Month: January 2019

Did you know … you can cancel sending an e-mail in Outlook?

Anyone who has mis-addressed a message or hit ctrl-enter and prematurely sent, well, some of a message has probably found the message “recall” option. Unfortunately, “recall” depends on the recipient having “Automatically process requests and responses to meeting requests and polls” enabled, cannot recall the message if the recipient has a rule that moves the message out of their inbox, and doesn’t work if the recipient isn’t using Exchange. Many times, your attempt to recall a message yields another message like this:

Which is better than someone thinking I meant to send them half of a thought that stopped mid-sentence. But it’s not what I expected. You can, however, configure Outlook to delay sending messages … allowing you a little time to cancel the message.

Outlook Client:

On the ribbon bar, click “File”. On the ‘Account Information’ screen, click “Manage Rules & Alerts”

Click “New Rule…”

In the new rule wizard, select “Apply rule on messages I send”

Do not select any conditions – just click “Next”.

You will see a warning that the rule will be applied to all messages you send – click “Yes”.

Click the check-box before “defer delivery by a number of minutes”, then in the text below click the hyperlinked ‘a number of minutes’ and enter the number of minutes you want to delay sending messages. Use a small number – if you close Outlook before the message is sent, it will not be sent until you re-open Outlook! (Plus it’s confusing if you’re on a call with someone, tell them you are sending them something, and it doesn’t actually send for fifteen minutes). Click ‘Next’ to continue.

Give your rule a descriptive name, then click “Finish”.

You will be warned that the rule will only run if Outlook is running – click OK. If you routinely use Outlook on two different computers, you’ll need to create this rule on both computers.

Now when you send a message, you will see a counter next to “Outbox”. The message will sit there for the time you specified, then it will be sent. Once the message is sent, the counter will disappear.

If you want to stop the message from being sent, click on “Outbox”.

Right-click on the message – you can select “Move” and move the message back to your “Drafts” folder or you can delete it.

Outlook Web:

Click the “Settings” gear in the upper right-hand corner of your screen.

Click on “Mail” to display the mail-related settings.

Expand “Automatic processing” and click on “Undo send”

Click the radio button to select “Let me cancel messages I’ve sent for:” then click the drop-down to select how long sending will be delayed. Pending messages won’t be sent if you close your browser or put your computer to sleep – they’ll still be there when you open Outlook again. Click save.

Now when you send a message, it will be deferred in your “Drafts” folder for the selected time period. While the message is deferred, you will see a “Cancel send” option in the upper right-hand corner of your Outlook Web screen. If you don’t want to send the message, just click “Cancel send”.

The message will be opened to allow you to continue editing it. You can save it as a draft or discard it as well.

I’ve seen the future …

This will go totally meta — he’s going to deny having denied that he denied denying collusion. At some point, dude is going to deny having been Trump’s attorney / spokesperson / lacky. Then we’ll meander our way into a whole “je pense, donc je suis” discussion because maybe we don’t even exist at all. Bad debate tactic, but I’m coming to see Trump’s approach to public discourse like the guerilla warfare American Revolution approach to European combat tactics. Considered terrible form at the time, but effective as anything. Which, sadly, dictates that we’ll *all* be debating substantive topics by throwing baseless attacks, making shit up, and derailing the conversation with a heap of crazy.

WordPress 5 AutoSave Issue

I upgraded to WordPress 5 back when it was still in preview, and wasn’t shocked to find some issues. When I would create a post, WordPress would go into an auto-saving loop. Now I like the idea of background saves to prevent data loss if by browser falls over … but the instant the auto-save would complete, another would kick off and the editor was basically unusable (copy content / refresh page / paste content / cross fingers that the auto-save loop didn’t happen that time). I tried setting the auto-refresh interval in the config file, but that had no impact.

With the 5.0.0 release, I was dismayed to find the problem lingering but 0.0 releases usually have some quirks too. But two dot-dot releases later, and a lot of frustration that auto-save has caused waaaay more data loss in six months than years worth of browser glitches ever managed, I started researching the problem to find a solution other than “wait for the next release to fix it”.

