Category: Productivity

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Outlook Meeting Attendees In The Invite Body

Personally I do not like the way that Microsoft Outlook prints out meetings especially the fact that attendees are a comma separated list.
I prefer to see all the attendees as a tabular list – with their acceptance response so that I can tick them off as they join the meeting.

The following macro will do this for you.
NOTE 1 : this macro is amending the text of the body of the meeting invite, if you save this and send an update – everyone will see this. I prefer to just run the macro, print the meeting and then close without saving.
NOTE 2 : this is a one off snapshot of the attendee status, if further responses or updates are received you will have to delete the old text then re-run the macro.

Continue reading “Outlook Meeting Attendees In The Invite Body”
Categories
Google+ Productivity Technology

How Old Are My Google Contacts?

It may be a sign of old age but, I’m struggling more and more to remember how old people are. I have addressed this by having a review of my Google contact data and making sure, where I know someone’s birthday I have recorded it there.

This has the added advantage of creating a Google calendar showing me their birthdays.

I have now created a script which scans my contacts to find their birthdays, does some arithmetic to work out their age and store this in a custom field. I have set up a trigger to run this once a week.

Here is the script that I created:

Continue reading “How Old Are My Google Contacts?”
Categories
AutoHotkey Microsoft Office Productivity Technology Work

Productivity – Stay OUT of Outlook

As you will have read in various other places it is not productive to stay “in” Outlook and constantly respond to all the incoming e-mail.
It’s much better to go into your e-mail when it suits YOU – process your e-mail for a set period of time and then get back to some “real” work.
I had looked at various ways to implement this but it turns out that this is simple to implement using AutoHotkey (AHK).

Continue reading “Productivity – Stay OUT of Outlook”
Categories
Me Productivity Technology This Site

Feedly Mobile App For Android Has Tag Support

The latest update to the Feedly application for Android has just added support for tags.

Previously; when I have found something “interesting” in Feedly, I have had to mark it as “Save For Later” and then when I’m next on my laptop or Chromebook, I convert my saved later articles to have the tag “BlogThis”.

Now; as soon as I find something I wish to share I can immediately tag the article “BlogThis” and the wheels will immediately start turning. I have an IFTT recipe which will  scan Feedly for articles tagged with “BlogThis” and will then push them onto my blog www.RossGoodman.com. From there, there I then push the content from my blog onto Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Expect to see more “real time” updates in the future!

Categories
Misc Productivity Ross

My podcast playlist

Just in case anyone is interested – here is my current podcast contents. If you want to recommend any of your favourites to me – let me know in the comments below.

Continue reading “My podcast playlist”
Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Create an Outlook Appointment from a Mail

Although there is the functionality within Outlook where you can drag an email message and drop it on the calendar menu to automatically create an appointment – it copies many of the attributes of the email but it does not copy the mail sender & recipients to the appointment.

The following macro will allow you to do this:

Continue reading “Create an Outlook Appointment from a Mail”
Categories
Productivity Quantified Self Technology

Nothing To See Here – Just Rescuing Time

I have gotten into a nice grove of writing a blog post a day – mostly describing some script, macro or hack that I have implemented. Today I have (rather belatedly) discovered RescueTime which will log and report on your online activities.

This has ironically distracted me from thinking about my blog whilst I install it on my phone and my chromebook. In return, I’ll investigate the API over the weekend and write up anything interesting that I find.

Let me know in the comments if you have any cool hint’s, tips or sample code that you would like to share with me.

Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity

Outlook Calendar To Excel

I need to produce a weekly report detailing what work I have carried out. I diligently record this in my Outlook calendar. My weekly report needs to be submitted in Microsoft Excel.

The following macro will pull the entries for the last seven days from my calendar and store it in Excel format.

Continue reading “Outlook Calendar To Excel”
Categories
Facebook Google+ Productivity Technology Twitter

Review a random Google Contact every day

I have all of my contacts loaded into Google Contacts but the problem is, I’m never convinced that they are up to date or even sure if I should still have the person’s contact details listed.

To address this I created the following script which will send me an email every day with a randomly selected contact.

I can then review the contact’s details, compare it with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter and then either update their contact details or send them an e-mail to catch up with them.

Continue reading “Review a random Google Contact every day”
Categories
Microsoft Office Productivity Technology

Outlook Macro – Lookup

How often are you in Outlook and you receive an e-mail from someone and you want to know a little bit more about them. It may be as simple as looking up their phone number so that you can get back to them.

This lookup may be on your own intranet site or using LinkedIn, Facebook or Twiter.

The following Outlook macro will allow you to do this.

Continue reading “Outlook Macro – Lookup”