Thursday, 25 September 2014

12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook


12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook

Love it or hate it, Microsoft Outlook is still the de facto email client at many offices. It's been a while since we took a look at good old Outlook, so here are some of our favorite tricks well worth revisiting to increase your productivity in this all-in-one email, calendar, tasks, and notes program.
The instructions and details in this post are based on Outlook 2010, but they should work with both earlier and later versions of Outlook, except where otherwise noted.

General Shortcuts

The shortcuts below work across the whole program, so you can get more done whether you're reading emails or adding meeting events to your calendar.
1. Learn Outlook's keyboard shortcuts. Like Microsoft Word, Excel, and other Office apps, Outlook has unique keyboard shortcuts so you don't have to waste time moving your mouse around or drilling down through menus. Learn the ones you use most and you'll speed through your Outlook tasks. MakeUseOf has a handy Outlook keyboard shortcuts cheat sheet you can download or print out. Among the most useful:
  • Ctrl+R: reply to email
  • Alt+R: reply to all in email or switch to the work week calendar view
  • Alt+W: forward email or switch to the weekly calendar view
  • Ctrl+M: F9 to Send/Receive all
  • Alt+S: Send email
  • Ctrl+G: open the "Go to date" dialog to jump to any date in the calendar
You can also switch between mail, calendar, contacts, and other items in the navigation pane by hitting Ctrl + [the place number of the item], e.g.:
12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook

2. Take advantage of Outlook's Quick Steps. For those unfamiliar, Quick Steps is the killer feature Microsoft introduced with Outlook 2010. They're shortcuts to any multi-step action you can think of, such as moving emails to a specific folder and marking them as read or forwarding an email to your team and flagging it at the same time. It makes short work of repetitive tasks, and you can create your own Quick Step actions.
12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook

3. Create a new item from your clipboard.
Copy any text to your clipboard, then in Outlook press Ctrl-V. Outlook creates a new message (or note or whatever item, depending on the folder you're viewing) with the text already pasted.
So instead of creating a new item in Outlook, and then copying and pasting text in, you do both in one step.

Email Shortcuts

Even though Gmail and other webmail services are quite capable, Outlook is no slouch when it comes to sorting, filtering, categorizing, and otherwise wrangling your inbox to your needs.

4. Limit desktop notifications to only the most important emails. It's terribly distracting to constantly be told "you've got mail!" but you still want to get notified for the most important alerts. In Outlook, set desktop notifications only for those VIP messages. Canadian legal magazine Slaw offers a detailed tutorial for how to do this, but, essentially, first you'll turn off all desktop alerts under the Mail Options, then create an Outlook rule to display alerts for messages from specific people sent only to you.
12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook
5. Flag messages—fast. With a message or two selected, jut hit the insert key to toggle the flag on or mark it done.

6. Get emails that aren't sent directly to you out of your inbox. 

One of the best tips is to use a special "Inbox – CC" folder to gather all the emails that aren't sent directly to you; that way, the inbox is focused on only the most important emails. To set this up, go to Rules > New Rules…. Then click the "Advanced Options" button. In the Rules Wizard, select "where my name is not in the To box" and then in the next screen, "move it to the specified folder." (Alternatively, set up a VIP email folder and move "emails sent only to me" into that special folder.)

7. Use email templates to never write the same email twice. 
Tired of sounding like a broken record? For those emails you send often, such as requests for information or reminders of due invoices, save the email as a template via File > Save As… > Outlook template. Then, to use the template, go to New Items > Choose Form… and look in your "User Templates in File System" to browse for the template you saved. Or, even quicker, double-click the OFT file from Windows Explorer to create a new message from that template. You can also use text expansion to accomplish this across any program on your computer.

8. Create search folders for your most important emails. What are your most frequently accessed emails? Maybe they're emails from your boss or certain subjects (now where's that TPS report?). For any search you perform often, just save the search for quick access. Click on Search Folders in the left navigation menu, select "New Search Folder," and then either use the wizards or manually customize the search to your specifications. 

12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook

9. Quickly save emails as files. If you want to save certain emails for posterity, you have a few methods at your disposal. While you can individually save any email through the File > Save As... menu (options: text, HTML, Outlook Message format or .msg, HTML, .mht), it's far faster to save emails by dragging them to the desktop or Windows Explorer. This will save them in Outlook's proprietary .msg format, with the subject as the file name.

Tasks, Calendar, Notes, and Journal

Outlook isn't just an email client. It's a full-fledged Personal Information Manager. Having everything in one place has its advantages, but there are still ways to use all these features more effectively.

10. Group tasks by custom priority. If you want to use Outlook as your to-do manager too, MSDN's JD Meier suggests this organizational structure: In addition to adding a start date to each of your tasks, add a custom priority field (such as P0, P1, and P2). Then you can group your tasks by that custom field so you can see at a glance which ones to work on at the right time. For example:

12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook


11. Use natural language to create a calendar event. Don't waste time scrolling through the monthly date picker to find the exact date for an appointment or meeting. In the date field, type naturally "Independence Day," "three days from tomorrow," and so on.

12. Save Outlook notes, events, and any other item to the desktop for quick access. It's not just emails you can save to your computer outside of Outlook: calendar events, notes, contacts, and everything else can be dragged to the desktop or a Windows folder as individual items for quick access later. Double-click the item—even if Outlook isn't open—and it'll open right away in Outlook.
Bonus (for Outlook 2010 and earlier): Use Outlook as an automatic time tracking tool. This one's been deprecated in Office 2013, but if you have an earlier version of Outlook, you can use the Journal to automatically log your tasks, time, Office documents usage, and so on. You have to click on the left navigation pane's "More" button to find the Journal icon and then enable the Journal to track messages from specific contacts, meeting requests, and time spend in other office programs. 

