Microsoft Office 2010 knows there are Word-based macro viruses out there. It’s so protective, in fact, it can be a bit annoying when you’re trying to open Outlook attachments from co-workers. Tech blogger Amit Agarwal explains how to disable Word’s “Protected View.” More »
Windows only (for now): ToneCheck is an email plug-in that checks the content of your emails for tone and alerts you to language that may be misunderstood or interpreted as particularly negative. More »
Making the move from Windows to Mac? One of the trickier transitions might involve your Outlook email. To make the switch smoothly and transfer all your mail and setup to Apple’s Mail app, use the free Thunderbird client as a go-between. More »
Windows: Wanna give Office 2010′s online document syncing, Windows 7 taskbar integration, and killer quick steps a go? Microsoft has thrown open the doors on a free beta of Office 2010 Professional—for those who can wait out the download.
As with the Windows 7 beta and most Microsoft offerings, this one requires grabbing a license key, registering or signing in with a Windows Live/Passport account, and fighting it out with the many others trying to grab the download from the servers. The download is 684 MB, and Microsoft is suggesting users uninstall previous versions of Office before downloading—as well as asking that you "don't test Office Professional Plus 2010 Beta on your primary home or business PC."
Okay, sure thing, Redmond. Let us know if you’ve grabbed the beta, or found any helpful mirror links, in the comments. Office 2010 Professional beta is a free download for Windows XP SP3 and later systems.
If you are stuck using Microsoft Outlook to send those TPS reports at work, you've already experienced just how painfully slow it can get—but with a few quick tips you can make it usable again.
While you might keep up to date on all of your Windows patches, too many people are running outdated versions of Microsoft Office (not to mention other applications). You'll want to install the very latest service pack—because Service Pack 2 has fixed a ton of performance issues for users with large mailboxes or anybody using IMAP to access their email.
The 2007 Microsoft Office Suite Service Pack 2 (SP2) [Microsoft]
When you are using IMAP to access your Gmail (or other email) account, you'll probably notice that Outlook can hang, stutter, and just generally become completely unusable—but it works just fine with POP accounts. You can make the whole experience a lot better by telling Outlook to download the entire message every time you synchronize so you won't have to wait while it slowly grabs the message off the server. Head over to the Send/Receive Groups panel by using the Ctrl+Alt+S hotkey, then drill down into your account and choose "Download complete items including attachments". The first time Outlook syncs with your mail server, it might take a little longer, but you should notice a significant improvement overall.
Force Outlook 2007 to Download Complete IMAP Items [How-To Geek]
Keeping a nice, clean mailbox is probably one of the most obvious, but also most overlooked aspects of speeding up your Outlook experience. You can do it yourself by setting up a separate personal folders (PST) file, and then moving old email over there on a regular basis. If you don't feel like managing the archiving process yourself, you can turn on the built-in Auto Archive feature by heading into Tools -> Options -> Other and setting up your preferences for when to archive—you may need to tweak them to fit your own emailing behavior, but the key is to keep your daily mailbox nice and small.
Configure AutoArchive In Outlook 2007 [How-To Geek]
This is one of those tips that almost all long-time Outlook users know, but it's still important to mention. All of your email is stored in a single .PST file that grows larger and larger as time goes on, but deleting messages isn't good enough because the file never gets any smaller. You'll need to head into the Files -> Data File Management menu, then using the Settings button to take you to the dialog where you can actually compact your mailbox, shrinking the file down and potentially saving you a ton of disk space.
Quick Tip: Easily Compact Outlook Data Files [How-To Geek]
You’ve probably never thought of running the built-in Inbox Repair tool unless you absolutely have to, but if your Outlook frequently crashes and requires restarting from Task Manager, you should probably give it a run to fix all the errors you didn’t even realize were there. Since your personal folders file is effectively a database, it’s important to keep it clean and free of errors. You’ll need to head into your Outlook installation folder, and then find the scanpst.exe file to start the repair process.
Fix Your Broken Outlook Personal Folders (PST) File [How-To Geek]
If you aren't using Outlook to read your RSS feeds, you might not realize that it's still synchronized to the Internet Explorer common feed list. There's really no reason to keep this feature enabled, and you can easily disable it by heading into Tools -> Options -> Other -> Advanced and removing the checkbox from "Sync RSS Feeds to the Common Feeds List". Don't forget to delete any RSS feeds once you are done.
Make Outlook Stop Using Internet Explorer’s RSS Feeds [How-To Geek]
Chances are good that the majority of used space in your mailbox is taken up by all those attachments that everybody keeps sending you. After a while, your inbox is going to get so gigantic that Outlook can't help but slow down a little, but you can easily find all of the attachments and save them somewhere else before you go through a big mail cleanup—just use the free OutlookAttachView utility to save them to a folder easily and quickly.
OutlookAttachView Lets You Save All File Attachments
It's not that difficult to sort a few columns in your inbox and figure out which messages are wasting the most space—but if you've got a complicated set of folders that you use to organize your email, you can quickly view all email that is older than a certain date, or too large to keep around. Head into the Tools -> Mailbox Cleanup wizard that gives you loads of options to quickly find and delete messages you really don't need to keep around anymore.
