There’s a great deal of etiquette bound up in email communications – and it varies by culture and sometimes by country. Some people politely make the point of always addressing the recipient in an email, and in thanking them at the end, whereas others apparently look on it as a badge of honour to contain everything in a single terse line with no capitalization. Especially when it comes to OOF messages.
One of the cardinal sins of email management is in misusing the BCC function – you know, the ability to copy someone on an email without showing their name to everyone else. BCC can be very handy at letting one user or group know what is being said to another, without exposing the former’s email addresses or in fact making it explicit that they’re aware of what’s going on. Maybe duplicitous but 
handy at times.
Whatever you do, do not BCC large distribution lists. Some people think they’re doing a group a favour by replying-all to some thread and BCC’ing the group so it doesn’t get sent any of the subsequent replies… but what that often will do is circumvent any rules that members of that group have set up to fire all emails sent to it, into a folder. Now, post-BCC, everyone will probably receive your email in their Inbox, all the while wondering why.
What About meeting requests?
BCC is very handy when you’re emailing a group of people – maybe sending an external mail to a bunch of customers and you don’t want to inadvertently share everyone’s address with each other.
Funnily enough, one scenario where BCC would be most useful is when you want to invite lots of people to a meeting – an event, a party, etc – and there are plenty reasons why it might be best that they don’t know who else is being invited. Yet, there is no BCC option on meeting requests… it’s just not there.
But feat not, intrepid readers – it is possible to effectively BCC people on a meeting request, by inviting them as Resources. There are basically 2 ways that most of us will add names to a meeting request – either create it as a meeting in the first place, or create an appointment, then…
· …either type their names into the shown-by-default “To” box, or choose Scheduling Assistant to add people by just entering their names in the list, to invite them.
· … or add names to your request by clicking on Invite Attendees (which actually turns an appointment into a meeting, as meetings are appointments where other people are invited – ya falla’?), then click on the To button (or Add Attendees button). 
This brings up a dialog box that will expect you to select people from the address list, and select them as Required or Optional attendees (does anyone ever use Optional?). Or, in fact, Resources – the thinking being that the address book could have entries for resources like meeting rooms or even bookable equipment, that you could invite to your meeting thereby claiming it for your exclusive use.
Now, if you’d like to invite people to a meeting and have the request be sent out to them but not show their address to anyone else, just stick them in as Resources – either by selecting them from the address book or just typing/pasting their name or email address in the box (so it works for external recipients too).
They get a meeting request as normal, they show up in the meeting organiser’s list of attendees, responses get tracked etc – but when any of the attendees looks at a meeting in their own calendar, they won’t see the names of anyone in Resources. Clever, eh?
Happy New Year! For many of us, time to chuck out trees, and pack away any and all decorations, never to be seen again until December ‘15. Before you recycle the cards you may have received over the holiday season, here’s a quick way of using Outlook to make the job of sending your cards that bit easier.
Create a new view
track interesting bits of info – like whether you sent a card to this contact, and if you got one in return. Click on the New Column button and for the name enter Got Card, then choose Type Yes/No and leave Format as Icon. Press OK to create, and repeat the process for the Sent Card field.
All Contact fields from the “select available columns…” drop-down box, then pick some of the more esoteric contact fields that already exist – Spouse/Partner and Children fields will let you remember who to make the cards out to, and Home Address and Notes are pretty self-explanatory.
OK, now we have a quorum of contacts tagged with Got & Sent attributes, go into View Settings and click the Filter button, then switch to the Advanced pane. From 
the Field drop-down box, choose User-defined fields in folder and add Got Card.
want to change the Sort order to Full Name.
If you want to continue adding contacts to the list, simply open your existing contact (maybe from the main Outlook contacts view), then click on All Fields, and select the fields from the user-defined fields in folder – you can then set Yes or No for each of the custom fields, and that contact will now show up in your Christmas Cards view.
