Office At Work : Outlook

Add train journey details to Outlook appointments

StephB — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:53:00 GMT

I recently heard about an extremely useful add-in for Outlook 2007 from National Rail Enquiries, which allows you to plan and add train journey details to your Outlook appointments. Great idea and it’s really nicely put together too :). The screenshots below show how it works in Outlook 2007, but there’s also a version for Outlook 2003.

First of all you just download the plug-in from the National Rail Enquiries web site.

Once you’ve installed the plug-in you get an extra ‘Journey Planner’ button in all your appointments.

Clicking the Journey Planner button opens a dialogue box where you can specify you’re departure and arrival destinations, including default settings for work and home. You can then view details to select the journey which best suit your needs.

Once you’ve selected your journey appointments are created in your Outlook calendar which even have reminders set to the appropriate time, so you leave enough time to make it to the station!

The appt itself has all the detail of your journey, including links to the live departure board, so you track any delays. You can also set up SMS alerts for the journey.

All in all, a really nicely designed little application, which I know I’ll be making good use of very soon. Give it a go and let me know if it works for you!

Download the National Rail Enquiries plug-in for Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007

Stop doing email

GillLeFevre — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:36:33 GMT

One of my interests/challenges/obsessions at work is personal productivity. How can you get everything you need to do done and still get home at a reasonable hour? Can you get a work/home balance that doesn’t require regular sacrifices -- on either side? And what’s the secret to defeating Parkinson’s Law?

With these ongoing questions at the back of my mind, I was struck when I came across a series of articles by a colleague, Dave Wascha, that outlined practical steps to master your workload and maximise your effectiveness – without turning you into a jobsworth. Over to Dave…

Stop doing email

Every time I hear someone talk about how much email they got through yesterday, or how many emails they have in their inbox it drives me absolutely crazy. How many times a day do you hear others talk about how much email they do? How often do you talk about how much you do? We don’t pay people to do email; we pay people to drive business impact. One of the most common patterns I’ve observed in my time working is that people too often confuse the two. People confuse activity with driving business impact.

There are two common activities that we often confuse with impact: doing mail, and going to meetings.

Email is not progress

One pitfall I’ve fallen into and witnessed again and again with others is when we aren’t clear on our goals or how we add value, when we’re not feeling empowered or motivated, or when we simply don’t know what to do next, then email is something tangible we can do to delude ourselves that we’re making progress. It’s very alluring. You can (and probably do) spend hours processing hundreds of emails, deleting, filing, responding, watching your inbox shrink, reacting to new mails coming in etc. and when you’re done you can say, “Wow, I got through 800 mails!” It feels like you’ve accomplished something.

But even if we’re focused and clear about our objectives, we are haunted by our inboxes. We open up the inbox in the morning, see that we already have 40 new emails and it’s only 7:30am and we look at our calendars and see that we have meetings all day and there’s no way we’re going to get through it all and we feel overwhelmed by it. As good conscientious employees we feel compelled to read and respond to every single email we get. We must let go of this notion. Doing mail can be largely a waste of time. I know because I stopped doing mail six years ago. Well…mostly.

In 2003 I found myself spending more and more time doing mail and yet as hard as I tried I was never able to keep up. Inevitably I’d have to work on two or three Saturdays a month and spend the day “catching up on mail” and cleaning out my inbox. I found this unwinnable battle very demoralizing. I got around 12,000 emails in 2003. If you assume an average of 2 minutes (which is probably low) reading and/or responding to all 12,000 of these mails it roughly equates to spending 9-10 hours a week doing mail. I was spending all this time doing mail and yet I was getting further behind in what I was actually supposed to be doing against my objectives. I felt caught in this ever increasing loop of mail, mail and more mail and it wasn’t helping me actually get my job done.

The black list

On one of those Saturdays as I was sitting at my desk catching up on mail I decided to conduct an experiment. I set out to discover just how little mail I could read and respond to and still achieve my objectives and drive the business forward. I started by deciding that I wouldn’t read any mail from certain people who tended to send me a lot of mail that wasn’t relevant to my job, or my objectives. I made a list of those people and built rules in Outlook to delete mail from them automatically (I maintain such a list today). People are always shocked when I tell them I do this. This reduced my incoming mail rate by about 5-10%. I was encouraged. I was buying back time through deleting irrelevant mail without reading it. I then took a pretty big leap and stole a rule from a colleague which was to delete all mails where I was on the CC line without reading them. This one made me nervous because I thought surely I was going to miss out on lots of important information and be out of the loop on crucial goings on. My incoming mail rate immediately dropped by another 40%. When I tell people this they immediately ask, “How long did that last before things started to get dropped?” But interestingly enough little if anything got dropped. Most people are terrible about how much thought they put into who goes on the CC line. In fact they tend to err on the side of sending mail more broadly than necessary. If the only exposure you have to some idea or piece of information is through being copied on a mail about it, how crucial can it really be to doing your job? Anyway, through these two simple steps I reduced my incoming mail rate by half and it was having no negative impact on my ability to do my job. In fact was spending less time on mail, hours less, and I was increasing the time I had to spend on driving the business forward.