Quickly Clean Your Inbox in Outlook 2003/2007 [How-To Geek]
There are loads of great add-ins for Microsoft Outlook that add all sorts of great features, but often there are add-ins installed that are unused, unnecessary, or just pointless—and those are most likely the biggest cause of Outlook slowing down to a crawl no matter what you seem to do. You'll need to head into Tools -> Trust Center and click the Go button to edit your COM Add-ins, though Windows 7 or Vista users might have to open Outlook in administrator mode to be able to disable some of them. In my experience dealing with Outlook problems, this is the hidden one that most people never think of, but gives the biggest benefit overall.
Make Outlook Faster by Disabling Unnecessary Add-Ins [How-To Geek]
Wouldn’t it be neat if you could turn an old laptop or desktop into a media center that served and streamed movies, music, and files, and even backed up your other systems? With an Amahi installation, it’s not too hard.
Amahi is really a repository you add into an installation of the Fedora Linux system, but when you do, it gives that system a whole new look and purpose. From a web interface you can access from anywhere on your network, Amahi can organize and offer up access to movies, music (with streaming to iTunes and other players), photos, calendars, Outlook systems, and any old files you’re in need of. Amahi can also set up a VPN for your household network, giving you remote access to your files without too much more geeky configuration than the standard setup.
Amahi can run on pretty much any system that Fedora 10 can install on—that's about a 1.0 GHz processor and 256MB of RAM minimum. The developers are working on versions for Fedora 11 and Ubuntu, but for now, Fedora is just the base of home server that doesn't require an expensive license purchase or mastery of Linux to install. Free to download, works on any x86-based system.
iPhone/iPod touch: The biggest problem with the iPhone’s email client is its lack of search. All My Mail can’t compose messages, but its free version lets you search Gmail, AOL, or Exchange messages pretty easily.
After creating an account with Attassa (which, for this tester this morning, was a bit buggy), you’ll be able to add one Gmail, AOL, or (with a plugin) Outlook email account to your All My Mail app for synchronization and searching; the paid version and a monthly fee gets you more than one account at a time.
All My Mail organizes and sorts your mail primarily by contacts and attachments, and is kind of smart about it. It groups together email addresses with similar or the same contact names under one heading, and can recreate Gmail’s threaded message view by analyzing the messages you’re trading back and forth. There’s an attachment-only view you can flip to when you need to find one particular Word document from a guy named Bob, and the email search and sorting felt fairly responsive in our own tests.
All My Mail has a somewhat lacking security notice, stating only that all transmissions are SSL-encrypted and that their database is encrypted as well. If you’re concerned about third-party access to your email, you might want to consider waiting to see if the 3.0 iPhone update brings in something worthwhile in email search. Otherwise, All My Mail is a neat little utility that can’t be your all-in-one mail client, but does make up for one of the iPhone’s glaring deficiencies.
Here’s the official video tour of All My Mail:
All My Mail’s free/lite edition is a free download for the iPhone or iPod touch, requires 2.0 or later firmware.
Windows only: Microsoft Outlook is a powerful tool used worldwide by corporate drones—and with a little macro goodness, it will remind you to attach a subject line to your TPS Reports.
Adding the new macro requires a number of steps, but when you are finished you'll have a reminder to add in a subject line—just like Gmail has by default. You'll need to open up the Visual Basic macro editor, find ThisOutlookSession over in the left-hand treeview, and then paste in the macro into the editor.
Private Sub Application_ItemSend(ByVal Item As Object, Cancel As Boolean)
Dim strSubject As String
strSubject = Item.Subject
If Len(Trim(strSubject)) = 0 Then
Prompt$ = "Subject is Empty. Are you sure you want to send the Mail?"
If MsgBox(Prompt$, vbYesNo + vbQuestion + _
vbMsgBoxSetForeground, "Check for Subject") = vbNo Then
Cancel = True
End If
End If
End Sub
Once you've saved and closed the macro editor, you should receive a warning anytime you forget the subject line—a very useful trick to avoid sending an unfinished email.
Hit the link for the detailed walk-through screenshot tour. Note: this macro was found on at least half a dozen web sites, so we’re not really sure who the original author is, but the CodeProject link explains the process in the most user-friendly way. For more, check out how to defer sending emails to avoid embarrassment, or take a look through our top 10 Outlook boosters.
Windows only: Outlook Add-in Sender’s Time Zone makes easy work of dealing with recipients in multiple time zones—no more calculating times in your head.
Once installed, the add-on puts a small display on each message window with the time zone of the sender, the number of hours behind, as well as the time since the message was sent—it's one of those add-ons that's so useful you aren't sure why they didn't include in the first place.
Sender’s Time Zone is a free download for Windows, requires Microsoft Outlook. Gmail users can get the same functionality by taking advantage of the Gmail Time Zone Notifier Labs option. Thanks, Scott!
Windows: There are a lot of great add-ons for Microsoft’s premier productivity product, but there’s no central spot to turn them on or off. TopAlt EnableDisable controls Microsoft Office add-ons with simple check-boxes.
In a way, that’s all there is to it. Install the program, load it up, and you’ll see all the Office programs you’ve installed with plug-ins active on separate tabs. My freshly-installed Office copy doesn’t have a lot going on in the screenshot, but most any well-used copy will have Access, Excel, Outlook, and Word options to dig through.
EnableDisable shows you what’s being loaded into your programs at startup or on-demand, and offers a description if one’s embedded in the add-on. It catches both third-party plug-ins and Microsoft’s own functionality extenders. The Get More Add-ins link takes you, not surprisingly, to TopAlt.com‘s products, but the program itself does what it promises in a seemingly safe way. TopAlt EnableDisable is a free download for Windows systems only.
