Newsletter Archives

In this edition:
Outlook Time Travel
Automatically Check Your Emails
How to Repeat Office Actions

Happy New Year!

We hope you had a great holiday season and that 2008 is a fantastic year for you! Hopefully, the tips we have in store for you will make 2008 a hassle-free and productive year for your computer.

Now on to our first tip of 2008...

Outlook Time Travel

Outlook will allow you to set two different time zones, so you don't have to go through XP's Date & Time Properties to change the time zone.

To add your other time zone, go to Tools > Options and click the Calendar Options button. Then click the Time Zone button.

In the bottom half of the Time Zone window, select the "Show an additional time zone" checkbox and then select your second time zone from the dropdown and label the time zone. Click OK to get back to Outlook.

Next time you switch time zones, simply go back to the Time Zone window (Tools > Options > Calendar Options button > Time Zone button) and then click the Swap Time Zones button and OK.

That's all there is to it for Outlook to know you've switched time zones.

Just don't forget to switch back when you get back to your normal time zone or you'll miss your appointments back home!

Automatically Check Your Emails
One of the goals we have in the newsletter is to help you automate as much of your important and/or repetitive computing tasks as easily as possible.

Having to constantly hit the Send/Receive button in Outlook and Outlook Express is certainly something you can and should automate.

In Outlook Express, go to Tools > Options and select the General tab. Select the "Send and receive messages at startup" and "Check for new messages every (blan) minute(s)". The first option will download your messages every time you start Outlook Express. The second will automatically download your messages as often as you like. Just tell it how often you want to check for emails.

In Outlook, got to Tools > Send/Receive > Send/Receive Settings > Define Send/Receive Groups and select "Schedule an automatic send/receive every xxx minutes." and enter the number of minutes between sending and receiving your emails.

Of course, if you have it set to check your emails every hour, you may not want Outlook to send your emails every hour. In that case, go to Tools > Options and click the Mail Setup tab and then select the "Send immediately when connected" checkbox. Now, Outlook will send your emails as soon as you click send (as long as you're connected to the internet, of course) and receive your emails only as often as you specified.

How to Repeat Office Actions
This tip really only works well with MS Office's Word and Excel.

If you need to repeat your last action (i.e. format change cells in Excel, draw objects in Word, etc), simply press the F4 key and the Office application will repeat the very last action you did.