Jonathan Hardwick : Outlook

Using funny characters in Outlook 2007 folder and category names - what's the sort order?

jonathanh — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:53:45 GMT

It's common to use "funny characters" (i.e., non-alphabetic symbols) in Outlook folder names, so that the folders sort in a specific order:

!!Super Important
!Important
All A's
Basically B's
...

Of course, the same principle can be applied to category names:

!Important
@Home
@Work
Project A
Project B
...

But how can you be sure that "!Important" will come before "@Home"? In other words, what's the sort order? This bugged me enough to sit down and work it out. So here's the sort order in Outlook 2007 (American English) for the symbols from an American standard keyboard layout:

! " # $ % & ( * , . / : ; @ [ ] ^ _ { | } ~ + < = >
then all the numbers
then all the letters

The hyphen and single quote are (almost) ignored, in that -A sorts after A but before B, and 'B sorts after B but before C. And yes, that's a space character before the ! character, so putting a space at the front of a folder name will make it sort to the very top. Sadly, there seems to be no special character that forces a folder to sort to the bottom of the list.

I'm sure there is an official name and explanation for this sort order, but my search engine fu has failed me. Help me, oh lazyweb!

It's not the amount of email I receive that's the problem...

jonathanh — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 09:20:00 GMT

...it's the amount I send.

This was brought home to me five minutes ago. I'm sat at home, digging my way out of my inbox (trying to reach Zero Email Bounce), and somehow I ended up in my Sent Items folder. "Wow", I thought, "that seems kinda full".

One Outlook search folder later (sent:today from:me) and I'm stunned to find that I've sent 47 emails today. Of those, 45 have been work-related. I'd need to average one email every 10 minutes, with another 10 minutes off for lunch, to send those during an 8-hour work day. And yet I also squeezed in three meetings, several hallway discussions, and some work on our team infrastructure.

At least now I know where the day went.

(If you want to learn how to cope with incoming email, I like Stever Robbins' "Tips for Mastering E-mail Overload" and Ole Eichorn's "The Tyranny of Email". If anyone knows how to cut down on sending email, I'm all ears. Although "stop working with interesting projects and passionate people" isn't an option!)

Getting to Zero Email Bounce

jonathanh — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 09:37:00 GMT

One of the nice things about working alongside 1,500 other bloggers is that if you let a thought go unblogged for too long, someone else will pick up the slack. For example: OneNote tells me that I created the page “Getting to ZBB in your inbox” in my “To Blog” section on Tuesday, June 14, 2005 at 5:20 PM. Then life happened, I never got around to fleshing out the idea, and Dan Fernandez beat me to it :) Now Omar Shahine has chimed in with a “me too!”, so I’m not even the first to say “oh, I forgot to blog that thought…”

Anyway, the analogy goes like this:

Zero Bug Bounce (ZBB) is when your team has no bugs older than n days, for some small n. It’s a “bounce” because you will always find new bugs later on — the count goes down to zero and then rises again. Nonetheless, it’s a good state to be in, if only for a brief instant, and Microsoft teams will “drive to ZBB” before shipping.
Zero Email Bounce (ZEB) is when your inbox has no emails older than n days, for some small n. It’s a “bounce” because you will always receive new emails later on — the count goes down to zero, and then rises again. Nonetheless, it’s a good state to be in, if only for a brief instant (and maybe Microsoft developers should “drive to ZEB” every day?).

If you want to learn more, Dan describes how to create an Outlook search folder to track your ZEB, and Omar describes how it matches with the Getting Things Done methodology.

Zero Email Bounce. It’s good for the soul. You heard it here ~~first~~ ~~second~~ third.

Update: Heather Leigh describes ZEB as “email nirvana”… :)

Mark all as read in Outlook - and why the long tail means that web search engines beat Office help

jonathanh — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 09:28:00 GMT

Cameron Reilly found my post on keyboard shortcuts in Outlook while trying to figure out a better way to do “Mark All As Read”:

Oh, and Jonathan, don't worry about getting this tidbit into office.microsoft.com. Who needs it! Your blog came up as the #4 result when I googled <"mark all as read" shortcut>.

