Tip o’ the Week #143 – Share your calendar externally

Posted on October 26, 2012 by 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 at least, thanks Steve!) at home? Have you ever IM’ed your significant other even if you’re both in the house at the same time?

Well, as an adjunct to the merry-go-round of keeping your home life under control, Tim Hall suggested this week’s tip, and although it concerns something that’s actually been possible in Outlook for several versions, it’s a hugely useful feature which is perhaps easily forgotten.

We’re all used to having other people in the company being able to see our calendar, so they don’t make arrangements with or for us that conflict with other appointments. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to share the calendar with your nearest and dearest?

Well, you can. Go into Calendar in Outlook, and in Outlook 2013 (other versions are available, though the UI may vary), look at the Ribbon on the Share part of the main Home tab. You’ll see the ability to Publish Online – with a few clicks, you can have Outlook push some or all details of your calendar to an external service on Office.com (after prompting you to login with your Office.com/Hotmail account ID), and which can in turn be consumed by invited Outlook.com/Hotmail etc users if they too are running Outlook. You choose who to invite, and they get emailed a link to add your calendar straight into their Outlook client. Simple as that.

There are a few other options which could prove more useful if not quite so straightforward to set up. What if your other half isn’t using Outlook? How about being able to sync a copy of their calendar onto your Windows Phone…? We’ll look into these in a future Tip o’ the Week, but if you’re keen to press on, you could look into a free third party addin that replicates content between two calendars, meaning you could keep a copy of your work Calendar in a household Outlook.com account, and sync that to the Windows Phones of everyone in the house…

Tip o’ the Week #142 – Touch and Outlook 2013

Posted on October 19, 2012 by ewand

Here’s a super-quick Outlook 2013 tip for anyone with a Touch-enabled PC running Windows 8…

Incidentally, If you have a multi-touch laptop like the Lenovo x201 Tablet or X220 Tablet, you may find that after Windows 8 is installed, it won’t see that the screen can see multiple touch points … so pinch/zoom etc won’t work.

To resolve, go into the System Control Panel applet by either pressing WindowsKey + Pause/Break, or just type Computer into the Start Screen, then right-click on the icon, and choose Properties from the menu at the bottom). Once there, click on the Windows Experience Index link and then run or re-run the assessment then run Windows Update.
That should sort it out.

Now, Outlook 2013 will allow you to do a number of things with touch, most notably navigating around an email (swiping up & down to scroll) or smoothly zooming in and out on text (pinch/stretch forefinger and thumb or use any other two fingers for added panache) to increase the text size – something that’s highlighted to you slap in the middle of the screen.

Navigating around an application designed for mouse interaction isn’t always easy, though, and although it has shied away from large-scale touchification, there is one cute addition to Outlook 2013 that is worth switching on if you ever let your finger do the pointing, rather than the mouse.

If you click on the little down arrow to the side of the Quick Access Toolbar that’s visible in Outlook, and select Touch Mode, then it will add a new icon to the toolbar which literally just spaces things out a bit more – meaning it’s easier to tap folder names from a list, or icons on the Ribbon, using a fat finger rather than a skinny mouse pointer.

Definitely worth having a look if you’re a touch friendly user.

PLUG: A group of Microsoft staff, friends and Microsoft partners (collectively called “Project 100”) cycled from Edinburgh Castle to Buckingham Palace a few weeks ago, to raise funds for 5 different and worthy charities. We’d love it if you could support us – thanks!

Tip o’ the Week #141 – more Outlook 2013 tweaks

Posted on October 12, 2012 by ewand

A couple more tweaks for those of you who are enjoying Outlook 2013 (or Outlook “15”). The first comes from ToW stalwart Stuart Handley, who is driven to near distraction by the Reading pane in Outlook. In his own words…

How can I disable in-line reply in the Reading Pane?

