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. Move […]
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, […]
Deleting Holidays
How to delete ‘duplicate’ holidays in Outlook. When you add holidays to Outlook, sometimes you can end up with duplicate entries because Outlook isn’t smart enough to detect simple duplications in the calendar. Here’s an example of triplication of holiday items in the Outlook Calendar. It’s easy to do given Outlook’s poor holidays support. Removing […]
Adding Holidays into Outlook
Put Easter and other public holidays back into Outlook If you check your Outlook calendar for the coming weekend, you might not see Easter Monday marked for Monday 21 April, Good Friday marked for Friday 18 April 2014. Or maybe US Thanksgiving on 27 Nov 2014 isn’t listed? Why? Doesn’t Outlook come with public holidays automatically […]
Outlook email basics and beyond
Outlook tricks you may not have considered for New, Reply, Reply All, Forward and Resend. New / Compose The simple and easy one first. Click on the New Email button to start a new message. At the very least fill in the TO, Subject and some message text then click Send. There can be more […]
Microsoft wins ad complaint over Google privacy
Microsoft’s ‘Scroogled’ campaign gets partial endorsement. The British Advertising Standards Authority has agreed with Microsoft after a complaint about their ‘Scroogled’ campaign. ‘Scroogled’ is an attempt by Microsoft to attack Google over its targeted advertising which looks at Gmail messages and displays ads based on the keywords in the email. It’s an extension of the […]
Microsoft reads private email on Hotmail/Outlook.com
When Microsoft feels the need, they read cloud emails on Outlook.com (aka Hotmail) or other Microsoft 365 hosted email. Microsoft has been caught reading private data stored on their cloud servers and it’s all quite legal. In 2012 screenshots of the, then unreleased, Windows 8 had been leaked and Microsoft wanted to know where the […]
Office ScreenTips in other languages
A free way to show Microsoft Office help in other languages Office Screentips is a way to show tooltips for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and other programs. This free addon from Microsoft doesn’t interfere with how the programs work or the wording of the tabs and ribbons. Only the tooltips that appear when you hover […]
Picture problems in Office
How to find your pictures to insert into an Office document. Even a simple thing like adding a picture to an Office document or email has subtleties and annoyances. When you choose Insert | Picture in recent versions of Office, it opens, by default, in the Picture Library. That seems sensible, at least to Microsoft. […]
Dropbox Alerts in Outlook
Get Outlook to show changes in Dropbox folders Dropbox has one excellent feature, the ‘Events’ view that lists files added, deleted or modified. You can use that feature to get custom Outlook alerts when certain things happen to your Dropbox account, like when a file is added to a shared folder. That list can be […]
Get alerts from Outlook RSS feeds
How to get a message when certain RSS feeds are updated As you probably know, it’s possible to get an alert or an action when certain email messages arrive into Outlook using the Rules feature. Office-Watch.com shows how to do the same thing for an RSS feed. It will let you filter down a larger […]
Sending files using Dropbox
A simple guide to sending files via Dropbox. There are many ways to send files that are too big for email (usually over 20MB). In this article we’ll look at how to do that with Dropbox either sending a ‘one-off’ file or regularly exchanging files with someone else. Dropbox is very popular, generally free and well […]
