I Heart Tech

Outlook's Delay Send is a Godsend

How does it happen? Two voices in your head simultaneously cry out, "Go ahead and click send, you're all set" while the other one is screaming "You forgot the attachment!" or "Hey Dumbass, you clicked Reply to All" or even worse, "Don't send it while you are still fuming! Wait!" We all know how that movie ends and we all know how we wish it could unS-END.

Can you recall, retrieve or unsend an email message that has gone out? No, the answer is the NO. In the old days of AOL and even Groupwise, you sure could (if the recipient had not opened it). But today, short of getting onto the recipients actual PC and/or smartphone and/or webmail and/or laptop and/or the other tens of places your ONE email can land, you can fuhgedaboudit.

GMail has a new feature in its Google Labs that allows you to "unsend" a message within 5 seconds and that's kinda cool - I say meh.

Now, what you CAN do if you are an Outlook user is set up your outbound messages to sit in your outbox for a few minutes before they deploy. By default, Outlook is set to send an email out of your OUTBOX and in to another's INBOX as soon as you hit the SEND button - immediately. You can turn that off and then tell Outlook how often it should send - like every 3, 4, 5 or ten minutes. Here's how you set that up:

From Outlook, begin by going to Tools > Options > Mail Set Up tab. There, you will see a check box to "Send immediately when connected". When this is checked - it does exactly what it says it will do - Send an email out  for immediate delivery as long as you are connected [to the internet]. If you are not on the internet, then Outlook will send as soon as it detects that connection.

You can uncheck it and then click on the Send/Receive button just to the right of that option. That leads you into the following window:

 

Look for the option to "Schedule an automtic send/receive every X minutes". By default, this is set to 30 minutes. So for those of you who think your Outlook is slow or not sending and receiving in a timely manner, you can change it here. I have mine set to checking (and sending) every 5 minutes. When I need something to go out immediately, I simply push the Send/Receive button on my Outlook toolbar and off it goes. Also, when someone says "I just send it to you, you should have it by now" - I also click that Send/Receive to force a check.

So my outbound emails, will wait for a few minutes before flyingout which then gives me the chance to open the email (if needed) and edit it before I look like an idiot.

Now, these tips are really good for those of use without an Exchange server and an IT department controlling our mail options. If you find that you can't change these settings or they don't seem to comply, talk to your local IT person and see if they can help.

By the way - want to learn more about using Outlook? I'm doing some webinars on Outlook (first one in a series of three is this Friday) and a few other topics in my monthly webinar schedule. Check it out here.

Outlook - Finding An Email in a Haystack

Seems to be that we all spend too much time looking for information - especially  when it comes to our inboxes. While the searching features in 2007 are much improved, here is a tip that you can use in any version of Outlook to quickly filter and search for emails that are related to a specific person or a specific subject.

Right-click on an email, go to Find All, then select either:

• "Related Messages" to see all the emails in your inbox, subfolders, sent items and even deleted items that are threaded to the email you selected. You'll see a new window pop up which will display the results of your search. It will show you the dates of the messages and even the folder where the message is located. 

or select

• "Messages from Sender" to find all messages from that particular sender. It displays the search results as described above. You can also sort the messages by clicking on the column headers (Received, From, etc). Additionally, you can rearrange the columns in this view as easily as you can your inbox columns. (See previous post about Maximizing your Screen Real Estate).

Outlook - Maximizing Your Screen Real Estate

I consider myself one of Outlook's Cupids. Every chance I get, I try to shoot an arrow through any attorneys heart (finding it can be tricky with some of them but I'm a reallllll good shot) with Outlooks name all over it. I love Outlook and most of my technology-meets-time-and-information-goals are to use it as my one-stop shop and resource for all I have and need in that way. So when I'm training it, the very first thing I talk about is making the most of your morning kiss (as I so call it) with  Outlook.  You know what I'm talking about, you click to launch Outlook and watch as it coughs and puckers its way onto your screen...then it loads all those messages that filed in over night and when done ARRRRGGGGHHHH - the visual equivalent to bad morning breath after a long night of poker with the boys. Your screen loves seeing you make that face.

So what can you do to minimize the impact? Begin by maximizing your screen real estate by organizing the Inbox main view to suit your needs.

