- TIP: Improve weekly planning in your Outlook Calendar
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Posted by oVan on Monday, March 31, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Here are some quick tips to improve your productivity with the Outlook calendar:
Create a second calendar for planning your week. Choose File | New | Calendar... and name it Planning.
In the planning calendar, make a general weekly planning by creating recurring appointments. Set their status like this: free status for home stuff, tentative status for work stuff, and busy status for must-do weekly items (backup, etc).
Assign meaningful categories to these appointments (work, phone, email, errands, home, garden, etc.) and make extensive use of Outlook's color categories. If you only need a few categories, give every one of them a distinct color.
If you plan on using lots of categories, assign the colors based on billable status (green = home stuff, blue = work stuff that brings in money, purple for unbilled work stuff, etc).Every Monday morning, switch to the calendar view (Ctrl+2), enable Week View (Alt + "-"). Now you can do your weekly review (using David Allen's GTD-style or Franklin Covey's Big Rocks) with your planning calendar as a guide. Note that you can set the planning calendar to overlay your regular calendar, or you can display them side by side - whatever works best for you. Now it's easy to fill those days and keep a healthy balance between work and family life: a quick glance at the colors of the week will tell you if you schedule enough time for both parties.
Still in the calendar view, with the To-Do Bar at the right side open, arrange your todo's by Category. Based on the color or category, you can now quickly drag a task or follow-up item to your regular calendar:
- If you drop a task onto the Daily Task List, it will set the due date of your task and update the follow-up flag.
- Dropping it on a time slot of a day will create a new appointment and past the task text into the appointment.
- You can also drop your task on the calendar button in the navigation pane. That will create a new appointment with the task text, and open it for editing.
Note: Dragging/dropping with the right-mouse button will give you a popup menu with choices (create or copy a new appointment - with the tasks linked as a shortcut or attachment).
Some handy and lesser known Outlook keyboard shortcuts to further improve your productivity:
General:
- Control + 1: Email
- Control + 2: Calendar
- Control + 3: Contacts
- Control + 4: Tasks
- Control + 5: Notes
- Control + 6: All folders
- Control + 7: Your shortcuts
- Control + 8: Journal
- Control + Y: Jump to any folder
- Control + Shift + I: Jump to Inbox
- Alt + F1: toggle Navigation Pane (full, minimized, off)
- Alt + F2: toggle To-Do Bar (full, minimized, off)
Calendar views (regular shortcuts):
- Control + Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Control + Alt + 2: Work week view (5 days)
- Control + Alt + 3: Full week view (7 days)
- Control + Alt + 4: Month view (31 days)
Calendar views (alternative shortcuts):
- Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Alt + 2: Day view (2 days)
- Alt + 3: Day view (3 days)
- Alt + 4: Day view (4 days)
- Alt + 5: Day view (5 days)
- Alt + 6: Day view (6 days)
- Alt + 7: Day view (7 days)
- Alt + 8: Day view (8 days, no kidding)
- Alt + 9: Day view (9 days - yes really)
- Alt + 0: Day view (10 days - this rocks!)
- Alt + -: Week view
- Alt + =: Month view
For email:
- Control + Shift + V: Move an item to a folder
Creating stuff:
- Control + Shift + M: New message
- Control + Shift + A: New appointment
- Control + Shift + C: New contact
- Control + Shift + K: New task
Has this helped you - or do you have some tips of your own? Drop a line in the comments...
Labels: 2007, key, keyboard, management, Microsoft, MSO2007, Office, Office 2007, OL2007, Outlook, Outlook 2007, productivity, project, shortcut, tip, trick, usability, Windows
- Free Shell Tools for power users!
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Shell Tools from Moon Software is a free download consisting of a few very handy shell extensions for Windows 98/2000/XP/Vista (32-bit).
Here's a quick overview of the features:
- Copy Filename: select one or more files, and you can copy the filenames to the clipboard.
- Filenote: allows you to enter some notes about a file. It will create a txt-file with the same filename and launch your text editor (notepad) to edit it.
