Office

OneNote Missing Features

Microsoft have announced the deprecation of the desktop version of OneNote. They claim that the Windows Store version is as good or better. But it really isn’t! Here I try to list the missing features. I will update this post as things change.

Office 365 Autosave

I am sure that whoever in Microsoft came up with the idea of an autosave flag, they thought it was a great idea. And indeed it is. However, when they made it default to on, they made a logistical nightmare for the majority of users. This post discusses why and what you could do about it.

Macro to open a web URL from Outlook

Many of us spend most of our work time in a few applications such as Outlook (email) and a web browser. This example macro for Microsoft Outlook will let you add a button to the Outlook Ribbon that will open a specific website URL.

Outlook 2013 URL Protocol Handler

Outlook has a custom URL protocol that allows interaction with different elements such as folders, mail and calendar items and contacts, Since Outlook 2007, this has been restricted for use only within Outlook itself but there are some tremendous opportunities for use from simple web systems. This post explains how to turn it on, even for Outlook 2013 (Office 365 version). It also gives pointers to other articles on how to use the protocol.

Microsoft 64-bit Application Support (lack-of)

Microsoft’s 64-bit support is still sorely fragmented as we find out with a brand new laptop trying to access Microsoft SharePoint.

Low-cost Information Management, Communications and Collaberation Tools

Microsoft Word Wildcard and Regular Expression Search and Replace

Microsoft’s Facebook Docs.com fails at the first hurdle

Had my first test for Microsoft’s new [docs.com][1] this week – and it failed badly. In case you don’t know, Microsoft recently announced a new beta [Office Live link-up with Facebook][1]. You can log in using your [Facebook][2] login instead of a Microsoft Live Id. So you would think that it would be possible to use [docs.com][1] as a collaborative document editor and I suspect that you are supposed to be able to – as long as your documents don’t contain anything complex – such as comments!

Nearest Postcode Search in Microsoft Excel

I need to find a load of addresses by proximity to a postcode. I have the addresses in a Microsoft Access database. Download Paul Jenkins’s UK Postcode csv and import into Access as a table Create a query on your own table adding the following calculated field: <pre>PCregion: Trim( Left( [My Table]![Postcode], InStr( [My Table]![Postcode], &#8221; &#8221; ) ) )</pre> Create a second query that joins the above query to the imported postcode table.

Copy and Paste to OneNote (AutoHotKey script)

After yesterdays OneNote tool post, I thought I’d do another while I think about it. Another annoyance of OneNote is it’s lack of control over pasting information from the clipboard. I’ve raised a suggestion with MS to improve this; you can see my comment in the newsgroup. To ease things a little if you need to copy and paste lots of stuff to OneNote, here is an AutoHotKey script to help.

Setting list item gaps in Microsoft OneNote (AutoHotKey script)

Although I like Microsoft OneNote and use it continuously, it does have a few failings. One of these is the inability to set the default styles and layout for text. In particular, when you create a new paragraph or list entry in OneNote, the default – non-changeable – setting is to have no white space between the paragraphs. This is very poor design and makes more than a small amount of text quite unreadable.

Critical Bug in Outlook 2007

I’ve recently stumbled on a bug in Outlook 2007. Apparently it is quite well known and the only reason that I hadn’t found it was that I don’t use Outlook as my main email client. In fact I only use email on it to handle meeting requests. The bug is that Outlook 2007 ignores the setting regarding sending reply requests for IMAP accounts. If this seems rather irrellivant to you, you might want to think again.