I’m trying it out and I think I’m going to find it very useful. I seem to have multiple Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel documents open at any time. I use Office 2010 and even though I can hover my mouse over the Excel icon at the bottom of my screen and quickly navigate to the sheet I want, it’s much quicker to see the names of my open spreadsheets and click the one I want to work on.

Cost is free for personal use and $25 for the Office Suite Extend Tab and includes 2 years of upgrades. After you download and install, you can open up the program and choose your configuration options as seen below.

There’s also a style & color tab if you want to take the time to make your tabs rounded or colored – a nice touch.

Ribbon Finder

This is a great feature from Extend Office for those of us who have a hard time remembering or learning where all the commands are on the Office ribbons.

Ribbon Finder is software that puts a search box in the ribbon area of Office programs. Then when you want to insert, wrap text, format cells, etc. but you don’t remember where the command is hiding, just type it in the search box and it gives you the steps. Fast and avoids frustration!

You can check out the versions, features and pricing here. They do have some free versions with this product too.

Can’t Get Used To the Ribbon? Want to go back to the Old 2003 Menu?  Classic Menus for Office!

If you have upgraded to either Office 2007 or 2010 and hate the ribbon, you can buy Classic Menus for Office to bring back the 2003 style menus for a cool $45. There are other products at the site, but these are the three that I thought would have greater interest. Check them out.

How are you with implementing new tools and strategies to improve productivity? If you need help with productivity, file management or organization, give me a call or email. I can help.

What do you think? Can you ignore your email half a day to focus on your work, or is your email your work? I think the type of position we have in a company determines how we process email. If you’re in a support or customer service role, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to turn off Outlook for a specified period of time. However, if you have a deadline and really need to focus, or your position has more of a thought/long range planning emphasis, it probably makes sense to not let incoming email distract you.

Whatever your role, you may benefit from the three Outlook tips featured this week.They are:

1. Effective ways to sort and organize your mail.
2. Take an email item and make it a calendar or contact item.
3. Fast searches to quickly find what you need.

Outlook Message Sorting

Check out your ‘View’ setting in Outlook. This is a quick way to cycle through all the choices available to you. The default is date with the newest on top. But check out the other options. Are you looking for something with an attachment – click on that. Have you ever tried out conversation view. I’ve found this one useful when needing to find  and follow a thread of conversation. This feature is in Outlook 2003 and later. With Outlook 2010, there is a feature that will ‘clean up’ duplicate conversations, which is nice.

Below are links to ways to change how messages are grouped in Outlook. The defaults are listed in the links. There are instructions for making your own groups.

• In Outlook 2010
• In Outlook 2007
• In Outlook 2003

To be more productive in your email, I find it’s helpful to create folders. Then when items come in, I can file them in their proper folder. You may want to make your folders topic based. Studies show that most email is for reference, so you may want to have folders to file this material in by topic or by who it’s from. The method just depends on the way you think is effective. Someone else may have a totally different system, but it works for them.

Perhaps flagging or categorizing mail (using color) works best for you. Take a little time to set up your perfect system and then tweak it from time to time.

Take an email item and make it a Calendar, Task or Contact

If you’re like most people, you get many items via email that need to go to either your calendar, a task to be done or you’d like to add the sender to your contacts. I used to copy and paste or just open up my calendar and type things in from the email. Then I discovered drag and drop.

Use drag and drop  to take an email and put it in your Calendar, Tasks or Contacts! If you want to put an email item on your calendar, Left-click and drag the item down to your calendar icon (see below). If you have more than one calendar, the icon will expand to show all your calendars and you can drag it on to the one you want. Then an appointment box will open up (look on your task bar for it). You will have to fill in the time and date details, but the body of the email will be in the appointment.
The same works for making an email into a task or contact. This is a great time saver.

Fast searches to quickly find what you need

Have you ever noticed the ‘Search Folders’ folder? It’s the last folder in the illustration below. It can become a powerful tool and timesaver for you. Use it to aggregate and/or sort your mail into specific categories. You can see below I’ve named a search folder ‘for follow up’. This contains all the emails I’ve flagged for follow up. Now they’re all in one place and I can quickly go to that folder to quickly check items needing attention.

If you have a team member(s) you collaborate with, you can set up a folder to capture all emails from people you designate. This can save you a lot of time and scrolling. You can also move your search folder up in the folder list. Simply right-click on it and follow the prompts to move it so it’s more in your line of sight.

Summary – Take Action!

