Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: Microsoft Outlook

  • Outlook: Problems opening and organizing calendars

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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): The issue was the same whether I was in the viewing pane or opened the invite, and persisted regardless of whether I’d responded or…

  • 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…

  • 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: Go to File -> Options Go to Mail Scroll down…

  • 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: To get around this issue, we can…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • 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. In Outlook 2013, Microsoft changed the nomenclature used when adding attendees to meeting requests. Where before there had been the usual options (To,…