I came across an issue on GitHub which not only reports the same issue, but included a bit of code to add to the theme functions.php file:

add_filter( 'block_editor_settings', 'jp_block_editor_settings', 10, 2 );

function jp_block_editor_settings( $editor_settings, $post ) {
	$editor_settings['autosaveInterval'] = 2000; //number of second [default value is 10]

	return $editor_settings;
}

And my WordPress is usable again!

Did you know … you can reply to an e-mail message with a meeting request?

Sometimes it is easier to take a few minutes, get everyone together, and talk about something. Switching from an e-mail thread to a meeting invitation, though, means you’ve got to copy/paste all of the recipients and provide a message summary so attendees have a clue about what you want to meet. Did you know that you can reply to a message with a meeting request? All message recipients are included in the invitation, and the message content is copied into the meeting request.

Web Mail:

Click the drop-down next to reply and select “Reply all by meeting”

A new meeting request will be constructed – complete with attendees (addresses in he ‘to’ line become required attendees, cc’s become optional attendees), a meeting subject, and the entire e-mail thread in the meeting body.

Outlook:

In Outlook, click on the “Meeting” button in the ‘Home” ribbon bar.

Again, a meeting request is created with attendees, subject, and message content.

Anything you can do in a manually created meeting request can be done here – if you want to add a Teams meeting space or set up recurrence … this is a normal meeting request, it’s just got a lot of information pre-populated.

Continuous Bias Tape

For Anya’s new book bag, I need piping — which is basically paracord wrapped in bias tape. My last few projects, making the bias tape has been an all day endeavor. ALL.DAY.LONG. Lining up, sewing, pressing, lining up, making sure I have the seams facing the right way, sewing, pressing …

I had seen people talk about one-cut methods for making loads of bias tape, so I decided to research alternate techniques. This is SO easy, I feel a little silly about the amount of time I put into quilt bindings and piping.

You start with a square of fabric — how much fabric? That depends! How much bias tape do you want? The number of square inches of bias tape is almost the number of square inches of the square with which you start — you’ve got to subtract out the square inches lost to the seam allowance. The seam is sewn along the sides of the square, and there is 2x the seam allowance per seam. Which means we’re subtracting 4x (two seams!) the length of the square’s side times the width of the seam allowance. Subtract that from the square inches of the original square and you’ve got the remaining square inches. To find the length of the tape, divide by the width of the tape. You could reverse the equation so an input desired length of tape produces a measurement for your square. Or make a quick spreadsheet and try different square sizes until you get close. Now the fabric will stretch, and your measurements won’t be perfect … but you should be close to the calculated length.

Now how do you make it? Start with a square, bisect it so you have two right triangles. Place the triangles so the right angles are on opposite sides — the 45 degree angle on one should be nested in the 90 degree angle of the other. Sew along the bottom edge — where the pins are below. Now you’ve got a parallelogram.

Draw lines the width you want your bias tape to be. I drew on both the front and back of the fabric so i was easy to line up. Pull the long corners of the parallelogram past the center — they’ll overlap a bit. You want each set of lines on one side to match up to the next line on the other side. But not meet up at the edge — you want them to meet up at your seam allowance. This is a little tricky, and it took me a time or two pinning and checking before the met at the right spot. Make sure both of your seams are on the same side of the tube. Stitch the two sides together. Cut along the line.

And you’ve got a long strip of bias tape. Fold it! To make piping, I folded it in half around paracord (yes, I’m sure cotton piping is cheaper, but I’ve got lots of paracord already, and it works).

Did you know … you can change Word’s built-in Styles?

Using Styles in Word has some advantages – one-click to apply a variety of format options, the “Navigation” tool provides quick access to “heading” items, the automatic table of contents uses “heading” items too (and you can instantly update automatic table of contents data as new content is added and page numbers change) – but what can you do if the predefined text format doesn’t fit your document?

