Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Outlook Meeting Attendees In The Invite Body

Personally I do not like the way that Microsoft Outlook prints out meetings especially the fact that attendees are a comma separated list.
I prefer to see all the attendees as a tabular list – with their acceptance response so that I can tick them off as they join the meeting.

The following macro will do this for you.
NOTE 1 : this macro is amending the text of the body of the meeting invite, if you save this and send an update – everyone will see this. I prefer to just run the macro, print the meeting and then close without saving.
NOTE 2 : this is a one off snapshot of the attendee status, if further responses or updates are received you will have to delete the old text then re-run the macro.

Categories
Microsoft Office

QUESTION: Outlook Macro Not Running

I’m looking for some help.

I have a variety of Outlook macros (see here) that run automatically when I send an e-mail. Recently these have stopped working and I see no errors.

If I manually trigger the same macro then it works and from that point onwards it will run automatically.

Any thoughts?

Categories
AutoHotkey Microsoft Office Productivity Technology Work

Productivity – Stay OUT of Outlook

As you will have read in various other places it is not productive to stay “in” Outlook and constantly respond to all the incoming e-mail.
It’s much better to go into your e-mail when it suits YOU – process your e-mail for a set period of time and then get back to some “real” work.
I had looked at various ways to implement this but it turns out that this is simple to implement using AutoHotkey (AHK).

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity

Outlook Calendar To Excel

I need to produce a weekly report detailing what work I have carried out. I diligently record this in my Outlook calendar. My weekly report needs to be submitted in Microsoft Excel.

The following macro will pull the entries for the last seven days from my calendar and store it in Excel format.

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Useful Outlook Macros

Quite often I want to create a task immediately off the back of sending an e-mail – usually to remind me to follow up with the recipient after a period of time. I created a macro to do this rather than having to remember to go into tasks and do this manually – better to keep the flow rather than having to remember the steps.

Categories
Microsoft Misc Office Productivity Technology Work

Add Reminders To Outlook Appointments

A Reminder
Creative Commons License photo credit: Andrew Coulter Enright

If like me your Outlook calendar can get a bit hectic and others can add meetings to your calendar sometimes you end up simply “reacting” to your schedule and jumping from one appointment to the next on “autopilot”. It’s at times like these that Outlook’s ability to create a reminder can save your dignity.

However, sometimes the meeting organiser does not set a reminder. I have created an Outlook macro that will look for incoming meeting requests, without a reminder set and give you the option to set a reminder.

Categories
Microsoft Office Windows Work

Multiple Excel Text Boxes With Common Content

I have just had to place a textbox object onto 17 worksheets within the same excel workbook, each text box containing the same commentary text. Type it once and then copy the text box and paste, job done.
Of course as soon as I have finished it I spot my typo and realise I will have to do it all again.
Only NOW do I slow down and think (OK I Google it) of the proper way to do it.
When you create a text box, rather than typing the text into the text box as I have been doing for years, with the text box selected you can type into the formula bar. In my case I put in the formula “=Metadata!B2”. This means that the textbox will display whatever I type into cell B2 on my “Metadata” worksheet.
Now I edit the textboxes I have created to reference the formula and in the future if the text needs to change, I change it in Metadata!B2 and the new text appears in all of the textboxes that refer to it!
NOTE: The text displayed in a formula driven text box is limited to 256 characters.

Categories
Microsoft Office Windows Work

Microsoft Office–VBA Editor Keeps Opening

For weeks now I have had the mild annoyance that the VBA code editor for various Excel spreadsheet’s appear to be opening at “randomâ€?. I finally tracked it down to me unlocking my PC. If I have excel running then lock my PC, when I unlock it, the VBA code editor appears.

I’m using Office 2003 SP3 on XP Pro SP3.

Turns out that there is a VERY easy fix – don’t maximise the VBA code editor.
If the editor is maximised, it appears on unlock, if it is not maximised it does not appear automatically on unlock.

Categories
Microsoft Office

Changing Excel Cell Values To Uppercase

A nice quick tip, I had lots of cell values in a mixture of cases that should have been uppercase.

Create a macro:

sub MakeUpper()

for each myCell in Selection

  myCell.Value = UCase(myCell.value)

next myCell

end sub

Add a menu item to your toolbar and then assign this macro to it.

Select the cells you want to upper case then press the button!

Categories
Microsoft Office Work

Update All Fields In MS Word

Sometimes you find a feature in a product that is just blatantly missing. One of those in Microsoft Word is the ability to update all the fields in the document with the latest value in a field.

I use both the built in fields e.g. Author, Version, Title and custom fields e.g. Project Code. I set the values once in the document properties and then insert the field codes in the document rather than the text. All is well. If you change the value of a field you can press F9 and all of the fields update to the latest value EXCEPT if you have used the fields in the document header or footer, these do not get updated for some reason. I would classify this as a bug, why would I not want all instances of the same field to be in sync throughout my document.

The solution is remarkably simple. Create the following macro:

Sub UpdateAll()
Dim oStory As Range
Dim oField As Field
For Each oStory In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
For Each oField In oStory.Fields
oField.Update
Next oField
Next oStory
End Sub

This can be saved in your normal.dot file and will be available in all your word documents.