Book Review: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Plain & Simple

The book is what it claims to be - a simple, pictorial, plain English guide to Outlook 2007. It is suitable for folks who are completely new to Outlook 2007 or have some exposure to previous versions but find the new UI a little daunting.

I have used different email client tools at different times. I found Outlook 2007 intuitive and more feature rich than prior versions. This book helped me improve my Office skills. The major advantage of being skilled with tools rather than having a superficial knowledge is that you can leave home a little early from work and dazzle co-workers (provided they aren't reading these kind of books already)

Spread over 14 chapters & 250+ pages, this book covers all essential features of Outlook 2007 like managing E-Mails, RSS Feeds, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks, Notes, Journal, Items and Folders. Several practical tips are interspersed between the step by step instructions for implementing activities related to the above features.

It is assumed implicitly in some of the examples that Outlook 2007 is connected to Exchange Server 2007. My Outlook 2007 is connected to Exchange Server 2003. Due to this I was led offtrack by a screen shot showing the Scheduling Assistant with Suggested Times of meeting participants which I did not see when I tried it out. It turns out that the Suggested Times pane is shown only when Outlook is connected to Exchange Server 2007.

Overall, the book was breezy, useful and interesting to read. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to quickly understand the essential topics of Outlook 2007.

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The One Click GMail Help Layer UI Pattern

I know GMail & Google Reader have some cool keyboard shortcuts like "c" to start composing a mail etc but never realized, there was a "?" shortcut. It displays the list of all important shortcuts instantaneously on a transparent layer over the web pages.


I feel this is an interesting UI pattern as it is unintrusive & very effective. I guess web developers can use this idea to simplify navigating data intensive applications with such simple shortcuts & the Help layer.

Another cute idea out of the GMail Labs is the Forgotten Attachment Detector. When the feature is turned on, you'll get an alert ("It seems that you might have forgotten to attach files.Send this message without attachments?") if you mention attaching a file but forget to do so. I noticed it works if there is a line like "the file is attached" & you forget attaching the file but not if you have a sentence that includes "check the attachment".

Related links:
Google Reader - the online/offline Feed Reader

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HOW TO create an Excel 2007 Macro

I have recorded an Excel Macro in the past but never coded one until recently. I was prompted by a question in an online forum posting to learn, implement and respond to the query with a working code sample.

The requirement was to automatically copy the previous day's worksheet to a new worksheet and name the sheet with the date of the day (in the format MM-DD-YY) on which it is re-opened. This basically helps in a scenario where you have to maintain a daily log.

Unlike in Excel 2003, where the option to create a Macro was available from the Menu (Tools > Macro), in Excel 2007 the option to get started with coding a Macro is present in the new Developer tab.

To get the Developer tab, click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Excel Options button present at the bottom. In the dialog box that opens up, select the Popular category, then under the Top options for working with Excel, select the Show Developer tab in the Ribbon check box, and then click OK.

To set the security level temporarily to enable all macros, click Macro Security on the Developer tab in the Code group. In the dialog box that opens, under Macro Settings, click Enable all macros (not recommended, potentially dangerous code can run), and then click OK.

To code a new Macro, you can click on Visual Basic or Macros option in the Developer tab.
I choose Macros. In the dialog box that opens up, name the macro specifically as Auto_Open in the textbox for Macro Name.

As it is named Auto_Open it lets Excel know that this macro has to run automatically when you open the Excel file.

When you click on the Create button in the same dialog box, the VBA editor opens up with this template -

Sub Auto_Open()

End Sub

I adapted a snippet that I found online and below is how my code finally looked. It has to paste within the above 2 lines in the VBA editor.

Dim wks As Worksheet

'Create new worksheet in the active workbook, put it after last sheet
Set wks = ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets.Add
(After:=ActiveWorkbook.Sheets(ActiveWorkbook.Sheets.Count))

'Try naming the worksheet as todays date (sorry, no "/" allowed in sheet names)
On Error Resume Next
wks.Name = Format(Date, "MM-DD-YY")
On Error GoTo 0

'Show a message if rename failed
If wks.Name <> Format(Date, "MM-DD-YY") Then
MsgBox "Sorry. Couldn't rename sheet to today's date."
End If

'Copy previous sheet to newly created sheet
ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets
(ActiveWorkbook.Sheets.Count-1).Cells.Copy Destination:=wks.Cells

'Select cell A1 of newly created sheet
wks.Select
wks.Range("A1").Select

'Release object variables
Set wks = Nothing

Save it. A worksheet with a template has to saved before hand so that the macro can use that as a base copy to create new sheets with current date and contents of the previous sheet.

