Microsoft Office
CategoryQuickly jumping to the last edited position in Word
0
Are you a heavy power user of Microsoft Word? If most of your future best-seller novels consist of just a couple pages in length you probably haven’t come across a major annoyance that your more verbose authors do daily. When opening a document, Word will always position the cursor on the first page of the document. For documents of daily increasing of length, you find yourself jumping to the end of the document – easily dozens of pages away. Annoying, yes; highly inefficient, absolutely! What is somewhat amusing is that Microsoft’s other Office applications don’t … Continue Reading
Having Word automatically save local copies of documents
Microsoft Word can access and edit documents both locally and remotely – such as the case on a file server on your network. Logically, it’s convenient to not have to first move the document locally to your hard drive before editing and, for the most part, this remote editing works well. However, if your work-flow consists of this setup frequently, it’s only a matter of time before the network connection or file server becomes unstable and that’s when problems occur. It can happen that when editing a document remotely and having the network connection severed … Continue Reading
Removing duplicate email, contacts, calendar events in Outlook
Probably the only thing more annoying than having duplicated music or photos on your hard drive is having duplicated emails or contacts in your email client. Forgiving the slight exaggeration preceding – needless redundancy can be problematic. If you’ve recently migrated your communications for a previous email platform into Microsoft Outlook it can happen that the import/export routine isn’t 100% fail-safe. Quirks and hiccups can introduce duplicate contacts, calendar events, or even emails – all of which make finding a particular item more difficult. While you could take the time to clean up the resulting … Continue Reading
Exporting your Outlook calendar into Google calendar
A few days ago I spoke on how to export your contacts from Outlook and import them into Gmail. Today, we continue the migration process from the Outlook desktop client to the adventurous Google cloud by detailing a similar task for calendar events. Within Outlook, switch to your calendar view and select the calendar you wish to export. Right-click on this calendar and choose Save As. In the Save As dialog window locate and click the More Options .. button. You’ll want to ensure that you select Whole calendar for the Date Range and Full … Continue Reading
Exporting your Outlook contacts into Gmail
Making the jump from your traditional desktop email client, like Microsoft Outlook, into a webmail based system, like Google Gmail, is not without it’s challenges. One such point of difficulty is how best to go about migrating your address book you’ve collected over the years from Outlook into your fresh and clean Gmail Contacts list. Thankfully the process is rather straightforward as Outlook is able to export your contacts in a CSV file which can then be used to import the information into Gmail. Here’s how! Exporting Outlook Contacts Within Outlook, from the toolbar click … Continue Reading
Editing and correcting Outlook’s auto-complete address entries
Microsoft Outlook, like many other email software, contains many niceties that help increase efficiency when using the application. Users of Outlook have likely noticed it’s ability to auto-complete email addresses as the user begins typing in the To field of an email composition. Outlook, over time, assembles a list of addresses you have sent mail to and attempts to speed up future correspondence by suggesting matching addresses as you type. This internal address book is attached to your user profile so typically a new profile or Windows install will purge the contents collected. This is … Continue Reading
Using Microsoft Word to quickly toggle capitalization of text blocks
Have you ever wondered why the Caps Lock key exists? It doesn’t at all seem like it’s useful, at least to most. The Caps Lock key finds it’s origins from the early physical typewriters, but it’s functionality wasn’t nearly as annoying as it is today on the computer. On the typewriter, the key was not a toggle between the states of capitalization, rather it was like a physical button that stayed depressed when pushed. Because of the physical nature of it’s design, it was nearly impossible to use a typewriter that was erroneously engaged with … Continue Reading
Recovering a damaged or corrupted Word document
If you’ve used Microsoft Word enough in your lifetime you’ve likely encountered a document that was fine yesterday only to find out today it’s completely trashed. Word documents, more than any other binary file type in my experience, have a propensity to become corrupt and generally unreadable to the user. Rarely can the cause of the corruption be identified but some theorize that modifying the document with many different versions of Word, even though they are all supposedly compatible, uncovers the potential problem. This theory carries some weight because different versions of Word often handle … Continue Reading
Protect your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint history
Microsoft Office has a feature that maintains a list of recently viewed documents within the applications of the suite. From a usability perspective this is quite handy as the odds of you needing access to a recent document is quite high – and they are just a few clicks away now. However from a security and privacy perspective, this situation is a nightmare. It’s not unfathomable to find many reasons where this information should remain hidden, if not completely wiped altogether. Unfortunately, Microsoft does not provide the means to accomplish this easily. eSecure provides an … Continue Reading
Gain speed in Outlook by disabling add-ins
Microsoft Outlook is a necessary evil in many workplaces across the country. On the surface, Outlook provides a ton of worthwhile functionality – email, calendar, tasks, contacts are all vital in any productive business environment. Unfortunately, Outlook crumbles under it’s own feature set and quickly becomes a bloated and sluggish experience from start up to close down. Yet millions stick with it faithfully because it’s better than the alternatives or their employer is so far ingrained in the Microsoft platform that no other product can be integrated successfully. Outlook, like Windows in general, generally doesn’t … Continue Reading
