SuperWasp

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

» Full Article

  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

» Full Article

  Posted by oVan on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments

First look at CatalystWeb

CatalystWeb is a new small business software service that runs in your browser. It provides the functionality of Microsoft Outlook, combined with shared documents and corporate instant messaging. You can read up on the Catalyst launch blog for some background information by Bob Mathew.

The public website has a very clean and professional layout, and explains all functionality and benefits of the CatalystWeb product. The free trial signup process was also quick and easy. You provide a few details (company name, desired username and password, etc), and a minute later you receive a confirmation email with login link.

The initial login process took a bit more time than I anticipated: besides providing administrator credentials, you can set up all the users of your small business here. Even though you can import a user list from CSV, the other screens take too much time for the inpatient user. Luckily you can skip the user setup process altogether and complete it at a later time. In fact, that's what I recommend doing, since you have to setup departments and locations later on anyway.

Once you arrive at the main interface, you'll quickly realize that this application is truly capable of replacing your daily Outlook functionality: it contains features such as personalized views, public distribution lists, public folders for messages and files, you can define master lists for your organization, message templates, etc.

In fact, this web based office is perhaps almost too powerful for at least part of the target audience: I don't think that the very small businesses will use all functionality that is available to them. This is even more true due to it's not so easy interface. Sure, it is very clear and consistent, and help functionality is available. But it lacks discoverable functions, everything is so tidy that you might miss a lot of handy functions just because you don't see them.

Another small issue with the interface is that every action you perform might result in another popup window. At a certain moment you'll have 4 or more popups open, and all start with the same title (your personalised URL) followed by the popup window title. This means that a quick glance at your Windows' taskbar will not help you in finding the right popup.

Anyway, these are all items that can be improved upon, especially since it's a web based service and you don't need to install any software or updates. I'm sure feedback from early adopters will make them fine-tune the interface.

All in all, CatalystWeb is quite a mature product for a freshly released service, and it will definitely provide a lot of functionality you can use in a small business. Initial learning curve may be a bit steeper than what they promise, but that shouldn't hold you back from giving the trial account a try!

Labels: Business, management, Outlook, productivity, Service

» Full Article

  Posted by oVan on Thursday, November 22, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments

Discover relevant RSS feeds with TagJag

As you know, people don't create lasting websites anymore. Everyone posts information quickly into blog postings (hey, you're reading one). To find your way in these blog forests, you need some good tools. One of the best ways to discover relevant articles is by means of tags. Tags are labels that the original poster sticks on the article, they're like the keywords you would look for in a search engine or to find a book in the library.

So how do you use those tags when you're looking for information?

There are some so-called social tagging sites (digg.com, del.icio.us, Technorati, ma.gnolia, Stumble Upon, ...) that let members vote for certain articles related to one or more tags. That's how the most popular posts bubble up to the top of stack.

In theory this is all fine, but when you're looking for a less popular subject or something that is not so recent anymore, you won't find what you're looking for easily. So here comes www.TagJag.com – formerly named Gada.be – by Chris Pirillo. It's a site (and a web service) that lets you search for a specific tag in more than 300 feeds and sites. The results you get are in RSS format, so you can subscribe immediately to those search queries.

Suppose I'm looking for a new job that involves working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Most job sites provide customized RSS feeds for job queries. Normally, you would need a lot of time checking out each one of them.

Here's how you can do it with TagJag...a few screenshots will say more than a thousand words:

First we surf to www.tagjag.com and see a big orange box to enter our keyword (tag). Below the tag box you see a horizontal list of feed categories and below the categories you see the current sites/feeds that are included.


We click on the "Jobs" category, type "lightroom" in the tag box and press enter. The list of feeds is updated and shows customized RSS feeds for job sites that use our tag "lightroom":


When we open one of those feeds (e.g. Monster.com) we get the current job postings on that site that contain our tag/keyword "lightroom". As you can see Adobe is looking for someone to join the Lightroom team:


The power of TagJag is not only that you get quick access to hundreds of relevant and customized feeds, but also that you can import all of those feeds in one operation into your feed reader via the OPML format. If you look in the second screenshot above, you'll see a dark blue button with a white circle around a dot — in the light blue frame around the feeds. That's the logo of OPML and when you right-click on it you can save it as an OPML-file on your disk. You can then import it into Outlook 2007, Newsgator, FeedDemon, etc. That way you have expanded your RSS feed list with possibly tens of useful links and feeds in one operation.

Give it a try!

Update: Corrected a few typos and added some more social tagging websites.

Transmit documents with convert pdf to doc software. This pdf conversion will save you so much time. Here you can get useful tips on buying software programs. If you are using all Microsoft applications then you can use a pdf server as well. Get the details of pdf to text file transfer and how it was created.

Labels: Chris Pirillo, del.icio.us, digg, feed, ma.gnolia, newsgator, Outlook, RSS, Stumble Upon, subscribe, tagging, tagjag, tags, technorati

» Full Article

  Posted by oVan on Wednesday, May 02, 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

» Full Article

  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

» Full Article

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