To provide a more streamlined experience without the need of popping up extra message windows and dialogs anymore, Outlook 2013 introduces in-line reply which allows you to press reply and directly start writing your reply in the Reading Pane (which means that it is not really a Reading Pane anymore and they should have changed the name).

You can press POP OUT to open your message in a regular Message editor window which provides access to additional formatting options and features.

To always use the regular Message editor window instead of in-line reply, disable the option:

File-> Options-> Mail-> Replies and Forwards-> Use inline replies when replying or forwarding

Maybe the new Reading/composing pane thing is a mixed blessing, although a lot of the time, progress means having to adopt an at-first uncomfortable change. Maybe try it out and if it causes you to want to cast a spell on its designers, just switch it off.

On a more benevolent level, there’s one nice design feature which is highlighted by Phil Hand…

I just typed out an email in Outlook 2013 which contained “attached” in the body. As usual, I forgot to attach the attachment but wow!, I got the following popup J

Wonderful! – now if only it was Clippy that was telling me 😉

If, like Phil, you have a wistful thought when Clippy is mentioned, you could always sign the Bring Back Clippy petition. Only 51 signatories at the time of writing, so don’t hold your breath for People Power bringing the Clip back from the great wastepaper basket in the sky.

If you’d rather not be warned about missing attachments, you can always switch it off by going into …

File-> Options-> Mail-> Send Messages and clear the “Warn me…” checkbox.

It’s also worth noting that now and again, clearing the Auto-Complete List could be a good idea – as people leave the company, you might find their names & old addresses are still being listed. Of course, you can always ditch individual addresses from the cache by clicking the X that appears at the end of the errant address.

Tip o’ the Week #137 – Peek-a-boo, Take two

Posted on September 14, 2012 by ewand

Following on from ToW #135, which introduced the “Peek” capability in the flat and shiny-shiny Outlook 2013, this week we’re looking at another couple. If you use Tasks, the ability to quickly see what’s due and to create a new one might be a useful feature.

Hover over the Tasks option at the bottom of the main Outlook window, and you’ll see a pop up “Peek” (right click on the Tasks option and you can “Pin the Peek” – or show Tasks off to the right of the current window, regardless of which folder you’re looking at. In the pop up window, you can mark tasks complete, you can create new ones, and if you double-click on one of the list, you’ll open the task in a new window.

The Calendar menu option also lets you Peek (as described in #135), while the remaining Peek-able option is People, the selection that was previously known as “Contacts”.

Peek on People, and you can enter someone’s name to find them – akin to searching for them in the Lync client by typing the name. You can also add people to a favourites list – although it says “anywhere in Office”, it’s not quite so straightforward… at least not yet.

Lync 2013 has a “Favorites” list that is a different thing, but if you right-click on someone in Outlook, you can add to Favorites and then be able to ~~stalk~~ contact them easily in future by Peeking on the People tab to see their current Lync status, and view the Lync Contact Card easily, which will afford you all the variety of ways to contact them.

The Peeks functionality doesn’t really give you anything you couldn’t quickly do with other means – press CTRL-2 to show Calendar, CTRL-3 to show People, CTRL-4 to show Tasks for example – but it brings some common functionality that bit closer if you’re using a mouse.

Tip o’ the Week #136 – Inbox tips for Outlook 2013

Posted on September 7, 2012 by ewand

If you’ve taken the plunge and started using Office 2013, you may be getting used to the subtle but impactful changes to the way some information is displayed, particularly lists of emails in your inbox.

Outlook 2010 has a colourful Ribbon, emboldens folders where you have unread email, and shows everything in the mail list in the same font and with the same size (unless you create rules to tell it to do otherwise).

Outlook 2013, on the other hand, has a flatter looking, less colourful Ribbon, and by default, will show your Inbox with a single line preview of the message, and the sender’s name will be in larger text. Some of the “chrome” used in the window has been removed too – dividing lines, 3D-like edges to controls etc.

