On a relatively regular basis, I find my days packed with appointments, reminders, and meetings. At other times, I need to organize a meeting, or talk to a colleague, and need to check their availability. For these reasons, and others, I’m an active user of digital calendars. Anything that happens during the work day is listed in some way or another in my work calendar (even if simply showing my availability or lack thereof).
(more…)Category: Microsoft Outlook
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Start Outlook in Safe Mode
In last week’s post, I mentioned starting Outlook in Safe Mode. While I didn’t expect it to help, I was at the point where I wanted to ensure I’d tried everything. Simply put, when starting Outlook in Safe Mode, you disable any add-ins that may be installed and causing issues. I’ll leave the question of whether or not it’s a useful tool to have in your bag to you, here’s how you do it:
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Outlook: Calendar illegible in invites
A little while back, I had an issue with Outlook not properly displaying the calendar in meeting invitations. It looked like this (which I’m sure you’ll agree is less than helpful):
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Hide recipients in Outlook meeting bookings
Like so many of you, I arrange a fair number of meetings for various purposes. Among these are the ones I arrange for the members of my union local in my capacity as its head. Now, EU – and thus also Norwegian – data protection law clearly categorizes union membership as one of the numerous special categories of personal data. I understand this to mean that I am not allowed to share the membership list with my members.
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Set Outlook to only mark as read when you open an email
A while back, a customer complained that Outlook always marked emails as read when he clicked over to another email, and wanted to know if there was a setting that would change this behavior. As it turns out, there is. Here’s how you do it:
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Outlook: Disable the send without location prompt
Like many others, my work days are – to some extent – made up of meetings with others. It’s not uncommon for these meetings not to have an assigned meeting room, and I find it annoying that Outlook asks me if I want to enter a meeting location:
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Outlook: Mail merge
I have previously written about one of my many responsibilities; contacting users whose login credentials have shown up in breach lists. While the pertinent results of the breach files are delivered to me in a flat file, I use Excel’s Text to Columns feature to separate logins (usually email addresses) from the password. While this might take a little fiddling with the delimiters, it is worth it to ensure that you have a good basis on which to work.
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Outlook: Offline Mode
From time to time, I need to run Outlook in Offline Mode. This is usually the case when I want to ensure that a mail merge has worked successfully. It is also a good option to reduce data usage when on mobile networks. Going to Offline Mode is straight forward. In Outlook, go to the Send/Receive tab, and then click “Work Offline”:
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Find attachments opened in Outlook
Early this year, a user called in with a somewhat peculiar story. They had previewed a file attached to an email, and the subsequently deleted the email. It wasn’t important enough to be worth it to restore the entire mail file, and so they wondered if there was any other way to find the attachment. They noted that they had previously gotten into a folder which seemed to contain all previewed files, though they were unable to find it again when searching. The user had searched the web, to no avail, and so turned to me with two questions. First; could I help them find the folder, and second, why did it not show up in search.
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Newly created folder does not show in Outlook
A user called in, complaining that they were unable to create a new folder in a shared mailbox. The error message they got indicated that the folder already existed. I started troubleshooting the issue, and it transpired that they had created the folder already, though it did not show up. I tried a number of fixes, including restarting Outlook, removing the mailbox from account settings, and even deleting their mail profile altogether. It was this last attempt that would lead me to the correct solution.
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Outlook 2013: BCC in meeting requests
I had a user call in, who was unfamiliar with Office 2013, having only worked with previous versions of Office, and wanting to know how they could add a BCC recipient to the meeting request.
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