Themes

Under the “Design” ribbon bar, you will find an array of themes.

Selecting a different one changes the colors, font faces, font weight, and font sizes used throughout the document. You can change your document to look like this

Or this

Customize Styles

What if the styles still don’t fit your document? I, as an example, prefer my headings bolded and sub-headings both bolded and italicized. You can customize a theme to match your specific preferences.

On the ribbon bar, select “Home”. In the “Styles” section, right-click on the style component you want to change and select “Modify”.

Modify the style component as desired – change the font face, make it bolder, change the size, change the color, add a little more space between lines, whatever you want. Click the box to ‘Update Automatically’ and, if you want to use this customization in other documents, select the radio button that says ‘new documents based on this template’. Click “OK”.

Sections of your document using that style component will be updated. I have customized all of the style components – normal, headings, title and subtitles, quotes, etc.

On the ribbon bar, select “Design”. Click the “Themes” drop-down and select “save current theme”.

If you want to use your theme on every document you create, click “Set as Default”.

Click ‘Yes’ to confirm the change.

Did you know … Outlook can display the time in multiple time zones?

In one of my prior jobs, I worked in Boston. I had colleagues in Hawai’i. Scheduling a meeting was a mental undertaking – 8AM in Honolulu is 1PM in Boston (and I had to count through Alaska, the west coast, the mountains, the next one over, and then me all.the.time). Beyond the time wasted figuring out what time it is elsewhere … you forget to think about it when you’re in a hurry. I’d book the guys in Hawai’i for mid-morning meetings at dark-o-clock, and the guys in Hawai’i would schedule mid-afternoon meetings that were 8PM for me. The Outlook calendar can show two time zones concurrently – both reminding you that time zones are a ‘thing’ and quickly showing you what time it is over there.

Click “File” on the ribbon bar

Select “Options”

Select “Calendar” from the left-hand navigation bar. Scroll down and find the ‘Time Zones’ section. Check the box to ‘show a second time zone’, and select that other time zone. I add a label both to my time zone and the secondary one. Click OK. If you have the monthly update channel, you’ll be able to select a third time zone too.

Now check out your calendar:

Did you know … you can ignore entire conversations in Outlook?

You can! Of course, you don’t want to ignore important conversations; but we’ve all been accidentally included on message (or been caught up in the dreaded reply-all blizzard) and been inundated with messages that really can be ignored.

Within the Outlook client, click on one of the messages. On the left-hand side of the ‘Home’ ribbon, click “Ignore”

Or from within the message, “Ignore” appears on the left-hand side of the “Message” ribbon bar.

If you haven’t previously selected “Don’t show this message again”, you will see a warning that the entire conversation and all future messages will be moved to “Deleted Items” … click “Ignore Conversation”

If you change your mind, all of those messages are in “Deleted Items” and you can easily move them back.

If someone changes the message subject, those messages become a new thread that you’d need to ignore again. When you’ve been erroneously included on some message, the subject rarely changes … but I usually have to block five or six different threads in reply-all blizzards.

Did you know … you can increase the maximum number of “undo” operations in PowerPoint?

I am a big fan of “undo” – highlighted something to copy it but missed the ‘ctrl’ part of ctrl-c? Undo! Editing an image and drew a line the wrong place? Undo! Change some verbiage and regret the modifications? Undo! (I’ll generally copy the stuff I’ve added into a new document before I start hitting ctrl-z {the keyboard shortcut for undo} and incorporate a few of the new ideas into the original text.) Occasionally, you run out of undo-able operations. If you are saving to OneDrive, SharePoint, or Teams, you can use the version history to get back to your original content. But did you know that PowerPoint allows you to increase the number of undo operations available?

Click “File” on the ribbon bar and select “Options”

Select “Advanced”. Under “Editing options”, you will see a maximum number of undos – this value defaults to 20.

You can increase it up to 150 – although higher numbers can adversely impact performance, so stick to a lower number unless you really want to undo a hundred operations!