- 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
- A revolution in your Inbox: Xobni
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, December 18, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsYou 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
- First look at CatalystWeb
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Posted by oVan on Thursday, November 22, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 comments
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
- Vista Virtual Desktop Manager
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, June 05, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsAs an independent web developer, I never have enough screen real estate. Even with Vista's Flip-3D task switcher, I'm lost in the multitude of open windows. It's not that I don't close my windows fast enough, in fact I use Ctrl-W, Ctrl-F4 and Alt-F4 all the time and have launch shortcuts for about every application, but at times you just have too many windows.
These are some apps that I use on a very regularly basis: Outlook, many windows of Internet Explorer (each with a bunch of open tabs), same story for Firefox, Paint Shop Pro, Lightroom, Topstyle, OneNote, Mobile Device Center, Visual Studio, Outlook Express, Skype, MSN Messenger, UltraEdit, CSE Html Validator. That sure gives an overwhelming Flip 3D view!
So what can you do about the desktop clutter? I'm going to install Vista Virtual Desktop Manager. This way I can group together apps based on the activity (a desktop for development, one for graphics, one for email and rss, ...)
Even though there are plenty of virtual desktop managers out there, and I've tested a lot of them in the past, this one has a compelling advantage: native support for Windows Vista. By making use of the DWM based Aero interface, it gives you full screen thumbnail based preview.
Here's a list of features taken from the website:- Full screen desktop/window manager/preview with full drag and drop managing
- Desktop switch indicator
- An infinite number of desktops
- Watch the windows move in real time as you drag them around in the window manager
- Multiple monitor support
- Window menus
- Tray icons for each desktop
- Configurable colors, fade speeds, hotkeys, etc.
- And much more!
VVDM is currently a beta version 0.41, and can be freely downloaded:
http://www.codeplex.com/vdm
Did you play with it already? Let us know your experience!Labels: desktop, flip 3D, manager, productivity, Virtual, Vista, Windows Vista
- 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
- Vista Productivity Tip: Save To Desktop
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Posted by oVan on Thursday, May 17, 2007 | PermaLink | 0 commentsWhen you download a file with Internet Explorer, and your external storage drives or network drives are offline, a lot of people quickly choose the Desktop as destination.
In Windows XP this has a limitation: when you click the Open Folder button when the download has finished, you get the rather silly message that you cannot open that folder because the file is located on the desktop. I say silly, because when you use the Windows Explorer the Desktop is an existing (virtual) folder.
Luckily Microsoft had some spare time to change this behavior: you can now click the Open Folder button and you're then greeted with a Windows Explorer view of the desktop.
Did you find other small tips & tricks? Let us know!Labels: productivity, timesaver, tip, trick, Windows, Windows Vista
- Windows Vista Shortcuts
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Posted by oVan on Wednesday, December 06, 2006 | PermaLink | 0 comments