Outlook

When I got my new laptop a few weeks ago I thought it was pretty cool that it came with Office 2007. The nifty new toolbars and embedded wavey swooshes are slick. I don’t really mind that by default Word and Excel assume you want to save files with a .docx or .xlsx extension. (That’s fine with me; makes it easier to remember to not save something as an ‘07 file if I need to share it with others that are still using Office XP or 2003.)

What I cannot handle is the fact that Outlook 2007 is using over 130 MB of RAM. 130 MB?! I wouldn’t mind that much, since apparently it’s supposed to play nicely with Windows and just use whatever RAM is available. But even using as much memory as it is it’s still slow slow slow. And this is even after I disabled iTunes 7.3’s ridiculous Outlook add-in. 130 MB?! Are they crazy?

A friend of mine sent me a link to an iTunes song he thought I’d like. Of course I was unable to open it because it came delivered as an attachment. (Cue scary music.) Microsoft thinks that I can’t possibly be trusted to not open some flesh-eating virus, so by default Outlook blocks everything. It’s usually one of the first things I “fix” when I get a new computer. Here’s how to do it …

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Zeldman does a spectacular job explaining why I hate when people use Word as their email editor.

The schedule for the University of Florida 2007 football season has been published. You can find it at the University Athletic Association website. They even give you the ability to import the schedule directly into Outlook!

It took me a few minutes to find it, of course. There is just a lot of stuff cluttering the site … Y’know … all about how we won the National Championship in basketball last year, and then the BCS Championship in football this year, and then the National Championship in basketball again this year.

One of the world’s worst, most-annoying spam-prevention systems is the one in my current version of Outlook — Microsoft® Outlook® 2003 (11.8002.6568) SP2. I’d say about one out of every three times I attempt to click on a link in an email, I get a warning telling me that all links in the message have been disabled to help protect me from ones that may be “harmful”. As far as I can tell there is no way to globally deactivate this, so I have to continually enable links before I can click anything. It is obnoxious and insulting and I hate it.

You have got to be kidding me. This is just about the coolest thing ever. A few weeks ago I lamented that there was no place where I could go to import the entire NCAA College Football Bowl schedule into my Outlook calendar. Today I received an email from Greg Titamer, the owner of Calendar Updates. Not only does Greg’s site provide a complete college football bowl schedule to download into Outlook, but he sent me a free coupon! I would have gladly paid the $1.99 for this. Sweet!

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! This is when everyone starts asking me, “So what do you want for Christmas?” Every year my answer is the same. “I don’t really want anything. I need cash. If you have a burning desire to buy me a gift, check out my Amazon wishlist.” To make it easier on you, I’ve embedded the little Amazon widget right here.

Here’s something you probably can’t get me, but I’d really like. Someone somewhere should give me a link I can click to automatically add all the college bowl games to my Outlook calendar. That would be oh-so handy. Why hasn’t anyone done that yet? Is it even possible to have a single object that imports multiple calendar items? Why isn’t ESPN working on this?

Trust me. You want to go get HideOutlook from r2 studios. This little app is great! It lets you minimize Outlook to the system tray instead of the taskbar. Click the icon in the systray and Outlook pops open or closed; right-click it and you can create new email messages, appointments, etc. Very hep. And it’s free!

Q. Is there any way to work around the Outlook security update?
A. Way One Way Two Way Three

It really bugs me that the Rules system in Outlook Express is so much better than the one in Outlook. Why would that be? Isn’t Outlook supposed to be the full-featured, super-duper version? Isn’t Outlook Express supposed to be the scaled-down, free version? I’m using Outlook 2000 and Outlook Express 6 at home and at work and Outlook Express is tremendously better. If the contact management was a bit improved and there was any kind of calendar system in Outlook Express I would never use Outlook.

Does anyone know if it’s possible to modify the rules in MS Outlook 2000 with a text editor? The “Rules Wizard” is just too annoying for me. It can’t handle any sort of boolean statements and I hate the way it ’sorts’ the ‘order’ in which it ‘processes’ the ‘rules’. I’ve been looking hither and yon and can’t find any documentation on hacking the rules … heck! I can’t even find any documentation on where the rules are on my hard drive. I’m one of those folks that gets a great big number of eMails every day and I would *love* to be able to sort and file and folderize and blah blah blah in some sort of effective manner. Help?

Found this cool page with some stuff about Outlook, but nothing on the Rules …

Yeah. So. Gotta little bug here. Can anyone tell me how to force Outlook to send a message formatted as plain text instead of in the user’s default format in VB? The only information I can find is about the OlEditorType, but that is apparently read-only unless I force the mail object to have HTMLBody true. It’s not an emergency, or even important. It’s just really annoying me.

Dim myOLApp As outlook.Application, myItem As outlook.MailItem
Set myOLApp = CreateObject(”Outlook.Application”)
Set myItem = myOLApp.CreateItem(olMailItem)

Y’know what I want? I want to be able to drop my cell phone into a docking cradle - like I do with my Visor - and have it just suck up all my phone numbers from Outlook. Is that too much? Why can’t I do that? … the hell …

Foot-and-Mouth Believed to Be First Virus Unable to Spread through Microsoft Outlook!
“Researchers Shocked to Finally Find Virus That Email App Doesn’t Like”