Maybe it’s all part of the ~~Metrofication~~ Windows 8 Modern/Native Application Design Style-ification of the Office 2013 UI. Just don’t go into the new “Full Screen” mode, then try to close the window by dragging the window down by the middle… it might look like the UI design language until recently known as Metro, but it’s still a full fat desktop app.

In some respects, changes like the new Inbox view take a bit of adapting to, may even seem like an annoyance: in Outlook, the impact of the change of view style is that fewer messages can be seen on screen at once. There are some things you can do to mitigate this fact, though…

Minimise the Ribbon when you don’t need it

Office has allowed the user to make the Ribbon go away in previous versions, and in some respects it’s even more useful now if you want to maximise your screen real estate. Look on the far right of the Ribbon bar and you’ll see an upward pointing carat – click on that and the whole shooting match vanishes upwards. You’re still left with a menu bar, though, and if you click on a menu (the “View” one, for example), then the Ribbon will re-appear. If you don’t like this modus operandi, just click on the pin icon at the bottom right and you’ll be back to normal working. Pressing CTRL-F1 toggles the Ribbon between hidden and pinned, but then if you’re a keyboard junkie, what need would you have with the Ribbon anyway?

Adjust the preview

If you use the Reading Pane on the right, you might find you don’t need to worry about the one line preview below the message in the displayed view – you can tweak this by disabling the preview altogether, and you get prompted to choose if you’d like it just for this folder or for everywhere. Preview? Pah.

Subject vs Sender

Some people recall messages based on their contents, others on when they were sent (hence why you get a by-default grouping based on age), and some on who the sender was – “that note from Steve last week” maybe rings a bell more than what it was called. If you prefer a good ol’ fashioned Subject first approach, then it’s possible – though not necessarily bleedin’ obvious – to switch them round again.

Go to the View menu, in the main Outlook window
In the Current View section, click on View Settings then Columns…
Select the Subject and Move Up
Hit OK to save… et voila!

Bon Appetit!
This week’s tip brought to you by 1970s comedy…

Tip o’ the Week #135 – Outlook 2013 Calendar first look

Posted on August 31, 2012 by 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 a lower risk in dogfooding it than there has ever been before with test releases of Office.

Since Outlook is the application we’ll spend more time in than any other, let’s have a look at a few tweaks in the new version. The early experience of Outlook is that it’s quite different – it certainly looks more “flat” and more “white” than previous versions: a bit odd at first, but it’s quick & easy to get used to.

Take the Weather with you

One neat feature in the new Calendar is the weather forecast being brought into the calendar. To manage your locations, click on the down arrow to the right, and if you click on the x next to any existing location, it will get removed from the list. Obviously, clicking on Add Location will let you search for places to put on the list.

Somewhat obtusely, if you live in the majority of the world which uses Celsius, basing your temperature on one where water freezes at 32 and boils at 212 degrees seems a bit odd. Brits still talk centigrade, but since the late 1940s, the preferred term was Celsius since a centigrade is a French and Spanish term for a unit that is 1/10,000^th of a right angle. And we don’t want to get our temperatures and our miniscule fragments of angles mixed up now, do we?

Anyway. To change the default temperature scale, simply (when in the main Outlook window), go into File | Options | Calendar and scroll all the way to the bottom, then look at the Weather options. Maybe it’ll get a bit more obvious by the time of release.

Zoom Zoom

This function is really designed for touch use, but it also works with desk-based rodents or touchpads on laptops. Go into your Calendar and if you want to switch from day view to see the whole week or month (or vice versa), you could use the view option on the Ribbon. Since many of us may hide the Ribbon by default (and Office 2013 makes a good job of getting itself full-screen), you can do the same thing using Zoom in and out. On a touch screen, just pinch fingers in & out, or if you’re using a mouse, press the CTRL key and use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

Peek-a-boo

Remember Microsoft’s Actimates Barney consumer electronics product? No?? Check him out here… One of Barney’s tricks was to play Peek-a-boo, though there was once a related knowledge base (KB) article titled, “Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own”. Creepy.

