Office At Work : desert island picks

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).

Desert Island Office

GillLeFevre — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:42:24 GMT

If I had a pound for every time someone told me they "only use about 20% of the features" in Office then I wouldn't need to be writing this blog... The cool/amusing/incredible/trivial (delete depending on your personal geek factor) thing though, is that almost everyone uses a different 20%. (Back in 2005, Darren blogged about an interesting experiment that proves this nicely.)

So, with a view to uncovering some of the different 20%s, I'm going to be asking various colleagues which three Office features they couldn't live without.

Here's what Karen Buckley (Marketing Manager) picked:

1. Excel charts

In Office 2007, charting has been given a major face-lift. Now it's even easier to make a rather-dull list of numbers sing.

2. Windows + S

This was new to me, but I think it's going to get a lot of use! Press the Windows key and S, and you can take an instant screen clipping - just drag the cursor over the area you want to "clip". Then paste the clipping wherever you need it. [Great for copying online receipts into OneNote while you wait for the email confirmation to arrive.]

3. Calendar button in Outlook

A really quick way to check your calendar when you receive a meeting request. Just click on the calendar button and it opens up a new window with your diary showing the date of the proposed meeting - you can quickly check your availability and then close the calendar window when you're done.