Let's start by working with the columns. See, your Inbox is made up of rows and columns really. Each email message, a row. Each heading ("From" "Subject") a column. You need to streeeeetch those columns out to see as much as possible and you need to be picky about which columns display. For example, if you're in a big firm and often get emails that go TO "All Attorneys" or "Everyone" - you may want to add the TO column to your view. That way you can see immediately those emails that came directly TO you (likely more important) than the ones that went TO "OfficeSoftballTeam".

So here are the first four things you are going to do:

• Rearrange the order of columns by dragging and drop them around
• Delete columns you don't REALLY need on initial view by dragging the column heading down until you see a black X then releasing
• Add new columns by right-clicking directly on a column heading, go to Field Chooser, drag fields onto your column row
• Resize columns by placing your cursor between two columns, look for double-arrow, then drag to desired width

Here it all is in a handy video for you:

Outlook Calendar: Viewing Non-Sequential Days Sequentially

 There's a little known yet immensely useful feature in Outlook that allows you to click, pick and view non-sequential dates in Calendar and it's so easy your eyes will roll back into your head and you'll say to yourself, "You gotta be kidding me." Soooo let's say you receive a call from a client who available to meet on any of the following days: July 31, August 8 or August 21...

1. Start by going to the Calendar view in Outlook, you'll see (hopefully) a thumbnail view of the current month on the left hand side of Outlook .
2. Press and hold the Control (Ctrl) key down as you click on the dates you want to view.
3. The big Calendar pane to the right will change to show you only those dates.
4. You can even select dates in other months by going to those months (see red arrow on graphic) and still Ctrl + Clicking.

Outlook is Acting Funny.

Well of all the Microsoft applications it does have the best sense of humor - so what do you expect? I received an email from a sweet gent I met at the ABA Spring meeting a few weeks back about Outlook's "goofy" behavior. He wrote:

The one Office program that remains an enigma to me is OUTLOOK.  I hesitate to use the "contact" and calendar features, because of its vulnerability to trojans, worms, and viruses.  And I just recently bought a new XP computer with Outlook 2003, because Outlook 2000 on my W98 computer would crash every other time I replied to a message.  (Outlook 2003 has done that once or twice, so something is still goofy.)

This is my biggest question, however.  Do you have any strategies for "saving" email messages in a format other than an archived Outlook .pst file, that can be text searched and identifies who it came from in the file name?  If you just save it as a txt file, you need to rename it because it names it as the subject.  That won't work for a string of replies. My inbox and sent folders are huge.

My response:

First, you're crazy...with up-to-date and proper virus protection, you shouldn't be afraid to use Outlook. It's an amazing tool for organizing your time and data, so get on it. (Sometimes I have to use Tough Love with these attorneys.)

Sounds to me like your issues with OL could be because your PST file (your entire Outlook file) is too big. If I remember correctly, you're either a solo or with a small firm and likely not running Exchange Server (which allows very large Outlook files). Outlook PST files take a BIG HUGE dump at 2 gigs. So you definitely need to keep an eye on it and archive regularly. Here is a link explaining the PST file size issue (and a bunch of other things) and then  another link to a handy utility you can use regularly to run some maintenance on that PST.

http://www.brienposey.com/kb/pst_maintenance.asp
http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.asp

Now, as for archiving. If you havent bought it yet, then this will be the BEST reason ever to dole out the dollars for a very important tool:  Acrobat 8 Professional. It will allow you to point and click at a folder in Outlook and convert that entire folder into an organized and searchable PDF file from which you can manipulate emails individually (that is still pull out only certain pages to forward on if you have to). It does convert all the emails to PDF (does not leave them in native Outlook format) as if you had printed them to paper and filed them in a cabinet. You can search for text, sort by sender or sort by date.

Making it Work..Step 3 - Talk About It

This could be the hardest part of our little project. Some of you  are going to do just fine - but many of you will struggle, perhaps even die. Survival of the fittest, my friends, survival of the fittest. You're going to have to communicate to all the right people what's expected of them. Yes, it's true. At some point technology just can't do it all, and we, the humans, must take action.

It is now time to gather the troops and talk about this new system.  Who's in? Who's out? What will be the magic word to be placed into the Subject line of the email? Will there be a syntax convention?  What other information will/can/should the call attendant gather? Can he or she include certain info that is useful to the recipient (is it a current client, a potential client)...etc. I think you get the picture. Although it's an incredibly minor adjustment to an already existing system - think about what you are doing.

