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!
For our Thanksgiving week Roundup: Adobe shows us how to print both entire batches and selected pdfs from an email portfolio (a great way to archive email for future reference), and if you hate the Microsoft Office Ribbon, you can get rid of it without downgrading your Office Suite.
In this week’s Roundup of the reading file: a quick (and really fun and challenging) online typing test (how long has it been since you took a typing test?), how to configure Outlook 2010 for your Gmail account, some inexpensive speech-to-text alternatives for those who want to dictate to their PC, yet another reason to use Microsoft Word’s Style feature, and what those little black boxes next to your Microsoft Word text mean, particularly for your document’s pagination.
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.
From this week’s reading file: Vivian Manning shows us what that little blue line underneath some of your text in Microsoft Word really means, DIY IT Guy shows us how to re-start Microsoft Outlook in troubleshooting mode to save your data (and possibly your sanity), and Susan Harkins has several ways to paste text in Microsoft Word to ensure the least amount of post-paste cleanup (always a good thing, especially when you’re pressed for time editing).
You may remember the Reader Question from a few weeks back involving synchronizing Microsoft Outlook information between two computers. I posted a list of possible solutions courtesy of Outlookipedia (and the comments to the post also contained some great suggestions, including using IMAP rather than POP3 email).
I also continued to follow up with this reader behind the scenes to see if I could find a better solution for this dilemma. I’m happy to report we did.
The developers of SynchPst (one of the solutions listed in the Outlookipedia article) contacted me and, after some back-and-forth via emails among the three of us, they consented to allow this reader to try a copy of their software free.
Here’s the reader’s review (edited for length as indicated by the ellipses):
This week’s Roundup of the reading file is an embarrassment of riches from the usual suspects: TechRepublic’s take on the most important Microsoft Word skills, how to put time values into Microsoft Excel, Vivian Manning tackles Microsoft Word’s mail merge feature, making it easier to switch between Word documents, and how to share your Microsoft Outlook calendar. Click the “Read More” link for the details. Click to continue…
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.
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