Minor Outlook annoyances

For some reason, every one in awhile, I'll type up and email, get down to the bottom of it, making sure to drop my cursor down below the bottom ot the text and hit the Signature icon to isert my signature block, and it gets inserted at the top. Not all the time, but sometimes. I don't know why, I don't notice any pattern about when it pops in at the top and when it goes where my cursor is. Weird.

The other odd thing, in the calendar, I can click and drag to highlight a segment of time larger than the default 30 minutes. For example, if I have an appointment starting at 7 until 8:30, I can click the 7-7:30 and mouse down to 8:30 and the entire 90 minutes would be selected. In 2003, when I right click and choose New Appointment, it defaults to 7-8:30, because that is what I had selected. If I right click in 2007 on the selected time, my selection moves to the 30 minute slot I right-clicked in and that's what my appointment is now set to and I have to adjust it. Blah!


posted 10:10 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

AVG fix, sort of

I discovered what, exactly, the problem with Outlook 2007 and AVG is today. I had discovered that allowing AVG to scan incoming emails seemed to strip all the text from the emails. Turns out that disabling email scanning is not the only way to fix that.

In fact, the problem is with the email "certification" that AVG adds to the HTML of every message. You can turn off certification and leave the email scanner operational, which is much preferable to not scanning incoming email.


posted 8:39 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post

Contact Database

I was playing around a bit with the sample contact database template in Access 2007 this evening. I was duly impressed with the ability to import contacts directly from Outlook, but then I thought, if I already have that information in Outlook, why am I spending this much time keeping them in Access. So I started looking around at other options and found one called Collect from Email. I clicked it. I was prompted to create a form that I could then email to people and ask them to fill out in either HTML or InfoPath format. It also created a folder in Outlook called Access Data Collection Replies, where the filled-out forms could be stored, and where I could pull the data into my database from the replies. This is not a bad idea.

Not that I encourage anyone to just start emailing information forms to all of their contacts, because we all hate those "update your information" emails from people who can't be bothered to actually keep track of what we're up to and where we've moved, and we never fill them out. But in a business perspective I do wonder if there's a way to extend this beyond basic contact information and use it to do training class surveys, or helpdesk feedback, etc. Anyone gotten this far into Access and have some insight?


posted 9:41 PM | 0 comments | Links to this post