Are you a ‘zero inbox’ person? I must confess I’m not. I’m one of those people who use Outlook as a repository of information, reference and referral. In my many years as an admin, I’ve had to go back and search for documentation to prove that yes, indeed, you did get an email on this and here it is! The Outlook search is powerful and effective for my needs and with the sorting features Outlook offers, I don’t see a need to change. I do need to go through and eliminate the junk I don’t need anymore and again, the sorting features in Outlook can quickly help me accomplish that.

What about you? Do you need help with your inbox or some organization tips? Perhaps I can help. Feel free to contact me via email, twitter or phone.

If you’re running any version of Windows, you’ve probably dealt with setting how you want your Windows Security and other updates handled. I’ve got mine set to download important updates but to let me choose when to install them (this is using Windows 7).

Deleting Downloaded, But Not Installed Updates

I was running Office 2007, but upgraded to 2010. However, I’d been getting this persistent and annoying notification that Windows Update wanted to install an important PowerPoint 2007 update. I thought it would go away, but it never did (because the update was downloaded).

Here’s how I found and deleted the download. I found that all the Windows updates are downloaded to

C:\WINDOWS and/or
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution

or C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download   Mine was in the Download folder and I just opened up the folders until I saw ‘powerpoint’. I knew (by searching the Microsoft KB (knowledge base), that this update came out in July, 2008, so I was pretty certain that was the right one. I deleted it and the folder it came in. Now there are no more notifications!

I found another way to do this that involves additional steps. It involves running some commands from  File>Run that involve first stopping the automatic updates. The next command finds the folder containing the downloads (same as the one I have above). They instruct you to delete everything in the downloads folder and then to restart the automatic updates. So the end result is that you delete all contents instead of searching for a particular one. I suppose if all your updates are installed, you don’t really need the contents of the download folder any more.

Hide a Particular Windows Update

If your Update Settings are such that you’ve told Microsoft that you’ll go and decide which updates to download, then you could see some updates that you’ll never need (like language packs for languages you don’t speak).

You can hide these so you’ll not see them again. It was so easy, but I didn’t know about it until I researched it. Simply right-click the update you don’t want and you’ll see a pop-up where you can select  the ‘hide update’ choice and you’re done!

If for some reason, you want to see the updates you’ve hidden, the update manager knows you’ve hidden then because you’ll see the below links when you first come to Microsoft Updates. Click on ‘Restore hidden updates’, then you’ll be taken to the place where you can choose to restore an update.

I procrastinated doing this for months because I didn’t know these simple commands. I hope this will be helpful to someone.

EraserDrop Portable was developed by John Hiller (he developed a Firefox Portable App), and is part of a suite of portable apps. So this app can be downloaded to a memory stick and used from machine to machine, or you can install to your local drive and use it from there.

What It Does

It securely erases files and folders. Just drag and drop to the icon you’ll see on your desktop after installation. Then you choose what method of erasing you want it to perform – from a 1-pass to Gutman. You’ll get a message when it’s finished telling you what it did and if there were any problems.

In addition to securely erasing your files and folders, you can also tell it to erase the free space on your drive. What’s free space and why would I need to erase it? Reading up on this, I’m finding that when/if you delete files by putting them in the recycle bin, they are deleted, but still recoverable. By using EraserDrop Portable’s wipe free space, this shreds and makes unrecoverable all that data previously deleted. I haven’t done this one yet, although I’m sure it’s OK as the documentation says that only free space is overwritten, not my files!

Download, Install & Start

There’s a link in the first paragraph for the download. I had some problems with the install. I clicked on the .exe and it started like all other installs start, but when it got to the directory to install to, it didn’t choose to put it in my Programs folder. Instead, I got the box below with no destination folder selected.

It took me a couple of tries to find a folder it liked – it wouldn’t let me put it in the Program Files folder, instead, I chose a subfolder and then when the install was finished, I simply moved the folder up a level so it can be found within the Program Files folder.

The directions say to find the folder and click on the app icon to start the program. I did this a couple of times and it looked like something was starting, but I never saw anything. I went back and read the instructions again and it said a little icon would appear on my desktop. Well, it was there, but I really just didn’t notice it for awhile because it was so small. So look for the little icon that’s below with the red line through it. It seems to appear at the top left of any application I’m using.You can right-click on the icon and change the picture or hide it.

In my research, I found other shredding and deleting programs that do the same things. I feel good about this one because it came from Source Forge, a respected name and offers great, free, open-source software.

We ditched our landline earlier this year and now use T-Mobile’s @home service. We still have our old land-line phone number, but we can’t use it to fax, bummer. That’s when I became interested in what was out there for faxing from my computer.

First, I have to say if you have documents generated on your computer, internet faxing is a quick, inexpensive and convenient way to send your information directly to a fax machine where it prints out just like you fed it through a machine on your end.

Here’s a place to look at several fax reviews. These all come with a monthly fee, but it’s much less per month than paying for your phone line and the ink your fax machine guzzles each month. Have you priced your local print shop, Staples or Office Depot for their fax fees? Our local Staples quoted me about $1/page and the guy told me the prices were pretty much the same around town.I think he was embarrassed to tell me the price, but I’m glad he warned me before I had to shell out $12 for my fax.  What a racket!

If you’re looking for free faxing, efax allows free incoming faxes.   It’s hard to find this feature on their site anymore, but you can use the link. You’ll be assigned a number, but don’t expect to get one in your area code. If you sign up for the pay accounts, then that is available. I believe you have to receive a fax at least once a month to keep your number.

I recently found FaxZero and really like it, with a couple of reservations. I like it because you can send two free faxes a day with a limit of 3 pages each. The three pages can be text you type or documents. There are two shortcomings: they accept only .doc, .docx, or .pdf and only one document per fax. So an excel or picture file can’t be sent with FaxZero. The other is that only one document can be attached per fax. Even with their premium service, only one document can be attached. Their premium service is $1.99 per fax with a limit of 15 pages/1 document per fax. It’s great if you can get everything into one document. But this is too limiting for me.

The fax service I found that allows multiple documents to be attached and supports up to 178 file formats is myfax. Their lowest plan is $10/month, which seems to be a great deal if you fax more than 10 pages a month.

I’ve used both efax and FaxZero and they’ve both worked just fine. For my needs, I still need a stand alone fax machine from time to time to send documents not on my computer. Luckily, I have a friend at a near by office who allows me the use their machine for free.

This week, Google said they recognize how difficult it is for some to give up their numbers, so they’ve been able to tweak the technology to allow people to keep their original number and keep these GV features:

• free voicemail transcription (delivered to your email address)
• ability to do an on-line search of transcribed voicemail
• customized greetings for different callers
• SMS and email notifications
• low-priced international calling

If you decide to make your GV number your only number, you also get these features:

• ability to use your Google Voice number to reach you on all your phones
• SMS via email
• call screening
• call recording
• conference calling (up to 6 people)
• call block

Here’s a chart from Google that gives a side by side of the above for easier comparison.

The big appeal of Google Voice for many of us is the ability to use one number that we can program to reach us from all of the phone numbers we use. We don’t get that if we keep our original number.

Having the ability to import my contacts, assign groups to them, record a specific greeting for business, personal and family groups is both efficient and professional. I can further direct GV how to handle a specific group or person’s calls at a certain time of day. For instance, I would program GV to send all my family calls to all of my numbers so I wouldn’t miss them. I would program my business group to ring only certain phones at designated times of the day.

Here’s a short video that quickly explains the benefits of Google Voicemail.

Having It Both Ways

I’ve got a Google Voice number—and I still have my mobile and home numbers because I didn’t want to be too hasty in eliminating numbers I’ve had for a long time.

Why not use both numbers. I’ve decided that’s what I’ll do for now. I can give my GV number out for certain purposes/circumstances and enjoy the ability to program instructions for specific groups or callers.

If I go out of town, I can choose to forward my mobile and home numbers to my GV number and have the ability to handle all my calls in a specific manner. Any voicemails will be transcribed and emailed to me for easy review and retrieval.

I’m not using my Google Voice number very much yet, but it’s nice knowing it’s there and on the few occasions I have, it’s such a timesaver to get voicemails emailed to me instantly. The transcription isn’t perfect, but enough so I can recognize who called.

One thing I haven’t gotten to work is the free SMS. It’s my understanding that if I use GV SMS, charges wouldn’t apply. However, after using it exclusively for several days, I checked my on-line T-mobile account and they were still being counted in there. I will check out the Google Voice Help Forums more to see if I can get an answer there.

New With Google Calendar

• offline access to gain read-only access to your calendar, just go to any page on your calendar and click the ‘offline’ button at the top. You’ll be prompted to download and install Google Gears and then you can configure all or just one of your Google calendars for off-line access.
• Attach documents to Google calendar. This is a nice feature – activate by going to the ‘Labs’ section and enabling and saving. Then open or initiate your meeting/appointment, click ‘Attachment’ and add any Google doc (limited to Google docs only).

• Snooze reminders on your desktop. This is a Google Talk download that will put reminders that you can snooze on your desktop.
• Google 1-way (Google to Outlook), 1-way (Outlook to Google), or 2-way (Both calendars synced to the same appointments) sync. This one’s been around for awhile, but it was on the ‘New’ page. This feature is the most popular with Outlook users. There will be a download for this feature as well. I’m not using it now, but I have in the past and it’s a great tool, especially when working with a client. You are able to get web access to their calendar to add events, appointments, etc. and they will sync with the client’s Outlook calendar.
• Sports calendars – add game schedules from your favorite team(s). Find this feature near the top of your calendar page.

Google’s calendar documentation says it will sync with Outlook 2003 or 2007 and with Mozilla’s Sunbird and Apple’s iCal. If you have Windows Live Calendar, you can import an .ics file from Google. It’s a bit convoluted, but you first go to your Google calendar, export your calendar as an .ics file, extract it and then import the file with the .ics extension into your Windows Live calendar.

If you don’t want to use the sync program from Google, you could export your calendar events from Outlook to a .csv file and import them into Google. To do this, have Outlook open and go to File>import/export>export to file>comma separated values (Windows) and then you’ll choose your calendar to export. Then it’s simple to go to Google and get to your Calendar Settings page and click on the import button, find your file and bring it in. You will be able to select a date range during this process.

You can perform the reverse as well – export your Google Calendar and bring those appointments into Outlook.

If you’re wondering about contacts syncing between Outlook and Google, this is available from Google in their premium ‘Google Apps’ product. You can still import your contacts. You can still import and export contacts between Google and Outlook, they just won’t be synced.

Plaxo Calendar Changes

I wrote awhile back about Plaxo’s features and benefits. Since then, some changes have been made. They are now requiring a ‘premium subscription’ at $60/year for something they used to do for free. That is the syncing of appointments and contacts between Outlook and Plaxo calendars. The premium feature also includes syncing of tasks and finding and eliminating duplicate contacts.

Plaxo still offers their ‘Sync Points’ for the below apps for free. To get to Sync Points, sign in to Plaxo and to either your calendar or address book and look for the Sync Points at the bottom of your screen. Click the radio button and follow the instructions.

I really don’t hear about a whole lot of people signing up for Plaxo accounts anymore and I rarely get invitations. It seems that people with an account keep them open, but really don’t do a lot with them. With Ping.fm and other aggregators around, it’s easy to keep Plaxo in our circle of social networking.

Google Apps is $50/year and seems to be a better deal of the two paid services as Google is always coming out with new things, most of which are free.

What do you use to keep your contacts and appointments organized? Please leave a comment.

From Foxit’s website, here are the advantages…

Dennis O’Reilly of Windows Secrets Newsletter writes that we must be more aware when downloading patches, upgrades and fixes to software. Software vendors are not only giving us the critical patch, but some (including Adobe & Sun Java), try to sneak in other software along with the update. I noticed when I was updating my Java, I was given an ad for Carbonite and it seems that everyone is trying to get me to install a toolbar, change my search provider, my home page or to pass along information to them.

I have a feeling inexperienced computer users will probably reboot and wonder why things look different because they didn’t notice they now have a new search page.While working on a client’s computer last week, I removed several inches of toolbars that I’m sure were installed because they just kept clicking the ‘ok’ button.

For small business owners or companies who must comply with federal regulations, Foxit offers a security suite of products that comply with regulations at a low cost.

If you are an Adobe user (most of us still need them for the Shockwave Player and Flash Player), here’s the link to update your products.

Digsby

If you’re a social maven with multiple email accounts, social media sites and IM accounts, give Digsby a try. If you use more than one computer, get a Digsby account and then you’ll never be parted from all your networking sites. Just sign into your Digsby account (requires a software install), and find out what’s happening across all your social networks.

Digsby rolled out a huge update in June, 2009. They promise they are lighter weight (consume about 50% less resources), and they’ve fixed many bugs.

I’ve had it on my work laptop for many months and just decided to install it on the family computer with the Windows 7 RC. It seems to be really snappy with Windows 7 on  my older Dell.

Digsby seems to be covering all their bases with the social networks, email & IM. Here’s a list of what can be aggregated for you:

Social Networking

Facebook         MySpace        Twitter        LinkedIn

Email

Gmail         Yahoo Mail        Live/Hotmail      AOL Mail     IMAP   POP

IM

Yahoo      MSN         Google Talk       AIM         ICQ         Jabber

What’s To Like

• As long as I have Digsby installed, I can simply sign in once and have instant access to all my social media accounts
• With the addition of LinkedIn, Twitter, POP & IMAP mail, I can truly have everything aggregated in one desktop sidebar.
• I like the ability to turn on and off notifications – I usually leave them off as it’s too distracting to see so many pop-ups.  But if you’re waiting for a particular message, it would be helpful.
• It is more lightweight on my systems – good news since I’ve got multiple things running at all times.
• Ability to post updates right from Digsby. I save some screen real estate and resources because I don’t have to log into LinkedIn or Twitter to see what’s happening or to post an update. This is a big plus.

Not To Like

I didn’t care for all the add-ons being pushed on me during the install. The Freeze search, the video player and maybe something else. For the unsuspecting person, I’m sure they just hit accept for all these things and then wonder where it came from. I wish this could be eliminated – but perhaps this is how they keep it free.

Still Figuring Out

POP Mail. Specifically I’m looking at getting an Outlook mail account from one computer to work on a different computer. I understand that if I have Outlook installed on both computers, but with different email accountson each computer, I can’t pull up an email. However, I can view a list of emails currently on that computer with a short preview.

Reading the Digsby forums, people were asking for Digsby to support accessing their webmail instead of a desktop client (like Outlook). They said that they had added this feature, so I looked in the advanced settings and saw that there is a place to cut and paste your webmail URLs (one for in-box and one for the compose box). I tried this, however, it crashed my Firefox browser!  I got a Java applet error.

I will try it again and try it with IE to see if I get a different result. If any Digsby users out there are reading this – would like to get your experiences. I’ll post an update next week after I work on it more.

We’d been running XP Home since 2005 and it was fine, but I was ready for a change. I like to do a reformat every year or so just to clean out the cruft. So I backed up my data and got my free Windows 7 RC download and key. I also found this advisor from Microsoft. It’s a quick download and install and will tell you if your system is ready or if you may have compatibility issues. Here are a set of short videos from Microsoft that give you a tour of what you’ll get. If you want really detailed information, i.e. upgrade from Vista, clean install from XP or Vista visit Microsoft TechNet for the hand-holding version.

With XP, you will need to do a clean install – which means you’re reformatting your drive. I thought about using Microsoft’s free Virtual PC software, and run XP and Windows 7,  but alas, the wizard said it wasn’t compatible with my machine.

The install was actually pretty quick and painless and when it was finished, I first visited Microsoft Security to get any updates I might need. I was looking at updates and getting my preferences set, anti-virus software downloaded, updating Windows Defender, etc. when I realized that all my drivers had been loaded for me! I had no idea Windows 7 would take care of this tedious and sometimes frustrating chore. This feature/benefit alone makes me recommend doing the upgrade. I think there are a lot of people out there who hesitate doing a reinstall of their OS because of making sure all the drivers are reinstalled.

Any glitches you may ask? Well, unfortunately I had no sound! My era 2005 SigmaTel audio driver had never been updated by Dell, and in my voluminous research, I found out Dell would be the only one to upgrade this driver. I did find (by a tedious search), that there was a Vista version of the SigmaTel driver made for my machine, but after downloading and installing, it didn’t work. Unfortunate, because I had read that if you had a Vista driver, most likely Windows 7 would be able to use it. I spent way too much time researching, looking at forums, etc. I found others with SigmaTel audio issues along with other brands. The Windows 7 techs would say to either contact the manufacturer, or wait until 7 is officially released. That’s the risk you take.

After speaking to Tim, my tech guy, I decided to get a new sound card. I got an Xtreme 5.1/16 bit Sound Card, went to their site, downloaded the Vista driver, and we had sound!

Paul Thurrott, who blogs regularly about Microsoft products and writes Windows books, has a very detailed  review on the beta release and is worth a look if you want to delve into the nooks and crannies of changes, upgrades and how to utilize features.

Takeaways

• Easy to download and install. You will need to burn the download to a DVD. Instructions from Adrian Kingsley-Hughes on ZDNet.
• DO think about consequences if something goes wrong. Make an informed and thoughtful choice of what computer to install the RC on—you probably don’t want to put it on your work computer.
• It is all they say – faster, prettier, UAC not as intrusive, what Vista should have been.
• One issue that I haven’t figured out it is that Adobe Flash Player will not stay installed when we’re using the Firefox browser. It continually says we need to install it, which we have many times (and uninstalled it). Still won’t work, so we use IE in those cases. Java works fine with Firefox.
• If your PC and peripherals are newer, compatibility should not be a problem If you do have driver issues, Windows 7, go to Control Panel and look for the new UI called Printers & Devices and run the troubleshooting.
• Just GET IT! Use it free for a year.