Posts tagged Tips
Configuring Google Voice as a Jott / reQall Replacement
Jul 23rd
I’m a big fan of reQall, Jott, and the various other voice-to-text services out there. I currently have a reQall Pro account and use it on a daily basis. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind when I heard that Google Voice was going to have voice transcription capabilities was using it to augment or maybe even replace my current tools. After some trial and error, here is the method I came up with to configure Google Voice for this purpose.
By the way, if you would like an overview of the Google Voice service, there are some nice articles on Lifehacker.com.
GENERAL ACCOUNT SETUP
- Create a Google Voice account. Until it’s open to the general public, you’ll need to request an invite here.
- Go through the basic setup following the instructions to add your home phone number and create your account.
- Once your account is created, click the Settings link at the top of the page and go to the General tab (see screenshot below). Make sure that Notifications are set to go to your desired email address. Optionally, you can disable the “Send a text (SMS) message to” checkbox. I disabled this because most of the messages are ones that I leave to myself, so I don’t need a text message telling me that I just left a message
- The Call Screening, Call Presentation, and Caller ID settings will not really matter for what we are doing. Set these however you wish for your other callers. Do check to see that the “Transcribe Voicemails” box is checked, and save your changes.
SETTING UP YOUR CUSTOM GREETING
The idea here is to create a greeting that mimics what you might hear when dialing into Jott or reQall. This greeting will only be heard when dialing in from your cell phone. There are several ways Read the rest of this entry »
Backup All Outlook Contacts to VCard in 3 Easy Steps
Jan 18th
For some reason, the Microsoft Outlook developers never really embraced the vCard format, and did not provide adequate ways to import/export to this format. The ” File > Import and Export…” menu only has ways to import vCards, and no options to export them. (That’s at least true in Outlook 2003, I can’t speak for Outlook 2007.) Because of this, various tools and add-ins have appeared that allow you to backup/export your Outlook contacts to vCard, and some of them even cost money! Why should you have to pay to back up your contacts?
Well, you don’t. It turns out there is an easy (but non-obvious) way to do this in Outlook 2003 without any additional tools or add-ins. Here it is in 3 easy steps:
STEP 1: Select all contacts in your Outlook contact folder (CTRL-A).
STEP 2: Select “Forward as vCard” from the Actions menu.
Handy Outlook Attachment Reminder Macro
Sep 17th
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.
Handwriting Recognition in OneNote 2007? Well, kinda…
Mar 29th
In my post on EverNote vs. OneNote, I mentioned handwriting recognition as one of the shortcomings in OneNote. I also mentioned that the implementation in EverNote is a bit disappointing as well because it uses a “shotgun” word approach. By that I mean that EverNote sets up an XML database of sorts where many possible words (most of them completely wrong) are attached to each handwritten word. If you search on any of those words, it will come up as a hit on that part of the image. You may be initially impressed when it magically finds the correct word when you search on that word, but the excitement fades when you realize lots of other words that aren’t even close will match as well. As I mentioned before, I do give the EverNote team a lot of credit for even attempting this, it’s just not quite good enough yet to be useful.
Having said that, the EverNote implementation did give me an interesting idea. Even though I capture a good percentage of my notes electronically using the DROE Tool, I still find it impossible to move away from handwritten notes entirely. There are too many situations where I either don’t have my laptop, or it’s not convenient or polite to use it. (I’m also too cheap to invest in a fancy image capture pen or tablet PC.) So here is my poor man’s solution…
I scan my hand-written Daily Record of Events (DROE) pages into a PDF file using the office copier. I then print these to OneNote, and I store them in my DROE Archive (@DONE section) as described in my post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“. I then add a >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
Attach Notes to Outlook Messages
Mar 29th
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 >>
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