Related link:
HOW TO create a Ribbon-less Excel 2003 UI in Excel 2007

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HOW TO implement a Store Locator for a website?

The folks at Wotton.org have put up a simple online app that makes it easy to put up a Store Locator for your website in no time with Google Maps. The advantage of showing it in an online map is that it can utilize the Driving directions feature that can be useful to visitors of that website.

The app provides a simplified UI to build a KML file. It takes coordinates of the locations, with any titles and description that you may want to add. A KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file is basically a standardized XML schema file that can hold geographic coordinates & related content.

You have to drop this KML file in the same directory as the web page in which you want to show the map. A template HTML file that contains the Javascript to merge the KML/XML file info on the map, is also provided.

Google Maps runs only when you have an API key registered for your website. So you need to sign up for it (for free).

Each API key is uniquely mapped to the directory (URL) where the web page with the embedded map is used. So you cannot use somebody else's API key or use your own on a different domain than what you have registered with. If you try it, it throws this warning - The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/

Thanks Jeffrey for sharing this tip.

Related link -
Road/Street maps of Indian cities on the Web

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Road maps of Indian cities on the Web

Creating road maps for India is a tough job. It's a bustling country full of idiosyncrasies. Not just street names even city names can change overnight based on popular or political sentiments. In the past decade, names of four major cities Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Bangalore have been changed to Mumbai, Kolkota, Chennai and Benguluru respectively.

However, Road maps are essential for India's teeming millions and luckily there are quite a few free mapping services for India on the Web that do a fair job, notably:

• Map My India
• Yahoo Maps
• Wikimapia
• Google Maps
• Live Maps India

Live Maps India has recently added a lot of detail including Street Maps for 9 important Indian cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, and Jaipur), Location Search, Business Search and driving directions. The driving directions include detailed textual map directions like in Yahoo Maps India but unlike Google Maps. It supports fuzzy search, the keywords you type need not be precisely spelt. Although not very comprehensive (I could not locate Microsoft's Hyderabad office, Hyderabad Central mall and Maitrivanam - the birth place of Hyderbad's IT story, on the Hyderabad map) it is definitely promising.

Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and Live Maps/Virtual Earth provide APIs to programmatically fetch maps & derive practical benefit from geographical info. I have found Live Maps/Virtual Earth the easiest to work with.

As per the Windows Live Web Services Terms of Use, Sites or Web applications with fewer than one million unique users pay no fees and the Virtual Earth service is free up to 3 million map tiles/month.

All the above three services support interesting keyboard shortcuts. You can use Arrow keys to Pan , "+" to zoom in, "-" to zoom out. In Live Maps, you can use Ctrl and Arrow keys to pan faster.

I know it's going to be long but I look forward to the day when Traffic tracking can be done through these online maps.

Related links -
HOW TO visually find the latitude & longitude of any town/city using Virtual Earth Map Control 6

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HOW TO tune your Windows PC

There are numerous background services in Windows that get started while you boot up. They jostle for resources and depending on the computer configuration they may impede the speed of your own applications.

I have found that turning off some unwanted background services speeds up performance fairly if not significantly. You however need to understand what the background services do, the impact of turning them off and prepare for any risks before setting forth on the tuning exercise.

I found the notes on tweaking the services by ElderGeek & BlackViper useful. They apply to Windows XP but could be applicable for other Windows versions as well.

BlackViper classifies the configuration based on usage type & includes the following:

• "SAFE" - configuration that 95% of the people will be able to use with little or no side effects
• Tweaked - power user setup
• Bare Bones - super geek setup

Related links:
Fire up Windows system apps the Macho Way

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HOW TO create a Ribbon-less pre-Excel 2007 look

One of the machines I work on has a 15 inch monitor with 800 X 600 resolution. I occassionally use Excel 2007 & the ribbon almost takes up one third of the real estate. I was excited to find the Excel trick of hiding the Ribbon and having a minimalistic UI with just the Quick Access Toolbar, in the comments section of a blog posting.