A year ago I’d tried entering “mark all as read” into Outlook’s online help, with no luck. What’s instructive is that I tried it again just now, and it’s still not giving me any useful results.

Now, Office online help has a great web-based system that takes into account dynamic user ratings to get better over time. The problem is that this only works if you already have a help topic written on a subject! With no topic to begin with, and no obvious way to suggest one, Office help is never going to come up with a good result for “mark all as read”.

This is where web search engines really come into their own. Sure, maybe “mark all as read” is an esoteric power feature that only 0.1% of Outlook users will ever want to automate. That puts it way out there in the long tail of potential topics about which it’s probably not worth writing official help articles. But someone, somewhere will blog about it, web crawlers will rank those articles, and suddenly people start trusting search engines instead of the official help system.

Also, only #4? Let’s see if this pushes it to the top of the list :-)

What to try when Office update can't find SKU111.CAB

jonathanh — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 05:28:00 GMT

Yesterday I finally diagnosed a problem that a friend’s laptop has had for a while: whenever she tried to install Office 2003 Service Pack 1, it would throw up an error about not finding a file called SKU111.CAB.

A week ago I’d confidently tried to fix this by downloading the “fullfile” version of Office 2003 SP1 onto the laptop. The fullfile version contains everything needed for an update, as compared to the much smaller normal version which requires you to find your original installation CDROM (but is faster to download from Office Update). So I was pretty annoyed when it threw up exactly the same error: couldn’t find SKU111.CAB.

My next step was to try repairing the original installation first, from Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs. This asked for the original installation CDROM, span it up and down a few times… and then complained about not being able to find SKU111.CAB. Ok, this was getting personal.

Which brings us to this weekend, and a lot of Google hits for other people with the same problem. Thankfully, Eric Longman’s post “Can’t find SKU111.CAB” pointed to the solution:

You've got the wrong install CD.

Voila! Turns out that my friend actually had three different installation CDs for Office 2003 (it’s a long story…). One session of CD-swapping later and the laptop was happily installing SP1.

Thanks Eric!

Review of FranklinCovey's PlanPlus

jonathanh — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 08:13:00 GMT

“Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.”
Gertrude Stein.

One of my resolutions this year was to get some help in sipping from the information firehose that is a typical Microsoft inbox, so back in January I bought a copy of PlanPlus. This is an Outlook add-in from FranklinCovey, and follows the same principles as their successful FranklinQuest series of paper-based planners - prioritized tasklists, daily view, the whole deal. It also has some nice touches such as daily quotations (see above).

Then in the months that followed it seemed like every other Microsoft blog started mentioning the competing "Getting Things Done" system from David Allen: first Scoble (who also persuaded David to start his blog!), followed by Omar Shahine, then John Porcaro, and finally LauraJ. Rock Hymas summed up the differences between the two systems as follows:

"David Allen's Getting Things Done and the FranklinQuest system come from fundamentally different paradigms. Both systems are looking at tasks as actionable items. However, FranklinQuest values the "What should I do today?" view and David Allen values the "What should I do here?" view.

And I've decided that PlanPlus is not for me. I can mostly work around the fit-and-finish issues: the preview pane that downloads all linked images in emails, the home-page calendar view that gets out of sync with its buttons, and the changes to daily notes that spontaneously undo themselves. No, the real reason that I've decided to uninstall PlanPlus is very simple but very compelling - it doesn't work with any other Outlook add-ins. All those cool search tools, such as LookOut? Sorry, can't use them. Send-to-OneNote? Nope, doesn't work. This is what you'll get:

This isn't a new bug - it's been noted on the LookOut forums, and FranklinCovey's tech support admitted it was a known problem back in June. I pointed them to Omar Shahine's article about how "Programming for Outlook using managed code is hard" and offered further help, but heard nothing more. Sorry guys, but this customer isn't waiting around any longer. I'm off to give my money to your competitors instead. Oh, and take a look at Eric Carter's blog - the add-in shimming wizard should mean that programming for Outlook using managed code isn't hard any longer…

“Everyone spoke of an information overload, but what there was in fact was a non-information overload.”
Richard Saul Wurman.