Have you ever had one of those “oh shit” moments where two seconds after sending an email you realized something was missing? And you know, by using the Outlook “Recall Message” feature, you’re just going to draw even more attention to your mistake. It’s like a highway accident… people will open recalled messages before anything else in their Inbox just to see what you might have screwed up.
Here’s one easy way to prevent that from happening: use this Outlook VBA macro to automatically scan your outgoing messages and stop incomplete emails & invites before they get sent. This macro will check for missing attachments on messages & meeting invites where you probably meant to attach something. It will also check for blank subject lines, as well as blank locations in meeting invites. Read the rest of this entry »
In a previous post I talked about my quest for an empty inbox and all the tools I tried along the way. Well, I’m at it again. My previous tool of choice, Taglocity, has taken a turn toward online social/collaborative email in their 2.0 release. I’m afraid that 99% of the email I handle is work related, and our big lumbering IT department would never allow a rogue server, inside or outside the firewall, collecting corporate data. Likewise, getting said lumbering IT department to establish their own server would be equally unlikely. The social/collaborative approach might be the next big thing, but I need help now. The final nail in the coffin was that some of the features that originally sold me on Taglocity 1.x are no longer supported in their 2.0 beta release. Given the new direction, those features won’t likely return.
So where does that leave me? Well, I went back to my notes and started to think about what kind of help I really need. Here are the requirements I came up with:
- Need a quick way to triage and file email. Filing must be effortless, otherwise I will resist doing it
- Needs to be a stable tool that works well with Outlook 2003 (yes, I’m still stuck there… see comment above related to the big lumbering IT department).
- Need to strip out the spam and low-priority reference email & notifications
- Need reminders for my own actions as well as follow-ups for requests I send to others
- Must fit into my GTD workflow… In general, that means I need a way to create tasks and appointments from email and somehow tie related tasks/emails/appointments/notes together to form a “project”.
After recasting my net and re-evaluating the latest versions of all the tools I had previously considered, I came across a gem that I hadn’t given a chance the first time around: ClearContext IMS. It seemed to meet all of the needs I described above, and there was even a trial version available… Off I went.
CLEAR CONTEXT FEATURE WALK
After using the tool for over a month now, I am starting to see some nice benefits from the various features. Here’s a look at the highlights as well as some improvement opportunities for the ClearContext development team…
FILE MESSAGE, FILE THREAD. ClearContext does a fantastic job with filing (my #1 requirement above). One of the best features is being able to bring up the topic selection dialog (ALT-P) and type just a few characters of the topic name to narrow down the list. ALT-M will file it from there (no mouse required). What is especially nice is that your don’t have to remember any prefix or top level folder name since a match even in the middle of the topic name will select it. Additionally, You can choose to file the original message while typing your reply right from inside the reply window. Nice touch!
Two needed improvements for topic filing are:
- Please, please, please guys add a >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
I just released a new version of the Daily Record of Events (DROE) note taking tool. This release adds support for EverNote and text-based DROE files, as well as enhancements for the OneNote DROE.
From the README file, here is a summary of what changed in v0.4 (Beta). For complete details, download the README file. To get your own copy of the tool, see the Downloads page.
- NEW FEATURE: Added support for a completely text-based DROE without the need for OneNote. This includes a quick edit window.
- NEW FEATURE: Added support for EverNote… DROE Tool can send text notes to EverNote using EverNote’s auto-import feature
- NEW FEATURE: The amount of white space between notes is now configurable in the INI file.
- NEW FEATURE: “Clip Mode” causes any selected text to be clipped and included in the DROE entry. For OneNote DROE files, selected images are also sent to the DROE.
- NEW FEATURE: WIN+LeftArrow now summons a new control panel that makes it easy to update settings in the INI file and reload the tool.
- Bug fix: Fixed issue with cursor being stranded 3-4 lines below the date stamp.
- Bug fix: The CTRL-SHIFT-K and CTRL-SHIFT-M shortcuts were not working when the Outlook window was active. This is fixed.
- Updated and re-organized this README file. Switched to PDF format to significantly reduce the download size.
Here’s the scenario… You are quickly clearing your email inbox before going home. You open a rather lengthy message and start to read through it. A vague idea forms in your head about what your response will be, but you’ve been reading it for 5 minutes now and haven’t gotten through the entire chain yet. It’s time to go home. You move the message to your @FollowUp folder but you don’t want to lose your train of thought. Here’s where this little trick comes in.
Click the “Note…” button on the message toolbar and just start typing, then close the dialog box. Move the message to your follow-up folder, and then come back later with your “note to self” intact. Okay, I know you probably don’t have this button, but I’ll show you how to create it.
This trick utilizes the colored message flags in Outlook. As you can see below, when you click the “Note…” button it brings up a dialog box. You can start typing any message you want (up to 100 characters). When finished, just click OK or hit [Return]. Your note is automatically saved with the message. Messages with notes can quickly be found because they have flags set, and your personal note is displayed on the dark bar in the header of the message (as shown below).
You can also schedule a reminder if you like by setting a date & time in the “Due by” field after typing your note. Another nice feature is that your notes are private. When you reply or forward the message, the note stays attached to the original message but does not travel with your outgoing message.
Here are the detailed instructions for setting up the button. Note that all of this is >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
UPDATE: Since releasing version 3.0.0.842 in September 2008, Evernote for Windows now supports import, indexing, and preview of PDF files. The Mac version supported this several months prior. The work-around below is no longer needed (but still fun to try if you want to experiment with and learn more about Ghostscript).
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As I mentioned in my EverNote vs. OneNote post, one of the key weaknesses of EverNote is its inability to handle PDF files. To get around that, I created a script to send the content of PDF files to EverNote as JPEG images. This is in the form of an Outlook VBA macro. I used it to quickly capture hand-written notes scanned into my office copier/scanner. The notes would arrive via email in an attached PDF file.
To use the script, you must set up an Outlook rule to trigger based on the mail address of your copier/scanner. The script then saves the attachment to a folder of your choice (edit path below), then calls Ghostscript to generate a JPEG file for each page. Note that since I already had PDF995 installed, I just used the Ghostscript executables that come bundled with that tool. You can install the PDF995 tool and edit the path in the VBA script below to point to those executables… or you can probably find or compile a standalone version. By the way, PDF995 is an excellent free tool and does a fantastic job distilling content into PDF files.
The last pre-requisite is setting up the >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>>