- Show Hidden Files: a quick way to toggle visibility of hidden files in your Explorer. Much handier than going through Folder Options.
- FontLoader: makes loading, unloading, installing and uninstalling of TrueType fonts, OpenType fonts and TrueType Font Collections very easy.
- CopyURL: copies the url, the link or the name of Internet Explorer Favorites. Very handy when you want to share some info via email or blog about it.
- RegisterServer: makes registering and unregistering DLL/OCX/EXE files a snap.
After installation you must first enable the extensions you want (see screenshot above).
Download here: Shell Tools 1.01 (Vista compatible)
- FIX: Remove and stop respawning of My Sharing Folders
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | PermaLink | 3 comments
In my previous post I quickly explained how to remove the "My Sharing Folders" shell extension via the command-line. All things work fine, until you restart your computer (or WLM) and notice that it has reinstalled itself.
In this post I will go a bit further, and explain how to stop automatic reinstallation of "My Sharing Folders", as apparently Microsoft has changed the latest Windows Live Messenger.
I assume you're familiar with Regedit and you have sufficient knowledge of Windows to play around with administrative rights. Obviously, I'm not responsible for any damage you might do to your machine - you're on your own there.
Let's get started:
- Exit Windows Live Messenger (not just sign out)
- In a command prompt, type: regsvr32 -u -s "C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger\fsshext.8.5.1302.1018.dll"
Note: you might need to change the numbers in the filename to match your version. - With Explorer, go to "C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger\" and rename the fsshext.x.x.xxxx.xxxx.dll file to .old (replace X with the file version from your directory).
- Next, open the registry editor (regedit), go to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\(your userid)\Products\577EC8054AB4847428FDEF82ADF9300B\Features and rename the "MsgrFeat" string to "MsgrFeat-old". Don't change the contents of this string as you might need it someday to uninstall/change Windows Live Messenger.
Start WLM, all should be ok now. Let me know if it worked out ok for you... and Digg me!
Labels: fix, hack, Live, Messenger, Microsoft, registry, Vista, Windows, Windows Vista, WLM
- Removing "My Sharing Folders" from Windows Live Messenger
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 commentsHere's a quick tip to remove the "My Sharing Folders" shell extension that Windows Live Messenger installs.
Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) with administrative rights. (In Vista you need to right-click and choose "Run as administrator", or type "cmd" in the start menu and press Control-Shift-Enter.)
Copy or type this command:regsvr32 -u -s "C:\Program Files\Windows Live\Messenger\fsshext.8.5.1302.1018.dll"
Note that you must check the correct filename first, as this changes with every version of Windows Live Messenger.
Update: I've posted a follow-up article to solve the reinstallation problem created by the latest Windows Live Messenger (WLM) versions.
- Fix: Localhost unavailable with ESET NOD32
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Posted by oVan on Friday, March 21, 2008 | PermaLink | 2 comments
Developers using Visual Studio will probably encounter this problem after installing ESET NOD32 antivirus or ESET Smart Security Antivirus+Firewall: browsing the web with Internet Explorer works fine except for websites you develop yourself (localhost).
Disabling the firewall or antivirus features doesn't solve this problem, however replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1 (or using FireFox) does solve it.
The real problem is easily fixed though.
Windows Vista:
In the start menu, type "notepad %system%\drivers\etc\hosts" and instead of pressing enter, right-click on the notepad icon in the top of the list (see screenshot). In the context menu you must click on "Run as administrator".
Windows XP and 2000:
Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) and type these commands:
cd %system%\drivers\etc
attrib -r -h -s hosts
notepad hosts
You will then see the following file in notepad:
The last line contains the problem. It reads:
::1 localhost
You can either remove this line and save the file, or comment it out with a pound/hash character #. Voila, fixed!
Labels: Administrator, fix, IE, IE6, IE7, Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft, problem, Vista, Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studion 2008, vs2005, vs2008, web develoment, Windows, Windows Vista