To activate this feature, invoke the Customize Quick Access Toolbar menu that is next to the Office Button at the extreme top on the left. Click on the More Commands option to view list of commonly used & popular commands. Select your frequently used commands out of the complete list and they will then be displayed on the Quick Access Toolbar as buttons.

Use CTRL + F1 to minimize the Ribbon or toggle it back when required.

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HOW TO test your webpages in different versions of IE

We do not live in a perfect world. Web developers have to live with the differences in the way browsers render their web pages. It is prudent to verify that the page design & functionality does not break by running the pages in all the popular browsers & their prevailing versions.

It is not possible to install several versions of IE side-by side. Thankfully you can still test on IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta2 (on Windows XP) on the same machine using the freely downloadable Virtual PC Images.

This step by step guide shows how to run the IE8 Beta2 VPC Image on Virtual PC 2007.

Related links:
HOW TO easily verify your website design in different browsers/OSs

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Virtual TechDays 2008

"I was born intelligent, Orkut ruined me" - spotted on a T-shirt

Developers and IT Pros have to constantly learn new technologies, tips and tricks of the trade to excel at their workplace. The affordability of faster Internet connectivity has made e-learning on the Web a nice alternative to books.

Virtual TechDays is an annual event conducted by Microsoft India over 3 days (September 17-19th this year) with 40+ free sessions delivered by experts through Office Live Meeting 2007.

There is swag to be won in quizzes to be held on the event days. Block the dates on your calendar.

The recorded sessions & slides of the last Virtual TechDays are still very relevant and available for downloading.

Related links:
Free ASP.NET & related videos
Track Free Microsoft e-Learning products with RSS feed

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HOW TO merge two HTML tables with Javascript

While trying to reply to this unusual question on merging two HTML tables to generate a new table dynamically with Javascript, I ran into a nice tutorial on doing the DOM. The tutorial had simple code snippets with elaborate explanations that made it easy to extend them for my requirement with little effort. Check it out...

Short but useful examples stimulate learning & make it a joyful experience. In the past, I have particularly liked the well thought out examples in the fast-loading SQL Server 2000 BOL (Books Online) in CHM format. In recent times, I found the Virtual Earth map control software development kit (SDK) documentation (CHM file available for off-line viewing) and code examples very useful.

Over the years, I found these resources on Javascript invaluable -
W3Schools.com/JS
Danny Goodman's JavaScript and Browser Objects Quick Reference
Martin Honnen's answers in various forums. He is a tireless Javascript champion and a Microsoft MVP.
Quirksmode.org

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Is this just the start of a new Browser war?

...creating clean code that validates and works on many different browsers will be an important skill for webmasters and web designers. - Matt Cutts

Just days after Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 2, we have Google Chrome making an entry into the browsersphere.

Google Chrome is a new open source browser almost built from scratch that supposedly took over two years of work. It uses the same rendering engine as Apple’s Safari browser - WebKit. To install you need to get the 475KB Installer which will in turn download another 7MB to get you started. The beta currently works only on Windows OSs.

The UI is minimalistic. So minimalistic, it lacks the Search box that most browsers have. The address bar doubles up as Search box as well and it is called Omnibox. Next to the Omnibox, there are just two icons for the Page & Tools menu that in turn show options for the direly essential tasks.

As my preferred language was set to Hindi(India) in Regional and Language Options in Vista, when Chrome opened all the menu options & dialog boxes were in Hindi. As the font was too small & language not colloquial, I switched to English(India).

The search engine provider can be customized by selecting the option on right-clicking the address bar. I could only see India-based search engine providers in the customization list.

Tabs are on the extreme top. There is no title bar, no status bar (a temporary bar just shows up below while a page is loading). Tabs can be dragged and their positions switched. You can drag tabs out of the window to its own new window and then if required bring the tab back to the original window by dragging it exactly to the Tabs area.

The Incognito mode is equivalent to Private Browsing in Safari or InPrivate Browing in IE8b2. The keyboard shortcut to open a new incognito window is Ctrl+Shift+N. It opens as a new window with a incognito "spy" icon in the top left corner. You can also right-click any link on a web page and select Open link in incognito window.

