- 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
- Vista Productivity Tip: Quick Access to Windows Mobility Center
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Posted by oVan on Sunday, June 03, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsNotebook users are often avid keyboard users, using a mouse is not always practical on the road or in the garden and you can do many tasks so much quicker with a few quickstrokes.
Windows Vista has a number of keyboard shortcuts that make life a little easier. One of them is Win+X: on notebooks, laptops and tablet pc's this launches the Windows Mobility Center. (Win+X is the Windows Logo Key together with the letter X)
The Windows Mobility Center gives you quick access to typical notebook-related activities. These are presented as small tiles: volume settings, battery status, wireless network, external display, sync settings and presentation settings.
Apparently it is also possible for third parties to create extra tiles, but so far I haven't seen them. One thing I'm missing here on my Dell Latitude D810 notebook is a tile for Bluetooth. Have you seen it, or do you know if it exists? What about other usefull tiles? Let us know, post a comment!Labels: keyboard, Microsoft, mobility, productivity, tip, Vista, Windows, Windows Vista
- Quickly Change Tabs
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Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 10, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsFor all keyboard lovers out there, here's a quick tip on changing the tabs in your browser: you all know that you can create a new tab with Ctrl-T, and that you can jump between the tabs with Ctrl-Tab...
But did you know that you can quickly focus a specific tab with Ctrl and the position of the tab? So for the first tab you type Ctrl-1, for the second one Ctrl-2, and so on.
This works in Internet Explorer 7 and FireFox 2. Maybe other browsers (Opera, Safari, ...) work too, so if you can test and verify this, let us know via the comments.Labels: Firefox, IE7, Internet Explorer 7, keyboard, shortcut
- IntelliPoint: To scroll or not to scroll?
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, April 24, 2007 | PermaLink | 2 commentsWhomever at Microsoft Hardware decided to remove the universal scrolling functionality from the IntelliPoint software, should be removed from the team immediately. If that is the same person who decided that not every key should be configurable in the IntelliType Pro software, he/she should be expelled to Siberia instantly!
I have a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 8000 (also part of the Wireless Entertainment Desktop 7000), in front of me. In many ways, it's an excellent mouse:- very ergonomic for an ambidextrous model
- it's rechargeable and rechargeable AA battery is included
- quite attractive in silver, dark gray and matte black color scheme
- excellent optical performance with adjustable precision
- no noticeable Bluetooth lag (not recommended for gaming though)
- the left and right side buttons are difficult to reach
- although the wheel button turns without notches it doesn't roll smoothly
- no extra buttons (zoom, search, ...)
- But most importantly, it must use the latest IntelliPoint software and therefore it's useless!
For starters, the default configuration for this mouse is to have the scroll wheel click (when you push the wheel) launch the Instant Viewer. What on earth do we need that for? I thought Windows Vista had the great Flip-3D feature? I think I can hear them say "Nah sorry, you can't use that with your expensive mouse. You really need to use our full screen 2D viewer to see what windows are open."
Secondly, the Universal Scrolling feature has disappeared from the list of other activities you can bind to the wheel button. Put simply, you cannot scroll a window anymore without clicking the wheel button first (that's what they call AutoScroll, although I fail to discover the Auto in that functionality).
My excellent Wacom Intuos3 comes with a nice 5 button mouse that is ball free and optics free, and it scrolls immediately in any window. It's wheel rolls with soft notches, making it a very nice experience.
Additionally, my magnificent Logitech VX Revolution notebook mouse comes with an incredible free wheeling scroll wheel. It takes a little time to get used to it, but the productivity gains when skimming through hundreds of spam mails in Outlook 2007 is unbelievable. The best thing about this mouse is that it doesn't need the bloated Logitech software to work as expected, including scrolling a window without clicking. It has a search button, zoom lever, and back/forward buttons: these all work as expected in Vista. To anyone at Microsoft, please take note of this!
Finally, the magnifier functionality of IntelliPoint is very nice in theory. In reality however, it causes your Windows Vista Aero scheme to temporarily switch back to the Vista Basic interface and then immediately switch back to Aero. WTF! So it can work in Aero-mode but somehow they can't load the Magnifier DLL without switching. Uch!
Ps: I'll save my rant about IntelliPoint Pro 6.1 for a future post. There's only so much you can take :-)Labels: 7000, 8000, Aero, AutoScroll, desktop, entertainment, IntelliPoint, IntelliType Pro, Intuos 3, keyboard, Logitech, Microsoft, mouse, Revolution, Universal Scroll, VX, Wacom, Windows Vista, wireless
- Windows Vista Shortcuts
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 comments