If your Microsoft Outlook .pst file (the one that holds all your messages, calendar items, contacts, and tasks) is getting a little heavy, here are five ways you can trim it down.
Read MoreGuest Posts
That Reminders window in Microsoft Outlook is a great thing … until it starts annoying the living daylights out of you. You know you ignore it at your peril, but how do you use it without it driving you crazy? My latest guest post on Lawyerist shows you how.
Read More
Want to make your law office paperless, but you’re too intimidated to take the plunge? Here are some intermediate steps you can take in my guest post on Lawyerist.
Read More
In my latest guest post over at Lawyerist, I link you to a recent IBM study that shows just how inefficient sorting e-mails is, and then I show you a better way: using Microsoft Outlook’s Search Folders feature. Click the Read More link for a link to the full article.
Read More
Here are four quick tips across a range of Microsoft Office applications: modifying the Status Bar, ensuring Excel sheets auto-calculate, improving full justification of text in Word, and starting Outlook in the folder of your choice. Click through for a link to the full article.
Read More
Over on Lawyerist, I’ve been writing a lot lately about Microsoft Outlook — how to use tasks and categories and how assign tasks to other people, for example. This week, I’ve gathered up three features many Outlook users don’t even know about.
For instance, did you know that Outlook can automatically calculate “30 days from now” or “one week from now” when setting a due date? Or that you can redirect e-mail replies to another user? Or that Outlook can keep all of the e-mails in a particular conversation together for easy reference?
If these tricks are news to you, click through for a link to the full illustrated tutorial.
Read More
If you’ve only used Microsoft Outlook’s Tasks to track your own to do list, you’re missing half the power of that feature. Many Outlook users don’t realize that Tasks can be assigned to other users, and you can even track an assigned Task’s progress on your own to-do list. My latest guest post on Lawyerist is a complete illustrated tutorial on how to use this feature. Click through for a link to the full article.
Read MoreWant to use Microsoft Outlook to organize your cases? Say, keep track of your overflowing to-do list, group all of your Smith v. Jones entries together, get an at-a-glance look at what’s on your plate this week? Click through for a link to my latest guest post on Lawyerist, “Using Outlook Tasks + Categories Views,” for some great strategies on using Outlook to stay on top of things.
Read More
If you’re looking to use Outlook to help organize your client matters but are clueless about where to start, I’ve got you covered over at Lawyerist. In my guest post called “Organize Matters Using Microsoft Outlook,” I show you (step by step with screen shots and detailed instructions) how to:
* Use Outlook’s Tasks feature to keep track of your to-do’s
* Organize your Tasks by client/matter/file using Categories
* Embed important information in your Tasks, like Word documents or Outlook v-cards with contact info
Click the “Read More” link below for a link to the full tutorial.
Read MoreIf you send documents out for review electronically, this guest post I’ve done over at Attorney at Work is a must-read. It’s a checklist of actions you need to make sure you’ve taken prior to attaching a document to an email and hitting the “Send” button. Before you start that next round of revisions, read through this and familiarize yourself with Microsoft Word’s security settings designed to combat potentially compromising metadata.
Click through for a link to the full article.
Read MoreAs a follow-up to my Using Microsoft Word Styles post on Lawyerist, I go one step further and teach you how to create new Styles and share them with others in your office. If you’ve ever thought about creating a set of standard forms (pleadings, letters, etc.) for use by everyone in your workgroup or office, this post contains some critical information about how the interaction between Styles and Templates in Microsoft Word.
Click through for a link to the full illustrated post.
Read MoreHow my recent “primer” on Microsoft Word’s Styles feature over on the Lawyerist blog has turned into a series … and how your documents can benefit.
Read More
If typing speed is important to you, you want to minimize the amount of time you spend reaching for the mouse to access common commands like font formatting, paragraph justification, etc. Learn a few critical hotkeys (key combinations that give you instant access to commands you’d otherwise have to click through the menu system to use), and your typing speed (and productivity) can increase dramatically.
Microsoft Word’s got tons of hotkeys, but over on the Attorney at Work blog, I’ve listed what I think are some of the most important for increasing your typing and editing speed. Memorize two or three of these at a time, use them enough to make them second-nature, then go back to the list to pick up a couple more.
Click through for a link to the full post.
Read More