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Productivity tips, reviews, tools, software and gadgets.

 
Microsoft Office 2007 Filter Pack

This download will install and register IFilters with the Windows Indexing Service. These IFilters are used by Microsoft Search products to index the contents of specific document formats. This Filter Pack includes IFilters for the following formats: .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx.

Download details: Microsoft Filter Pack

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  Posted by oVan on Monday, October 13, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
TIP: Improve weekly planning in your Outlook Calendar

Here are some quick tips to improve your productivity with the Outlook calendar:

Weekly Planning:
Screenshot of regular and planning calendar side by side in Outlook 2007 

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...

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  Posted by oVan on Monday, March 31, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Update to blog restyling
Here's a small update to the post about blog restyling. I've changed the stylesheets and the .IR code to use the Corbel TrueType font, instead of the Segoe Media Center Light font that nobody knows :-)

So, if you see plain old Tahoma in the text of this post, you should download the Microsoft Vista & Office 2007 fonts.

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  Posted by oVan on Friday, April 27, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Performance update for Outlook 2007!
Microsoft has silently released a much needed performance update to Office Outlook 2007.

From the download details:
This update fixes a problem in which a calendar item that is marked as private is opened if it is found by using the Search Desktop feature. The update also fixes performance issues that occur when you work with items in a large .pst file or .ost file.

This update is for Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows XP.

» Download Update

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  Posted by oVan on Monday, April 16, 2007 | PermaLink | 1 comments
Download new Vista fonts legally!
Click to zoom in


It's so easy... just download and install the free Microsoft Powerpoint Viewer and you will have the beautiful Microsoft Vista and Office 2007 fonts on your system: Calibri, Cambria, Candara, Consolas, Constantia and Corbel.

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  Posted by oVan on Wednesday, April 11, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
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