Creative Outlook alarms
The famous American ‘Can Do’ spirit takes on a new meaning at Detroit Fire Stations. Callouts to emergencies are sent to the fire stations by fax … yes, you read that right … fax. And it gets worse … When the fax arrives, paper comes out of the printer, hits a soda can with metal […]
Where is Microsoft on email encryption?
Microsoft needs to play ‘catch up’ with email encryption. Yahoo is going to join Google is supporting not just email encryption but the same type of email encryption. Sadly we’ll have to wait until sometime in 2015 for Yahoo to release their version of OpenPGP. That’s good news … but where is Microsoft? For all […]
More characters for Unicode
Unicode adds more characters to an already large list. Unicode has added another 2,834 new characters in the Unicode 7.0 specification, mostly support for 23 new scripts. That takes the total to a whopping 113,021 characters! But we’ll have to wait for these new characters to appear automatically in Office, Windows and mobile devices. The […]
More Microsoft encryption promises
Do the latest Microsoft data encryption promises mean much? Microsoft has announced more encryption services for customers but it’s more ‘papering over the cracks’ than a real effort to protect customer’s data. Microsoft has made some vague changes to protect the transmission of your emails and documents, but nothing to protect that information on their […]
Touch features in Office 2013
Office 2013 has some clever tricks when you touch the screen. Tony G writes: ” … there are some subtle features in Office 2013. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 and I have observed that the right click menus and some other features are different when called up by the touch screen and using the […]
Office 365 outage mystery
Email services for Office 365 and Exchange Online should now be resumed but Microsoft handled it really badly. In Microsoft’s world, damage to sales is far worse than any failure to meet customers service needs. So on that score, Microsoft has done well for itself in the last day or so. They had a major […]
World Cup scores in Outlook
You can get match results automatically in Outlook Once great thing about Outlook’s Internet Calendar feature is that it can be updated automatically. The 2014 World Cup (football/soccer) is a good example. As we’ve already explained, you can make a separate Outlook calendar with the match schedule for your time zone then overlay that with […]
Get the World Cup into Outlook
How to get the World Cup schedule into Outlook automatically. The football/soccer World Cup is about to start with 64 matches being played over the next month. Here’s how to get a reliable schedule into your Outlook calendar quickly and easily. Outlook lets you import an Internet feed of calendar items. This is better than […]
Better email encryption for Outlook
Gpg4Win is one way to improve and expand Outlook’s poor encryption support. Google’s End-to-End got us thinking about how to improve Outlooks lame email encryption and make it ready for End-to-End. The End-To-End addin uses OpenPGP, an email encryption system not directly supported by Outlook but you can do it via Gpg4Win. Gpg4Win is a […]
Google’s secure email system coming soon
Google’s End-to-End secure email tool is a great idea – will it force Microsoft to improve Outlook? Google has announced an upcoming tool ‘End to End‘ which promises a way to send and receive encrypted emails from within a Chrome browser using web-based email systems (apparently not just Gmail). That is a great move which […]
Outlook Quick Steps in depth
A quicker way to do some regular tasks in Outlook. Quick Steps is that big block in the middle of the Outlook 2010 and 2013 Home tab Quick Steps let you customize and combine Outlook functions into a single click without resorting to VBA. The defaults are meant to be examples of what is possible. […]
Outlook Reply / Forward prefixes
Why RE and FW are the best options for email subjects When you reply or forward a message your email program will add a prefix to the subject line. The question is – do you choose the standard ‘English’ prefixes RE: and FW: or your local equivalents? There’s plenty of alternatives to RE and FW […]
Problems with adding Outlook holidays
Outlook adds holidays from various countries but it’s not very clear or clever about it. Recently we’ve been looking at Outlooks Holiday support. We thought it would a simple matter of clicking ‘Add Holidays’ but instead we found an old-fashioned, unclear and poorly designed system that’s causes lots of hassles and frustration. From File | […]
Using Conversations in Outlook
A better way to view your email in Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 Outlook Conversation view is a different way to arrange your email. It groups messages with (usually) the same subject together making it easier to follow an email thread. Conversations also makes better use of valuable screen real estate. When Microsoft first showed […]
About Outlook Conversations
What makes a conversation in Outlook? In the Outlook world a conversation is a series of emails with the same subject line or conversation ID. It’s as simple as that. In the past these were called email ‘threads’. Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013 can group messages by conversation or thread. For most people the conversation […]
Questionable Outlook holidays
Should Outlook be adding marketing holidays as well as real ones? The US Holidays list in Outlook 2013 adds some unexpected and non-holiday items to your calendar – the full list is below. There were some surprising entries in the list supplied by Microsoft. Administrative Professionals Day There’s no doubt that Administrative Professionals, Executive Assistants, […]