So what’s the point of all this faffing about? Well, in 11 months’ time when you come to do your next round of cards, just select the view in Outlook and if you select File / Print and select Table Style, you’ll get a nice sheet or two of all the details and addresses you’ll need to write all your cards.
Anyway, this tip reprises the topic of the 
To disable the toast from the Mail app, go into the app itseld and bring up the Charms (press WindowsKey+C or swipe from the right if you have a touchscreen, or put your mouse in the top right of the screen). Now select the Settings charm, then Accounts, then go into the account you have set up to your corporate emai (since you can set notifications differently per-account).
download useful info for you when it recognises someone’s email address on the LI network. Here’s an example before it’s configured – click on the arrow to the right to expand the People Pane for more information. You may even get a notification at this point that LinkedIn is enabled but you need your password to continue. 
Assuming it isn’t enabled yet, the next step is to go into the View tab, look under People Pane and check Account Settings. Tick the LinkedIn box if it’s not already configured, provide your credentials and bingo. 
just hover over the person’s mugshot and you’ll see their details, and click on the down arrow within the contact summary to view their other information – such as phone number, if they’ve published that in LinkedIn and are allowing their network to see it. 
What’s the most-used application on your PC? Maybe it’s your web browser (IE, of course), but if you’re a corporate email slave like many of us, then it’s quite likely to be Outlook. As you spend so much time in the application, it’s worth getting to know how to move around it a little more efficiently, and that could save you, oh, whole minutes every day.
lot, then you could move that folder up 
the chain so the icon will always be available. 
(The “Compact Navigation” option hides the text description and replaces the words with a simple icon, and is on by default).
outlook /select 
When you first install the addin, it will set up some new menu options on the MESSAGE tab in the main Outlook Window, and also adds a new ClearContext tab with additional functionality. At a simple level, ClearContext gives you a quick ability to move individual messages and threads to any folder – it will show the last few folders you’ve filed into. If the mail is part of a thread you’ve already done some filing on before then you’ll see the destination for those other messages, and you can start typing the name of a folder to see a list that can quickly be selected from. So much easier than dragging & dropping, expanding out hierarchies etc. 
(I’m not going to show you a screen shot as I’m too ashamed of the results – here’s a library picture instead… ->)
In the 
with a very remote server. If you get this far (Not Responding, all Outlook windows go a milky white colour, your cursor changes to the Circle of Hope etc) and start to panic as you haven’t saved that email you’ve been writing for the last half hour, then help may be at hand. A cure can be to right-click on the Outlook icon in the task bar, and choose Cancel Server Request from the pop up menu. You may need to do several of these in order to truly make Outlook back down, but it often resumes ordinary connectivity to the application, even if the task you asked it to do (which caused the
The topic of filing vs piling of email has been had on ToWs passim (
Another option is to just right-click on a mail in a list and use the File In > pop out menu. The software promises to learn as you do more and more filing, but even on the first run it seems to have a fairly decent stab at the right place to put stuff. There are no rules to configure, no wizards to run – remarkably, it seems to just work. You might want to switch off the default filing of everything you send, though – that could be a little annoying.
Hot on the heels of last week’s “
OneNote program manager Nicole Steinbok delivered an award-winning internal Microsoft presentation, blaming inefficient meetings (in part) on the 30-minute blocks that Outlook defaults to.
It’s seemingly an irrefutable law that when you book a meeting for an hour, it takes an hour. Or what might happen is some people are still rocking up at 3 or 4 minutes after the start, and others start packing up 5 minutes before the end because they have another meeting to go to. Others yet will start a whole new discussion (“oh, just one more thing…”) with 2 minutes to go.
be, or what time it should start. There are a few workarounds – you can set the timescale the calendar shows (so each line is 60, 30, 15 etc minutes, and if you double click on a section of your calendar to create an appointment, then it is set to that time slice). Try it out by going into Calendar, selecting the View tab, then View Settings. Select Other Settings on the pop up dialog, and change the view from there. 
Press ALT-F11 to open the Visual Basic editor