I started to get addicted to deleting mail. Through trial and error I continued to build rules in Outlook to whittle and pair and trim mail that wasn’t directly relevant to me driving business impact. Anything that wasn’t directly relevant to the daily execution of my job got deleted or moved to a folder before I read it.

It’s good to talk

I continued to scan and analyze my inbox for patterns or trends that would allow me to cut even more. I began to notice that a significant portion of the mail in my inbox at that point were responses to mails that I’d sent other people. Furthermore I also noticed that the more people I put on the TO: line and the CC: line the more responses I got back. This of course seems obvious, but it led me to experiment with further refinements to my system. I made a list of the people I most often sent mail to. For six years I’ve made this list in every role I’ve had and it has always been the case that I send the bulk of my mail to 5 or 6 people. I then made sure that I have frequent, short meetings with those people, and I started to choose the phone as the primary communications channel in the absence of an in-person meeting. One 3 minute phone call or ten minute meeting often saved a thread of dozens of back and forth emails and hours spent conversing in mail. So, in addition to cutting back on the amount of mail I received, I also started to cut back on the amount of mail I sent. I sent fewer mails and I sent them to fewer people.

When you go through this refinement process you’re left with a handful of mails from the 5-7 most crucial people for you to be in touch with on the 3-4 things that are most important to your job. In fact, those 3-4 things should map directly to your objectives. If they don’t your system is flawed.

In all but a few circumstances email is not the best way to communicate with people. Additionally I believe most of the email we get is not directly relevant to doing our jobs. Email is a tool to get a job done and yet for many of us it has become our job. I got over twenty thousand emails last year and I deleted nearly 70% of them without reading them. Of those I did read I responded to fewer than half. If you spend a ridiculous amount of time doing email you are likely doing it at the expense of driving business impact and your own work/life balance. I’m ruthless about deleting mail and I don’t apologize for it. Only very, very rarely do I actually miss something that was pretty important.

Don’t confuse reading or writing email with driving business impact. I don’t get paid to do mail and neither do you.

Key Takeaways:

Don’t confuse activity like doing email with making progress on driving the business forward
Most of the email you get is not crucial to doing your job
Create a system for identifying irrelevant (or less relevant) mail and delete as much as possible without reading it
Send less mail and send it to fewer people
Choose the phone, instant messenger or short, in-person meetings instead of email whenever possible
Use the time you save doing steps 1-5 to make focused progress on driving the business forward

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) now available to download

StephB — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:15:07 GMT

If you’re using Office 2007 and want to keep your computer completely secure and performing at it’s best - and I know you do - head to the links below, where you can find out about and download Service Pack 2 (SP2). If you have your PC configured to download updates automatically (Control Panel / System & Security / Windows Update), you will get this update automatically after around 90 days. However you can get the benefits straight away by installing the update early from Windows Update on your PC or by following the links below.

What are the improvements?

Faster email management in Outlook 2007

According to expert & blogger Gray Knowlton ‘One of the most important end user benefits of the SP2 release is the improvement in Outlook performance.’. Amen to that I say – anything that speeds up managing my email is a definite plus :). Improvements include:

Faster and more predictable startup & shutdown
Better folder view & switching
Improved calendar reliability
Reduction in number of data file check error messages

‘Save as PDF and XPS’ added to ‘Save As’ options

If you haven’t already downloaded this feature you’ll find it installed as part of the SP2 update. Saving as PDF or XPS keeps your formatting intact and secure so you can ensure your documents are seen exactly as you intended. So, very handy if you have official docs to email or complex creations to send to the printer.

Save as ODF 1.1

This feature should help if you have friends or colleagues using other types of office software. Basically, it allows you to save your Office 2007 docs in a shareable format which is easily read by most types of office software.

Next steps

· Where can I download SP2? – You can pop up to Microsoft Update and install the bits

· Where can I learn about what is in SP2? – Here

· Is this an Automatic Update? – Not yet. For the first 90 days (at least the first 90), service packs are made available as a manual download. After 90 days and with a 30 day notice, Service Packs are offered through the Automatic Update channel as a critical update.

Want even more info

More detailed overview of the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 can be found on Gray Knowlton’s Gray Matter blog – from which most of this info in lovingly cribbed. Thanks Gary!

Most popular how-to articles in 2008

GillLeFevre — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:51:00 GMT

How do you know what you don't know... You need to know something exists in the first place, to know that you don't know anything about it...

Because of this conundrum, I'm always interested to see what people are searching for on Office Online -- and I almost always discover a new feature that I wasn't previously aware of. So as we get into "list season", I thought I'd share the 5 most popular how-to articles from Office Online.

1. Make text superscript or subscript

Office 2003 | Office 2007

2. Prompt to open a file as read-only

Office 2003 | Office 2007

3. Turn on or off overtype mode

Office 2003 | Office 2007

4. Using CC and Bcc when sending emails

Office 2003 | Office 2007

5. Enable support for other file formats, such as PDF

Office 2007

What are your favourite Office features?

