If you’ve ever been afraid to use video in PowerPoint before, it’s time to get over it! I have a friend who considers himself a PowerPoint star! A real guru. He can make things fly and spin and even bounce. But when it comes to inserting video, he’s suffers from Learned Failure.  Learned Failure is [...]

I can be a bit of a hoarder when it comes to email. Although I am doing better at deleting messages I don’t need to keep and filing away those that I’ve handled, I still have lots of messages in my inbox (4,366 at the moment).
So when I am looking for a particular message in my inbox that I know that I need to deal with, I use search. In earlier versions of Outlook, I wasn’t too good at it. But now, I can find emails faster and easier thanks to Instant Search and the new Search tab.

Finding a message

Click on the folder you wish to search (for me it’s usually my Inbox.) Click in the Instant Search box, type in your search text , then click the search icon or press enter.

Instantly, any messages containing the search text are displayed in the Instant Search Results pane. The search text is even highlighted.

Summer vacations have started. And in past years, that meant keeping track of vacations of those with whom I work so that I would know an email may go unanswered for a few days. And when I forgot about their vacation time and sent an email, I would often wonder why he or she is not being responsive.

At Traveling Coaches, we do ask team members who are going on vacation to set up an Out Of Office rule so that we know they will be gone for a few days. But in Office 2007, when you send a message to someone who is out, you only get the little Out Of Office reminder one time. Now with Exchange 2010 Mail Tips and Outlook 2010, when I address a message to a co-worker with an Out Of Office rule running, I get a tip showing their Out Of Office message at the top of my email draft along with a link to “Remove Recipient” should I choose. Now I know someone is on vacation before I send a message.

I live by my Outlook calendar! So, I get a lot of meeting requests. Not that I’m really popular…I’m not. But, we do have lots of things going on at Traveling Coaches… all of which require meetings and can be found on calendars. I also put my personal appointments on my calendar so I know when not to schedule meetings.

When I receive a meeting request, I check to see what else is going on that day before accepting the request. I want to know things like: Am I in Dallas and can attend in person, or am I on the road and will participate remotely? What other appointments do I have around that same time? And where are the other appointments for that day?
Until I had Outlook 2010 I would look at the appointment in my inbox and then switch to my calendar to see what is going on. Then I would switch back to my inbox to accept, decline or suggest another appointment time.

In our last blog, we discovered what happens when documents are opened from an email message in Outlook 2010 and then edits are LOST. This time let’s explore what Microsoft has when changes are LOST in files through AutoSave within the new Office 2010 suite of products.
When I work, I often have several applications and files open at the same time. When it’s time to stop work at the end of the day, I start closing windows without paying too much attention to what I’m clicking…and there have been times when I accidentally click No on that little prompt. You know the one…It looked a little bit like this in earlier versions of Office:

In my experience in supporting and training law firm users over the past 20+ years, I have been on the other end of the phone from attorneys that are frustrated because they opened a document from an e-mail message, made edits, and then discovered that the changes were not saved. If there was one help desk call I could eliminate, this would be it.

With Office 2010, I think we may actual be there. Let’s start with a document that is sent to the attorney – attached to an email that comes from outside the firm. The attorney double clicks to open the file and sees immediately that editing is disabled. The attorney cannot edit or print the file until he or she enables editing.

A very cool productivity enhancement to Outlook 2010 is Suggested Contacts. As I am sending email messages (including replying to messages I have received), Outlook will check to see if I have the person listed in my contacts. If I do not, a new contact record is automatically created in Suggested Contacts.

You can access Suggested Contacts by clicking the contact icon in Outlook and navigating to Suggested Contacts.

Our “Office 2010: Different. Better.” ILTA roadshow got off to a great start in Houston on May 6th. The first of 29 cities, Houston was a great pick for our roadshow launch. The room was filled with long-time friends and clients, our Texas neighbors, who gave us a wealth of positive and constructive feedback that we incorporated for the following week’s shows in San Francisco and Palo Alto.

I’m a big fan of Microsoft Office Backstage view! In Office 2007, Microsoft did away with the File menu and replaced it with the very pretty (and very mysterious) Office button – which most people didn’t realize held functionality. So, in the early stages of working within Office 2007, it was a real mystery to figure out how to open, save or print a document. Hooray for Microsoft listening to the user base!

For the last few months, I’ve been bouncing back and forth between my Windows 7/Office 2010 and Windows XP/Office 2007 laptops. I love working this way because it allows me to compare and contrast the two environments.

If you’ve already made the jump to Office 2007, you won’t have problems adjusting to the enhancements in Office 2010. You’ve mastered the ribbon by now and while there are a few new features, the changes will improve your workflow. The changes in Office 2010 bring home how much rich media has become a basic tool in communication. New graphic tools have been added as well as a new graphics engine. PowerPoint now has video editing capabilities and Excel has been enhanced to work harder than ever to serve up relevant information for your business analysis efforts.