Well, “Peek” has a new meaning in Outlook 2013, where you can see what’s in your calendar on a given day without needing to switch from the Inbox view to the Calendar view – just hover over “Calendar” on the Navigation pane at the bottom of the Outlook window, then click on any one of the dates to see a scrollable list of the appointments on that day.

Double-click on the appointment to open it in a separate window.

Tip o’ the Week #130 – Searching in Outlook

Posted on August 10, 2012 by ewand

Ever since the 3^rd party “Lookout” add-in was built for Outlook about 8 years ago, the pilers have inherited the earth. That’s pilers. No connection with Chaka Demus.

Research as far back as the early 1980s into how people organise their desks suggested there were “filers” – meticulously organised people who have a place for everything and put everything in its place, or “pilers” who just let it all build up.

Actually, it’s more complicated than that – pilers have “hot”, “warm” and “cool” areas of their desk defined by the level of activity, so stuff they were working on was commonly nearby. Filers on the other hand, might inadvertently squirrel stuff away and forget all about it. Common belief might be that outwardly more “organised” people are more effective, but the research shows this isn’t necessarily the case. Read more here.

Lookout introduced the ability to just search across your whole mailbox, in literally an instant – doesn’t sound all that special today but in 2004, it was absolutely revolutionary. Imagine searching your whole mailbox (all 200Mb of it, wow!! – though some companies gave their users bigger mailboxes) in the blink of an eye… No longer did you need to file anything, or remember the subject line, or the date it was sent – recall any attribute of the message and you can always find it later.

As it turns out, Microsoft bought the company and then incorporated similar technology into Outlook and Windows directly. The main man in LookoutSoft left MS after his career peak and a couple of years, to go and work at a grubby advertising company. Never mind.

Anyway, back to the present day. Outlook gives the user the option of searching within folder (press CTRL-E to jump straight in and type a search query, then press CTRL-ALT-A to expand the search to all folders if required).

The Ribbon changes when activating the search box to show a bunch of criteria that can be searched upon, with a click:

There are, however, a few other options… mostly to do with the way one expresses a query in the search box. Just type in a word and your query will return any item which contains that word, however if you put subject: search word or subject: “search phrase”, then you can restrict the search results to only key words from the subject line.

Similarly, from:”joe blogs” or from:”joe bloggs” subject: “blah blah” will restrict ever further to just mail from an individual or even specific mail from that person with certain words in the subject.

There are some other esoteric search terms, too. Running out of mailbox space? Try messagesize:>5mb and you’ll see only the huge emails. Or for the same filter, simply add messagesize:enormous.

Many more examples of search criteria can be found here.

Tip o’ the Week #119 – Using Outlook in multiple windows

Posted on June 1, 2012 by ewand

This week’s tip comes courtesy of Jon Morris, who is agog at the way lots of people switch between their Inbox and their Calendar, in Outlook. Hands up if you routinely use the Navigation Pane on the lower left of the main window, to switch between these two most commonly used folders?

OK, put your hand down now. People will stare. As an aside, the Navigation Pane was introduced in Outlook 2003, and was codenamed the “WunderBar”. Honestly.

Long-term ToW readers may recall Tow #10 (over 2 years ago), which covered some Outlook shortcut keys – eg press CTRL-1 to switch the current window to “mail” (whichever folder of email you last had open), CTRL-2 to “Calendar”, CTRL-3 for Contacts etc. That’s one way of switching the focus around, and certainly quicker than clicking on the WunderBar.

Anyway, back to Jon’s tip. If you right click on any folder or any of the shortcuts in the Navigation Pane, you’ll have the option of opening that folder in a new window, so you can switch between (for example) your Inbox and Calendar windows, by any of the various means you might favour (ALT-TAB, WindowsKey+number, hovering over the application on the Task bar etc). This works well if you have multiple monitors, so you could (say) have your Inbox on the main screen and the Calendar/Task list on the second one.