It used to be that a caller's information was stuck in two places, on the pink note and on the carbon copy. Now, you have live data that can be searched and manipulated and at best, added to a permanent and shared contact database.

Outlook Phone Messages Rule...Step 2

We're going to use the Rules Wizard in Outlook to create a really simple rule - one that moves any messages with the text "CLLR" into a folder for phone messages. Hopefully, this will inspire you to take a closer look at Rules and see how powerful they can be in helping you organize your emails and info. Let's do this.

1. Go to Tools > Rules and Alerts
2. Click on New Rule
3. You should get a dialog box that looks something like the one pictured here. I'm using Outlook 2007 for these screen shots, they look quite similar to 2003. If you have an older version, you should still be able to follow along.
4. Click once on the predefined definition that says "Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder".
5. Then, on the lower portion of the dialog box, click on the blue "specific words" link that will lead to another dialog box. Here you want to enter a key word that will trigger the rule. You can use "Caller" but careful with that one since it's a real word that might not just have to do with a phone caller, how about something that's not a real word like "CLLR" - whatever you want - I'll let you decide on that one. (Click ADD, then OK to close.)
6. Now click on the blue hyperlink text that says "Specific  folder". That will open another dialog that will allow you to choose the folder we created yesterday. (Click OK to close.)
7. You're almost done - you can follow the wizard as it  guides you through the remaining dialog boxes - which are quite self explanatory and shouldn't require too much input from you other than an exception to the rule if you want one (isn't there a saying about that?).
8. At the end, be sure to name your rule and turn it on. Your screen might look something like the one pictured right.

That's it for today. Tomorrow, we tackle the receptionist - let's hope she's not bigger than you are.

Making it Stop…Step 1 - Create a New Folder in Outlook

Ok, ok, you twisted my arm. Let's do this in baby steps, together. The first thing we want to do is create a new folder in Outlook for your Phone Messages to get filed into.

• Open Outlook
• RIGHT-click on your Inbox to select New Folder.
• Name it Phone Messages or whatever you want. If you want it at the top of your subfolders call it "aPhone Messages"(you can also drag it out of the Inbox folder and make it a main folder under Mailbox).

That's it for today. Next time we tackle the rule – the one that tells Outlook to move Phone Messages into your new folder.

Please make it stop...

Nothing hurts my hard-wired heart more than walking into an office to the site of these pink relics. Sometimes they're like Dead People, I see them - EVERYWHERE. They're on desks, under desks, in briefcases, on spikes, on my lap...it totally kills me. The one place I never see them is in the garbage. Once, I threw one into a garbage can and It spit it back at me. I'm not kidding. It's just soooo OLD - there's really no excuse for this system of communication.

Wouldn't it be great if your receptionist sent you an email that filtered into a folder called "Phone Messages"? And from there you could open the message, see who called and maybe, if she was kind enough, she would have attached their full Contact Card from your firm Address Book with the latest phone numbers and maybe even their picture? Wouldn't that be great? What if you were out of the office, and getting your email on your smartphone and you got the message there too? And what if you lost Riley Brown's phone number but you know that you once had a phone message from him and you could search for his name and find it? And what if you could easily take a new callers name and phone number and easily create an Outlook contact for them? *looOOOOoong sigh* oh to dream.

Outlook: Color Code Your Life

I had the pleasure of meeting with one of the coolest attorneys I know today. He recently relocated right here to Orlando and is in the process of opening a small office. He has a shiny new laptop - and not to mention a really hot assistant named Bella! - so I was throwing some tips around when one of them sparked this reaction "What!? You gotta tell people about this! It'll change lives!" Hehehe...I got a kick out of that and certainly do hope that it does   SOMETHING for you even if it doesn't change your life dramatically. We were poking around in Glen's Outlook calendar when I noticed that it looked a bit dull, it had no color. I'm a visualist so I've set up my calendar to take advantage of Outlooks color coding system. Glen's calendar, on the other hand, totally bored me. I commented on it and he said that the categories Outlook offers aren't useful for him; so I showed him how he can rename the category colors to suit his life and practice. First, in case you don't know, when you create an  appointment, you can assign it a color (called a Label in Outlook). It's very easy to customize the Label list. You can either go to Edit > Label > Edit Labels (not kidding) or you can look for the icon on your toolbar that looks like a little Rubik's Cube and click on it. Edit and save. Let me know if your QOL has improved.