When one of the comments to your guest post is, “I think I love you,” you know you’ve struck a nerve. That’s just part of the response I’ve gotten to my list of five little-known tricks for fixing misbehaving formatting in Microsoft Word.
Click here to find out how you, too, can alleviate your frustration even when you don’t have time to diagnose the problem.
Sometimes the latest tools aren’t necessarily the greatest. Case in point: it turns out that humble DOS, that pre-Windows dinosaur, is a much better choice when you need to get a comprehensive list of files that are on, say, a CD or DVD. If you’ve just been handed a disk or flash drive chock-full of discovery documents (or anything else), and you need to get a handle on what’s there, click here for a little show and tell on how you can use this forgotten tool from the 1980s to make short work of a directory listing.
It always seems to happen when you’re under the gun — the lights flicker or an application crashes, and your computer goes down right in the middle of a document. Or you get distracted and forget to save your document before you exit Microsoft Word.
You might not be able to stop computer crashes or inconvenient interruptions, but you can prevent losing an important document. In my post at Lawyerist, I show you not only how to take 30 seconds to set up Word’s AutoRecover feature, but also how to use it to recover a document that might otherwise be lost.
Click here for the full illustrated tutorial.
Lawyerist editor Sam Glover’s tweet about this post made me laugh: “Exchange admins everywhere whisper thanks to @legalofficeguru!” But, hey, Microsoft Exchange admins (the folks who run the software that powers a lot of y’all’s Outlook installations) will be thanking you if you’ll only take heed of my suggestions. You can pare down your Inbox and other Outlook folders without sacrificing anything important. (I promise!)
Click here for all five tips.
Ideas for the tutorials on this site and the guest posts I write elsewhere come from a lot of different places. I watch more blogs in my RSS reader than I can count, I’m constantly keeping my ears open for coworkers’ problems, and of course any problems I personally experience with Microsoft Office become post fodder, too.
But by far the richest source of material on the site is e-mail I get from readers.
Take, for example, a fairly lengthy e-mail exchange I had with one reader. Here was a lawyer, trying desperately to keep a handle on deadlines and outstanding work, particularly stuff assigned to others. He’d made a pretty game effort to use Microsoft Outlook to keep track of everything.
And he was drowning in Reminders.
Frankly, it took a while (and a good bit of back-and-forth) before I really started understanding the source of the problem. But his initial question really piqued my interest: “What is the best way to manage reminders in Outlook, and why isn’t there a ‘snooze all’ button, like dismiss all? It is very annoying to get reminders going off all day.”
As we work through the various aspects of this challenge, I made notes and did little research. The result of all that was not only a (I hope) successful resolution of his problem, but a new guest post over on Lawyerist. That post, Managing Microsoft Outlook Reminders, contains a whole slew of tricks for keeping that Reminders window from driving you completely crazy while still letting it do its job.
Click here for the complete illustrated tutorial. I bet you’ll learn at least one new thing!
We’ve been hearing it for a while now — the wave of the future in law offices everywhere is paperless filing. Not just e-filing in courts, mind you, but actually committing to a paper-free filing system in your law office.
For those who find that vision a little intimidating, here’s some good news: you don’t have to go cold turkey on paper files to start reaping the benefits of the paperless office. In fact, it’s probably a better idea to start small, see what works for you, and tweak as you go.
Over at Lawyerist, editor Sam Glover’s philosophy is that paperless can mean “less paper” rather than “paper-free.” I agree. So to support this “steady as you go” philosophy, I’ve written a guest post called Going Paperless: Some Intermediate Steps, outlining some things you can be doing to reduce the volume of paper in your office (and, not coincidentally, improving the efficiency of your filing system).
So click here, and get ready to start working on that New Year’s resolution to reduce clutter and/or make things easier to find.
I’ve always been one of those people who has umpteen subfolders under her Outlook Inbox. And, up until recently, I just thought that was the way to do things.
A recent study on efficient email practices, however, has convinced me that maybe a lot of the time I’ve spent sorting emails into their little virtual cubbyholes hasn’t been time well spent.
In my latest post on Lawyerist, I explore what this means for all of us Outlook users and, more importantly, show you how to use the Search Folders feature to quickly organize those critical e-mails without spending so much time sorting.
Click here for the full illustrated article.
The editors at Attorney at Work reached out to me for some quick tech tips for their blog this week, and I was happy to oblige. Ranging across the most popular Microsoft Office suite applications, this guest post will show you how to:
Click here to read these four useful tips.
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 today” 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 here for the full illustrated tutorial.
In my continuing quest to upgrade the Microsoft Outlook skills of Lawyerist readers, my latest guest post there shows how to assign Tasks in Outlook to others. From putting in the subject line and addressing the task (it’s as easy as sending an email) to tracking its progress, it’s a fully illustrated tutorial in how to hand off a to-do list item with Microsoft Outlook.
If you’re looking for an easy way to track not only what’s on your plate but also what you’ve given other people, click here for an introduction to Task assignment in Microsoft Outlook.
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