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Productivity tips, reviews, tools, software and gadgets.

TIP: Improve weekly planning in your Outlook Calendar

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

Weekly Planning:
 

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

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  Posted by oVan on Monday, March 31, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments

A revolution in your Inbox: Xobni

You don't have to believe me, but there's a revolution coming to your Outlook inbox. It will not only replace the existing Search function, but provide a whole lot of productivity improvement:

• Super-fast search finding mail, people and even attachments


• Useful statistics about your contacts


• Automatically extracts phone numbers from emails (and showing where exactly it extracted them)


• See all attachments for a selected contact, no more searching through all the emails


• Finally threaded conversations


• ...and a lot more!

Click the button to discover this great plugin:

Labels: Outlook, Outlook 2007, plugin, productivity

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  Posted by oVan on Tuesday, December 18, 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

Labels: download, Microsoft, Office 2007, Outlook, Outlook 2007, patch, performance, update

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  Posted by oVan on Monday, April 16, 2007 | PermaLink | 1 comments

Free Preview Handlers for Outlook 2007 and Vista

Both Windows Vista and Outlook 2007 offer you file previewing functions. Unfortunately, not all file types are handled and this Microsoft webpage simply mentions "Available File Previewers: Check back soon for updates. We are currently working with previewer developers to list previewers on this page."

Subjectively the most needed previewers are PDF-files and code files, simply because it still takes ages to load Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Visual Studio 2005 respectively.

Here are two free PDF-previewers:

• Foxit PDF file Preview Handler | does not require Adobe Reader


• PDF Preview Handler for Outlook/Vista by Ryan Gregg | does require free Adobe Reader 8

You can read more blog posts about these great tools here, here, here and here.

And here's the free Code Preview Handler from Tim Heuer:

• Code Preview Handler (source code)


• Code Preview Handler (msi installer)

To finish this post, here's a link to the post about the preview handler article by Stephen Toub from MSDN Magazine. You can also download his free utility directly here:

• Preview Handler Association Editor

Labels: 2007, Acrobat, Adobe Reader, download, Foxit, Foxit Reader, free, magazine, Microsoft, MSDN, MSO2007, Office, OL2007, Outlook, Outlook 2007, preview handler, Vista, Visual Studio 2005, vs2005

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  Posted by oVan on Thursday, April 05, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments