Getting Outlook notifications for important emails

A colleague recently figured out a way to make sure that he’s notified in Outlook when he receives emails from specific people. He passed it along to us, and we’re passing it along to you. 🙂

When you set up this type of a mail rule, you’ll get a pop-up dialog box in Outlook when an email arrives from a specific person or group. You can then open the email from that pop-up.

Keep in mind that this only works from the Outlook client, and you have to be running Outlook at the time the email arrives for this to work. 

Expanding all the folders in the Outlook Inbox

I was asked the other day if there was a way to expand all the Outlook Inbox folders without clicking each one separately. The person had inadvertently moved a folder somewhere else, and they wanted to be able to see all the expanded folders so they could easily spot it. My first pass at research made it appear there was no way to do that without writing macros and such, but then I found this tip that works pretty good (provided you’re running Windows)…

Outlook Calendar Attendance Tracking

I learned a really cool little trick today entirely by accident. When I send out a meeting invite to a large group of people, I get a lot of a responses which I usually just delete. However, today I double-clicked and opened up one of the responses (instead of just viewing it in the Reading Pane).

Cleaning spaces and line feeds in Excel

A while back, a colleague pinged me and asked if there was a way to remove line feeds from an Excel spreadsheet. I didn’t know of a good way to do it, but I came up with a hack-ish solution using Find and Replace.  Unfortunately, I didn’t know about the Trim and Clean functions at the time.

Saving all the images in a PowerPoint presentation

Let’s say that you have a PowerPoint PPTX file which has a number of images that you’d like to repurpose for some other reason. Maybe you want them for another presentation, or you want to include them in a SharePoint site or Word document. You could go to each page, right-click on the image, and save it locally… over and over and over.

OR…

You could use this technique to find all the images in one place, and then copy/paste the ones you want to use.

Blocking Junk Mail in Outlook

Into each Inbox some Junk Mail must fall… and we get to play Whack-A-Mole to try and get rid of it. Here are a couple of options for getting junk mail out of your inbox and into your Junk Email folder…

The Properties Pane is back in Office ProPlus

When we first started upgrading to Office ProPlus (aka Office 2016), we were excited and happy… until someone noticed that the Properties Pane for things like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents was no longer visible. Needless to say, this made some of our customers “not very happy”.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft fixed that problem in the Office clients, and now you can once again see and access the properties. Here’s how you do it…