Now the smart bit here is that Outlook will remember what windows you had open, what folders they were looking at, and on which monitor they were displayed, if you close the application down by going to the File menu and choosing Exit. Closing the app using the Window Close “X” or by right-clicking on the application in the task bar will not remember the window positions, so if you get used to leaving the Outlook application from its own file menu, you’ll get the same window setup every time you restart.

Tip o’ the Week #112 – Change Outlook’s startup folder

Posted on May 18, 2012 (Updated January 7, 2022) by ewand

Productivity gurus wax on about how gaining and maintaining control of your never-ending to-do list starts with the way you prioritise, and how you build discipline in working through your task list rather than being distracted by less important “stuff”.

So, why is it that we stick with the default setting in Outlook, which starts up showing the Inbox folder, and with the most recent mail at the top…?
The only thing more distracting than looking at an inbox full of shiny new mail, is to have the new mail notification flash up in front of whatever else you’re doing, to tell you about it.

Check out the very first Tip o’ the Week – how to switch off the Outlook new mail notification. Try it out.
Live notification-free for at least a day; you can always switch it back on again if you need to.

If you’re on a Lync meeting and someone shares their desktop to show you a presentation (tsk, tsk), or you’re watching a presentation/demo on a big screen, feel free to berate the presenter publicly if they receive a new mail notification during the meeting.

Here’s a tip that Microsoft’s own internal IT training programme recommends: set which folder Outlook starts up in. When you launch Outlook for the first time, don’t have it go into your Inbox – what about opening your Calendar instead?

To change, go into the File menu, under Options then Advanced. Scroll down to the Outlook start and exit section, and pick your folder of choice. Simple as that – though if you routinely sleep and resume your PC, you might not be starting Outlook very often, so you may only see this occasionally. Continue reading →

Tip o’ the Week #110 – Tracking Outlook responses

Posted on April 20, 2012 by ewand

Most of us regular Outlook users are well-versed in the Request/Response model of doing things other than email. Take an appointment in your own calendar: add an invited attendee or two, and you’ve created a meeting. What’s different? The meeting invitations were sent out and the list of attendees is listed and tracked.

If you’re invited to someone else’s meeting, you’ll see options on how to respond, and you’ll be able to look at the scheduling view to see who else is on the list, but you won’t be able to see how they’re responded to the invite (well not entirely). You may be able to see the details in the scheduling view (depending on whether the invited attendees have given you the permission to see their calendars).

But if you organised the meeting, you’ll see further options, including the ability to check the tracking status – so you can see who has accepted, declined or just not responded to your meeting request.

If you didn’t organise the meeting, you may be able to open the calendar of the organiser and still be able to see who responded and how. Useful when you’re sitting in a meeting that someone organised, and you want to see who’s still planning to attend.

Unfortunately, when you look at the View Tracking Status tab, you’ll see the responses shown as a table, but unfortunately it’s not possible to sort or filter that list – so quickly picking out everyone who hasn’t responded from a long list of invited people isn’t so easy.

Redmond resident Texan Steve Winfield pointed out a simple solution, however – click on Copy Status to Clipboard, and the entire list gets copied to the clipboard – fire up Excel and hit paste, and you’ll be able to quickly sort and filter so you can chase up the non-responders or the folk who declined.

When you’re checking the tracking status of a meeting request, you will go to your calendar, but it’s not the only kind of tracking you might need to do.

If you send an email with a read or delivery receipt requested, or are looking for a voting buttons response, you’ll see your original email sitting in Sent Items but with a different icon on the message . open the message and you’ll be able to see some tracking capabilities, which differ a little depending on whether you’re looking at delivery or read receipts, or responses to the voting request. Either way, this time, you can only see a static list, with no clipboard shortcut. If you’d like to copy the responses:

· Click on the top one,

· Press SHIFT-END to select the whole lot

· Press CTRL-C to copy to clipboard

Now, it’s a snap to go into Excel, paste the responses and you’re free to sort & filter as before.