Synchronizing Outlook

Google mail is a great tool, and email-signatures.org is a great companion for it, when is comes to using professional signatures. Here are some examples.

GMail signature sample for realtors:

GMail signature sample for insurance agents:

There are plenty more templates at email-signatures.org.

Users of speech recognition software know the problem: It’s difficult to dictate names when answering e-mails in Outlook. And it’s always nicer to personally address the recipient of an e-mail.

Enter ReplyButler. This software was mostly made for using text modules in Outlook, but it also has the nice feature of automatically writing the greeting phrase (with correct name) when replying to an e-mail in Outlook.

Outlook 2010 is something special. Even though Windows has been available as 64 bit version, Office so far hasn’t. So far. Now, with Office 2010 that has changed. Whether it’s much of an advantage for the user, I won’t try to judge.

For the developers however it’s a challenge since it requires major changes. Easy2Sync for Outlook has now mastered these challenges and is available both for Outlook 2010 32-bit and 64-bit. It does that completely automatic, so you don’t have to worry about downloading the right version.

More info about it on the Outlook sync page.

Here are a few short impressions of the new Outlook 2010.

The installation was done without problem. During the start two things quickly became obvious:

1. The new Outlook starts FAST. Faster than the older version.
2. The ribbon bar is now also in the main dialog.

While the first item obviously is a good one, I (personally) rate the second one as negative. since I’m not a friend of ribbon bars. They’re easy to use for some things like BOLD or ITALICS, but difficult for the complex administration tasks of the Outlook main dialog.

A further test shows that in 32-Bit mode the Outlook sync software Easy2Sync for Outlook (in the new version 3.05) is already compatible. The 64-Bit mode still creates problems, which will also be a trouble for end-users. Since they (usually) don’t know whether they installed 32 or 64 bit, they don’t know which version of the add-on to download…

Now where’s my pst file? If you want to backup your Outlook data or share the folder to give an Outlook synchronization program access, it’s great to know where the file is stored.

And this program makes it really easy:

1. Download it.
2. Start it.
3. Click on the “open folder button”.

Enjoy!

A classic question whenever you’re trying to do something with the internals of Outlook. Microsoft has hidden the file well.

Here’s how you find it nevertheless:

• In the Outlook folder tree right-click the topmost item (“Personal Folders”)
• Click on “Properties”
• Click on “Advanced”
• At “File” you can see the path and file name of your pst file.

The best idea here is  to copy the path and paste it into the Windows explorer address bar.  (With the Windows default settings you can’t reach this folder by clicking on the folder icons because some of them are hidden.)

testing the new quickpress function