…

4. Click OK

Now when you select New, you will see a choice of Featured or Personal Templates – click on PERSONAL to see your templates…

Outlook 2013

By default Outlook 2013 only includes your emails for the last 12 months. You will usually see a message saying something like “there are more items on the server” – clicking the link sometimes returns more items and sometimes does not. To get rid of this message and have all your items sync’d to your PC…

1. Click File, Account Settings…

2. Click Change… and drag the slider to get All mail items…

3. Click Next and then Finish

4. Now all your mail will be available offline.