The context menu is extremely context-sensitive and the list of options you get on right clicking will vary depending on where you click.

Shift+Esc activates the Chrome Task Manager from where you can kill erring processes.

Chrome has better support for Google Gears enabled websites to access web content in offline mode.

I guess faster, standards compliant Browsers will bode well for Web users and developers.

Also see:
Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2) - a promising, bold new version

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Keyboard shortcuts common to Firefox & IE 8 (Beta 2)

The trouble with giving advice is people want to pay you back. - Alfred Neuman

I'm glad most of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Firefox 3 and IE 8 (Beta 2) are similar. Here is the list including some IE specific shortcuts:

Command	Shortcut
Back	Backspace or Alt+Left Arrow
Forward	Alt+Right Arrow
New tab	Ctrl+T
Undo Close Tab	Ctrl+Shift+T
Switch between tabs	Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+Shift+Tab
Reload/Refresh	F5
Full Screen	F11
Caret Browsing	F7
Toolbar Search Box	Ctrl+E
Zoom In	Ctrl++
Zoom Out	Ctrl+-
Clear Private Data	Ctrl+Shift+Del
Go to Location/Address Bar	Ctrl+L
Go to Search box	Ctrl+E
Find	Ctrl+F
Find Next	F3
New Window	Ctrl+N
Close Tab	Ctrl+W
Open link in new background Tab	Ctrl+Left Mouse Button
Private Browsing (introduced in IE8 & Firefox 3.5)	Ctrl+Shift+P
Add "http://www." to the beginning and ".com" to the end of text in address bar	Ctrl+Enter
Page down/Page up	Space/Shift+Space
Open Download Manager	Ctrl + J
IE specific shortcuts
Developer Tools	F12
Open Quick tabs	Ctrl+Q
Open new InPrivate Browsing window	Ctrl+Shift+P
Duplicate/Clone tab	Ctrl+K

Did you know the keyboard shortcut to open a new tab in Opera was once Ctrl+N? It was changed to Ctrl+T on popular demand.

Talking of Opera, here is some trivia (source: Wikipedia) -

Håkon Wium Lie, chief technical officer of the Opera Software company is the creator of the CSS web standard.

With version 8.5 (released in 2005) the advertisements were removed entirely and primary financial support for the browser came through revenue from Google (which is by contract Opera's default search engine).

Opera technology is now found in Adobe GoLive, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver, and other components of the Adobe Creative Suite

..a development build of Opera's layout engine, Presto, scores 100/100 on the Acid3 standards compliance test and renders the test correctly. However, it does not actually pass the test due to slow performanceAlso see:
My Favorite Visual Studio 2005 & SQL Server 2005 Keyboard Shortcuts

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Internet Explorer 8 (Beta 2) - a promising, bold new version

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out and I took it out for a spin.

I had dabbled with IE 8 Beta 1 on XP2 VPC (Virtual PC) Hard Disk Image. I'm glad Microsoft has provided a VPC (Disk Image of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 or a .VHD file on Windows XP SP3 (of 464.6 MB size) soon after it's release. I tried it out on the freely downloadable Virtual PC 2007.

IE 8 Beta 2 is bold because it has greater standards compliance than previous versions, a fact lauded by none other than Peter-Paul Koch who maintains the most comprehensive analysis of the quirks & behaviors of different browsers.

It is promising as it has features like Accelerators, InPrivate Browsing, Tab isolation, Domain name highlighting that make for a better & safer browsing experience. There are over a dozen new features compared to beta 1.

One of the Firefox features I sorely missed in IE was the inline type-ahead Find feature. IE 8 Beta 2 now has a non-modal Find that appears as a toolbar below the Tabs (unlike in Firefox where it appears at the bottom). It is somewhat similar to the Find feature in Safari which shows count of results with highlighting.

Private Browsing in Safari 3 gives you no visual clue if that feature is activated whereas in IE8b2, the InPrivate label is shown in the address bar.

Integrated Developer Tools is a cool addition that Developers will love.

I hope IE8 will have even more pleasant surprises when it is finally released. Meanwhile I will go back to learning more about Accelerators.

Related links:
Safari on Windows
Free ebook - Firefox 3 REVEALED

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