Category: Productivity

  • 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:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • 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.

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  • Keep Recent Folders Delete Older In DOS

    There are often scenarios such as rolling backups or rolling logfiles where I create folders which have the date in the folder name.

    HINT: Using the format YYYYMMDD means that an alphabetic search is also chronological!

    In most cases I only want to keep a certain number of these folders and delete the older ones. The following script will implement this deletion process.

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  • Format Date in DOS Command Line

    For any dos batch files that I run on a regular basis I commonly want to create a folder or a text file with the current date in the file name. I’m a purist and I like my dates formatted as YYYYMMDD so that an alphabetic sort is also chronological.

    The following script will place the current date into a variable in the required format.

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  • Track Changes In Excel

    One of the main reasons that I use Microsoft Excel is to keep lists to share with multiple people. Microsoft Word has great versioning and colabarative editing capabilities, Excel not so much. The main problem I have is knowing when a particular row has been changed and who changed it.

    The following macro implements this.

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  • Uselfull Excel Macro – Make Contents Page

    I commonly have large excel spreadsheets with many tabs or worksheets within the same workbook.

    I use the following Microsoft excel macro to generate a contents page.

    NOTE: I’m assuming the “Contents” worksheet will be the first and the list will be generated from A2 downwards.

    Private Sub CommandButton1_Click()
        For i = 2 To Sheets.Count
            Range("a" & i) = Sheets(i).Name
            ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=Range("a" & i), Address:="", SubAddress:="'" & Sheets(i).Name & "'!A1", TextToDisplay:=Sheets(i).Name
        Next i
        Columns("A:A").EntireColumn.AutoFit
    End Sub
  • Tools I Use – Auto Hot Key

    I have decided to start a small series of posts where I share some of my tools, tips and tricks as to how I make my work and personal life a bit “better”.

    The first of these tools is AutoHotkey.

    “Fast scriptable desktop automation with hotkeys. Creating your own apps and macros has never been easier”

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