Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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 implici...

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". Rela...

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...

T he 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 wit...

C reating 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 t...

T here 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

O ne 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.

W e 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

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

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

...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 Chro...

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 short...

I nternet 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 (unl...