12+ Tips and Tricks to Work Faster in Microsoft Outlook
You'll then see a timeline and detailed log of all these events, which is great for those of us who have to keep timesheets, invoice clients, or just want to jog their memories about where the time really went.
These are all just scratching the surface of Outlook's capabilities. Loaded with options and features, as well as VBA scripts you can install or write yourself, Outlook is a powerful tool for organizing your daily life. For more tips and tricks, see our previous collection of Outlook tips or share your favorites here.

Thursday, 18 September 2014

Windows 7 tips, tricks and secrets




1. Calculate more

At first glance the Windows 7 calculator looks just like Vista's version, but explore the Mode menu and you'll see powerful new Statistics and Programmer views. And if you're clueless about bitwise manipulation, then try the Options menu instead. This offers many different unit conversions (length, weight, volume and more), date calculations (how many days between two dates?), and spreadsheet-type templates to help you calculate vehicle mileage, mortgage rates and more.

Don't take any Windows 7 applet at face value, then - there are some very powerful new features hidden in the background. Be sure to explore every option in all Windows applets to ensure you don't miss anything important.


2. Get a power efficiency report

If you have a laptop, you can use the efficiency calculator to get Windows 7 to generate loads of useful information about its power consumption. Used in the right way, this can help you make huge gains in terms of battery life and performance. To do this you must open a command prompt as an administrator by typing 'cmd' in Start Search, and when the cmd icon appears, right-click it and choose Run as administrator.

Then at the command line, just type in 'powercfg -energy' (without quotes) and hit Return, and Windows 7 will scan your system looking for ways to improve power efficiency. It will then publish the results in an HTML file, usually in the System32 folder. Just follow the path it gives you to find your report.
 
3. Explore God Mode

Windows 7 has changed Control Panel a little, but it's still too difficult to locate all the applets and options that you might need. God Mode, however, while not being particularly godlike, does offer an easier way to access everything you could want from a single folder.

To try this out, create a new folder and rename it to:


The first part, "Everything" will be the folder name, and can be whatever you want: "Super Control Panel", "Advanced", "God Mode" if you prefer.

The extension, ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C, must be entered exactly as it is here, though, including the curly brackets. When you press [Enter] this part of the name will disappear, and double-clicking the new folder will display shortcuts to functions in the Action Centre, the Network and Sharing Centre, Power options, troubleshooting tools, user accounts and others - more than 260 options in total.




4. Customise the log-on screen

Changing the Windows log-on screen used to involve some complicated and potentially dangerous hacks, but not any more - Windows 7 makes it easy.

First, browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background in REGEDIT, double-click the DWORD key called OEMBackground (not there? Create it) and set its value to 1.

Now find a background image you'd like to use. Make sure it's less than 256KB in size, and matches the aspect ratio of your screen as it'll be stretched to fit.

Next, copy that image into the %windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds folder (create the info\backgrounds folders if they don't exist). Rename the image to backgroundDefault.jpg, reboot, and you should now have a custom log-on image.

Alternatively, use a free tweaking tool to handle everything for you. Logon Changer displays a preview so you can see how the log-on screen will look without rebooting, while the Logon Screen Rotator accepts multiple images and will display a different one every time you log on.


5. Disable Windows Features

Windows 7 enables you to remove many more Windows features than ever before: Internet Explorer, Media Player, Windows Search, its indexing service, Windows Gadgets and more. This is something that you need to do cautiously, if at all (since removing something like Media Player will break many programs which rely on it), but can be useful if you're looking to create a very simple, slimmed-down system.

Click Start, type OptionalFeatures and press Enter to launch the Windows Features dialog. Clear the checkbox to the left of any features that are surplus to requirements, and click OK to remove them.



6. Block annoying alerts

Just like Vista, Windows 7 will display a suitably stern warning if it thinks your antivirus, firewall or other security settings are incorrect.

But unlike Vista, if you disagree then you can now turn off alerts on individual topics. If you no longer want to see warnings just because you've dared to turn off the Windows firewall, say, then click Control Panel > System and Security > Action Centre > Change Action Centre settings, clear the Network Firewall box and click OK.
 
7. Parallel defrags

The standard Windows 7 defragger offers a little more control than we saw in Vista, and the command line version also has some interesting new features. The /r switch will defrag multiple drives in parallel, for instance (they'll obviously need to be physically separate drives for this to be useful). The /h switch runs the defrag at a higher than normal priority, and the /u switch provides regular progress reports so you can see exactly what's going on. Enter the command 

defrag /c /h /u /r

in a command window to speedily defrag a system with multiple drives, or enter defrag /? to view the new options for yourself.

8. Keyboard shortcuts

Windows 7 supports several useful new keyboard shortcuts.

Alt + P
Display/ hide the Explorer preview pane


Windows Logo + G
Display gadgets in front of other windows


Windows Logo + + (plus key)Zoom in, where appropriate

Windows Logo + - (minus key)Zoom out, where appropriate

Windows Logo + Up
Maximise the current window


Windows Logo + Down
Minimise the current window


Windows Logo + Left
Snap to the left hand side of the screen


Windows Logo + Right
Snap to the right hand side of the screen


Windows Logo + Home
Minimise/ restore everything except the current window