Tag: Productivity

Tip o’ the Week #23: Viewing Excel sheets side by side

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Toni Kent from Microsoft UK’s partner group once again provides the inspiration for this week’s tip.

Everyone loves the side-by-side windows feature of Windows 7, where you can dock windows to the sides of your monitor by dragging them (or pressing ÿ+? or ÿ+?). But sometimes it doesn’t appear to work if you have several documents open, and want to compare them side by side, particularly if they are spreadsheets.

It’s all to do with how applications open multiple windows. Microsoft Word, for example, opens each document in a separate instance of Word, so if you have two docs open, it’s a snap to show them side/side. Excel, by contrast, prefers to open each new worksheet within a single “Excel” application.

So, whilst Windows 7 will show previews of multiple windows, they’re actually just multiple documents opened within Excel.

If you want to see Excel windows side by side, try going into the View menu in Excel, and click on the View Side by Side option on the Ribbon, then choose which of the additional open worksheets you’d like to compare the current one with.

There’s also the option in Excel to “tile” open worksheet windows, so you could have more than 2 arranged side by side or one above the other.

Tip o’ the Week #22: Sync SharePoint data into Outlook

Posted on by ewand

This week’s tip comes from a reader: over to Microsoft UK’s Rob Orwin…

clip_image001In order to help my forecasting, I synchronise the appropriate documents to my Outlook so that when I send and receive they are automatically updated.

To do this I simply:

1) Go to the SharePoint site where the documents are held

2) Click, “Actions”

3) Click Connect To Outlook – As per screenshot

4) The spreadsheets magically appear in my outlook folder, cunningly named TPAM ISV as per screenshot
clip_image002

5) Whenever I hit “Send & Receive” I get the latest version

Net result: This means that when I’ve no access to SharePoint, I can quickly get the latest, synchronized copy of the forecast spreadsheet and have up to date info at my fingertips giving my notably more time to work on my excuses …

clip_image004Rob’s highlighted a great way of taking SharePoint files offline, which not only makes them available when you’re not connected, but also speeds up opening them if they’re big files… since you’ve already got them on your machine, in Outlook’s data files. The one downside is that they’re read only if using SharePoint 2007 – thought SharePoint 2010 gives the ability to do bi-directional…

There are other areas of integration that you might be aware of, too… like taking a SharePoint calendar or contacts list, and exposing it in Outlook – but this time, you can can edit the data in Outlook and it flows back to the SharePoint 2007 site…

Tip o’ the Week #20: Outlook date cleverness

Posted on by ewand

Here’s a quick Outlook tip that some long term users may know but might have forgotten. Ever since the first very of Outlook was released more than 14 years ago, it’s had a surprising capability to handle dates using natural language descriptions.

Whenever Outlook prompts you to enter a date (and allows you to type a date in rather than have to choose from a calendar), you can give it dates that are relative to today, eg “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “Friday” etc.

Eg – for a date field in a new calendar invite or a “do not send email before” field, you could simply put “tomorrow” and it will figure out the literal date for you. There are plenty of others too, eg:

image

… (which would change the reminder in the above dialog from the coming Friday to the next one after that).

There are hosts of others – “in 3 days”, “6 months”, “third Wednesday”, “Chrismas eve” etc etc.
See how many you can spot…

Technorati Tags: ,

Tip o’ the Week #19: Navigating multi-sheet Excel workbooks

Posted on by ewand

clip_image002Here’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:

clip_image004

Technorati Tags: ,,

Tip o’ the Week #18: Resizing pictures in email

Posted on by ewand

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.clip_image002

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.

clip_image003

After only 3 resizing drags, the image is now much less wieldy:

clip_image004

(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…

clip_image006

Technorati Tags: ,

Tip o’ the Week #17: Broadcast PPT to customers & partners

Posted on by ewand

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…

clip_image001Once 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.

clip_image002

Tip o’ the Week #16: All wiyht. Rho sritched mg kegtops awound?

Posted on by ewand

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…

clip_image002

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…

  • Horizontal line – see that line above? Type “—“ and press enter. Great for separating parts of your email, like the “here’s the mail I was planning to send to the partner” type messages… finish your intro blurb with a nice horizontal line and everyone will know what follows is separate…
  • Em & En – As well as being useful Scrabble words, “Em” and “En” are units of typography—an “em” being the same width as a capital letter “M” (and a space, and as the point size of the font), and an “en” being half that—which are used to measure, amongst other things, the widths of dashes.
    Whichever dash you choose is up to you and to the style guide you’re writing for (and both look so much classier than a dull old minus-sign), but the rules on how to involve them are pretty easy:
  • An Em Dash (“—“) is made by typing two hyphens (“-“) without spaces – eg em–dash
  • An En Dash (“–“) is made by typing space-two hyphens-space – eg en — dash
  • URLs with spaces – How many times have you ever received an email with a URL which doesn’t work because it has a space in it? (such as http://sharepoint/sites//TipOWeek/Tip o the Week 15 – Show yourself.msg)? Or a UNC like \\windymiller\Video\MSFT Internal\TR10\Ballmer – Cloud.wmv ?
    If you’re ever pasting or typing in a URL which has spaces, and you want Word or Outlook to treat it properly, start with a “<” then type or paste the URL/UNC then add a “>” to the end. As soon as you press space/full-stop etc, everything between the <>s will be turned into a URL/UNC and the angle brackets are removed.
Technorati Tags: ,,

Tip o’ the Week #11: SharePoint alerts

Posted on by ewand

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.

clip_image002If 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 alertclip_image004 – these screenshots were taken from SharePoint 2007 but 2010 has the same concept.

Technorati Tags: ,

Tip o’ the Week #10: Navigate Outlook with shortcuts

Posted on by ewand

clip_image001

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:

  • CTRL+1 – switches the current view to mail – the last mail folder that was viewed
  • CTRL+2 – switched the current window’s view to Calendar
  • CTRL+3 – ditto for Contacts
  • CTRL+4 – ditto for Tasks
  • CTRL+I – switches to the Inbox (ie. moves your mail view to the inbox folder)
  • CTRL+N – creates a new item (of whatever type is appropriate in the current folder)
  • CTRL+SHIFT+A – creates a new appointment (regardless of which folder you’re in)
  • CTRL+SHIFT+M – creates a new message (regardless of folder)
  • CTRL+E (or F3) – switches the focus to the “Search” box in the main view
  • CTRL+SHIFT+G – opens the “flag for follow up” dialog on the current item
  • SPACE and SHIFT-SPACE – moves the active email in the Reading Pane up and down

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…

Technorati Tags: ,,

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 …

clip_image003

Technorati Tags: ,,