- 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
- Windows Vista Shortcuts
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 comments
- Windows Vista RTM available!
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Posted by oVan on Friday, November 17, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 commentsWindows Vista has appeared on MSDN & Technet as one big 2.5Gb DVD ISO file for x86 and another for x64 edition.
The product key will determine what version is installed. Currently the following keys are offered to MSDN subscribers:- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Home Basic
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Ultimate
Some subscribers of MSDN & Technet reported only some of these keys were available, but that's probably solved by now.
Let the hunt for driver updates begin...Labels: Business, Home Basic, Home Premium, key, Microsoft, MSDN, RTM, TechNet, Ultimate, Vista, Windows
- Office 2007 Product Key Fun
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Posted by oVan on Monday, November 13, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 commentsDid anyone notice that the developers at Microsoft have chosen special product keys for the Office System 2007?
When traversing the registry for remains of the beta versions that were blocking the install of the RTM version (see previous post), I noticed that the product keys all end in "0000000FF1CE" (e.g. 30120000-006E-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE).
At first sight, nothing special to see... however, if you read it in the language many hackers use for their patches, warez and keygenerators, it reads "OFFICE" with the O replaced by zero and the I replaced by a 1.
Just thought it was fun...
Btw: If you still can't install Office 2007 after removing all the products mentioned in my last post, you should scan the registry for "-0000-0000000FF1CE". By manually removing those entries, setup should start without any problems. No warranties of course, you're on your own there...Labels: 2007, B2TR, beta, install, key, keygen, Microsoft, Office, patch, product, Professional, registry, RTM, System, warez