...for Absolute Beginners

StephB — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:59:32 GMT

No, this isn't a post about that questionable '80s movie adaption of the classic British coming-of-age novel. However, if you're new to Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Outlook you might be interested to know about the new 'Novice' training content available on Office Online.

These colourful training articles have loads of screenshots, introducing you to using Word, Excel, Outlook and Powerpoint with simple step-by-step instructions.

Like it's 80's movie counterpart our Novice content has a strong cultural flavour, not young British but most definitely far Eastern. Which is no co-incidence, given that it was designed and written by Office Online Japan. Thank you Japan!

(Probably) the most useful Office tip ever

GillLeFevre — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:57:24 GMT

With a computer, correcting your work is completely taken for granted. For example, I've rewritten this paragraph about six times which, twenty years ago, would have required at least two pieces of paper and lots of crossing out (I still remember my Dad's first electronic typewriter which would let you correct the last 15 characters typed -- and at the time we were so impressed!). But the one thing that is still difficult to "undo" is sending an email. (Our friends at VideoJug.com have demonstrated just how hazardous this mistake can be!)

I probably need to "undo" an email two or three times a week, and it's almost always because I've forgotten to actually attach the attachment that I said I was sending... Even more frustrating, I usually remember that I've forgotten about 5 seconds after I've sent the email and I'm forced to send the embarrassing follow-up email: "Ah, yes, attachment actually attached this time...sorry".

A colleague took pity on me and pointed out this tip: set up a rule in Microsoft Outlook to delay sending all your emails for two minutes.

Office Online has all the details on how to set this up: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100776981033#2

It took me five minutes to get it sorted and then every time I have an "oh no, stop that email" moment, I just go into my outbox and open up the email in question. Once the email's open, it won't be sent until I click "send" again, so I can take as long as I need to correct it.

The other alternative is to recall your message after it's been sent, but there are a number of limitations with this: both you and the recipients need to be accessing your email from an exchange server; and -- more importantly -- the email needs to still be unread. Better safe than sorry, so get that rule set up today.

Desert Island Office #2

GillLeFevre — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:56:44 GMT

I wandered over to our Mobile team today and asked Emily Lambert which three Office features she couldn't do without. Given that, in her words, she "lives in Outlook", it's not surprising that her favourites all come from that product.

1. To-do bar calendar

The to-do bar is quickly becoming indispensable in the daily quest to stay on top of your work, but Emily wanted to single out the "upcoming appointments" section (which you can customise to show more or fewer appointments as you need).

2. Calendar overlay

Trying to find free time in people's diaries can be challenging at the best of times. But you can save yourself a bit of squinting and hassle by using the "overlay" function. By clicking the tiny arrow in the calendar tab, Outlook displays the calendars on top of each other, making it much easier to find the elusive free space!

3. Time-zones for appointments

This is particularly handy for booking meetings with colleagues in different time zones (or putting the times of international flights into your calendar!). By clicking on the Time Zone button in a meeting request, you then get two additional fields added to the start and end time of your meeting.

This way it's easy to co-ordinate a meeting with, for example, a colleague in Munich. Or, by just changing one time zone, you can book out the time for your LHR-JFK flight starting in Greenwich Mean Time and ending in Eastern Time (US & Canada).

How I survive an overflowing inbox.......Frank Sinatra Style...!

ElisaS — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:18:00 GMT

We're all too familiar with emails.....(sometimes too many of them)....flooding into our inbox day in and day out. For many of us, our lives and jobs revolve around our inbox. We can often spend days just trawling through and answering those emails without actually ever getting to do your "day job".

For me, I have to take control back over my inbox.....I don't let it control me. I have to do this to stay sane....and here's how I do it.....

Firstly, I block out 3 small slots in my diary to review my inbox; first thing, lunch time and late afternoon.

As emails come in, I respond to those which I can answer straight away. And if I don't need them for future reference they are deleted. For those more important or those part of an ongoing project or topic I set up folders and often, sub-folders.

Then, once I have responded to that mail it's filed away where I can;

a) find it quickly and simply should I need to refer back to it and more importantly

b) it's out of my inbox.

For those emails I need to action later, I drag into TASKS, which automatically creates a new task. That email is then filed away for future reference etc, clearing my inbox. I then spend part of my day working through those tasks, setting reminders etc, including any additional correspondance. For those more urgent emails that don't warrant a task but perhaps I need to do some research into before responding - I set a flag.

For me, this works - my inbox is never over a screen page full so I can always see EVERYTHING and nothing ever gets missed. For me, if it goes below that bottom page you could run the risk of "out of sight out of mind" - I like to see everything. This is today's view of my inbox:

But of course, everyone does things differently, and everyone has methods that work for them in different ways. For example, my colleague Darren Strange, (Microsoft Office Product Manager) discusses how he does things on his blog - this works for him!

There is no right or wrong way to manage your inbox.....but the most important thing I think, is to ensure you control it and it doesn't control you! You need to find YOUR way to make it work for YOU. My way may help - I swear by it.....and for now....as the legend Frank Sinatra sings.......... "I'll do it my way"........

How do you manage your inbox? Is it spiraling out of control? Are you up until midnight "doing email?" Perhaps my way could help you!