Five Outlook nghtmares (and how to fix them)
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/print/9219419/Five_Outlook_nghtmares_and_how_to_fix_them_?taxonomyName=Desktop+Apps&taxonomyId=86
August 23, 2011 (PC World)
You use Microsoft Outlook to manage your email, your appointments, your contacts, and your to-do lists. In other words, you use it to manage your work life. So when this program doesn't behave the way its supposed to, you have a nightmare.
I'm here to help relieve you of those waking bad dreams. Following are solutions to five common but serious Microsoft Outlook problems. I'll tell you what to do if your data set has grown too large and cumbersome. I'll explain why you seem to be spamming your friends. I'll help you check your mail on more than one computer. And I'll show you how to back up and restore your Outlook data, as well as how to make Outlook contacts display the information you want to see.
These tips are for Outlook 2007 and 2010, although in their generalities — if not their specifics — theyll work with earlier versions, too.
Let's nip this nightmare in the bud, before it happens.
You keep a lot of information in your Outlook data file — including your email messages, your contacts, and your appointments. If something destroys or corrupts that file, youre in trouble. And since Outlook handles its data files in its own unique way, your regular backup routine may not be protecting its data. (You do back up regularly, don't you?)
So you need to make sure that you're backing up your Outlook data. But first, you have to find that data.
You can do so in the Account Settings dialog box. To open it in Outlook 2007, select Tools, Account Settings. For version 2010, click the File tab, and then select the Info option in the left pane, followed by Account Settings, and Account Settings again. (Yes, I know that's redundant.)
Once youre in the dialog box, click the Data Files tab. Select your data file (probably Outlook.pst), and then click the Open Folder button (version 2007) or the Open File Location button (2010). Windows Explorer will open to your Outlook data folder.
With Outlook closed and the folder open, copy the contents of the folder to a safe location, such as an external hard drive. Better yet, make sure that your regular backup routine includes this folder.
When the nightmare hits and you've lost your data, here's how to restore it:
1. Reinstall Outlook and go through the setup wizard. This will create a new but empty data file.
2. Once Outlook is up and running, launch the Import and Export Wizard. In Outlook 2007, select File, Import and Export. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab and then the Open option on the left, and choose Import.
3. In the wizard, select Import from another program or file and click Next.
4. For the file type, for Outlook 2007, select Personal Folder File (.pst). For 2010, choose Outlook Data File (.pst).
5. On the wizards next page, click the Browse button and find the backed-up Outlook folder. Select the appropriate file (probably Outlook or Outlook.pst).
6. As you go through the rest of the wizard, select Personal Folders, make sure Include subfolders is checked, and click Finish to start importing your backed-up data.
If Outlook is slowing down, its probably time to shrink your Outlook.pst data file. By default Outlook 2007 can handle a 20GB data file, and Outlook 2010 can manage a 50GB one. You can increase those size limits — but frankly, youll get better performance by decreasing the size of the actual file.
The previous tip described how to find and open the folder containing the file. Do so to check its current size, and to see how the size changes as you follow the suggestions below.
Start by compacting the file, which removes empty space. In Outlook 2007, select File, Data File Management. Select outlook.pst, and then click Settings. Click Compact Now. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab, and then select Info in the left pane. Click Account Settings, and Account Settings again. In the Account Settings dialog box, click the Data Files tab. Select the file and click Settings, Compact Now.
If that doesn't shrink the file sufficiently, try archiving, which moves old messages and appointments to another .pst tile (the default is archive.pst). You first need to reach the AutoArchive dialog box. In Outlook 2007, select Tools, Options. Click the Other tab, and then the AutoArchive button. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab, and then choose Options in the left pane. In the Outlook Options dialog box's left pane, click Advanced. Click the AutoArchive Settings button.
Once there, you'll find plenty of options for what to archive.
You can also start archiving now, rather than waiting for the next time it happens automatically. In Outlook 2007, select File, Archive. In 2010, click the File tab and select Info. Click the Cleanup Tools button, then Archive.
The program has other tools for cleaning up email. In Outlook 2007, select Tools, Mailbox Cleanup to find them. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab and select Info. Click the Cleanup Tools button, then Mailbox Cleanup.
After youve done everything you can to archive and clean up your data, your Outlook.pst file will remain the same size — but it will have considerably more blank space. Compact it again to reap the benefits of your cleaning job.
Your contacts may be receiving unwanted mail that appears to be coming from you. Don't worry: You're not spamming people while in a hypnotized trance. And neither is your copy of Outlook.
Remember that your copy of Outlook and your email account have no real connection, other than the fact that you use one to access the other.
In all likelihood, your email account has been hijacked for spamming purposes. To get it back, try changing your password (and make your new password a strong password). If you succeed in changing the password, and if hijacking is the problem, you've just solved it.
But if you can't change your password, the account has definitely been hacked. Contact your email provider about how to reclaim it; Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo each outline the steps for reclaiming an account.
A hijacked account isn't the only possibility, however. A malware-infected PC with access to your email address may be part of a spam-spewing botnet.
It could even be your computer. To find out, scan your hard drive with one or more security utilities other than your regular antivirus program. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Free, SuperAntiSpyware Free Edition, and the AVG Rescue CD each do a good job.
If your computer isn't the culprit, then a friends PC is — especially if the people receiving your spam all know one another. Malware can spoof (forge) any 'To' address in the outgoing spam, and typically it picks a random address from the infected PCs hard drive. If the friends who are complaining are all part of the same social circle, suggest that all of them check their PCs for malware.
If you have Outlook installed on two computers, and you try to download mail on both of them, youll likely to run into problems. The mail you download to one copy of Outlook likely wont be available to download to the other.
You have solutions to choose from, but the simplest is to change the way Outlook accesses your mail. If you use the POP3 protocol (Outlook's default), Outlook will download your new mail and then delete the messages from your mail providers server. As a result, the messages aren't there anymore for you to download. You could tell Outlook not to delete the mail, but that causes its own problems.
The better solution is to switch to the much smarter IMAP protocol, which synchronizes the mail on the server with the mail in Outlook. That way, the messages will remain in sync on every computer you check them with (as well as on your smartphone).
You can't change the protocol on your existing account; youll have to create a new one. You can do so in the Account Settings dialog box. To get there in Outlook 2007, select Tools, Account Settings. In Outlook 2010, click the File tab, the Info option in the left pane, Account Settings, and Account Settings again.
Once there, choose the E-mail tab, and then click the New button. On the first page of the resulting wizard, check Manually configure server settings or additional server types. When you get to the page with all the other fields, be sure to select IMAP in the Account Type field. Check with your provider for other settings.
This tip works only if your email provider supports IMAP. Check with the provider to find out.
You check your contacts, but you don't see the specific information you need. Sure, you have everyone's name and phone number, but you can't see the city they live in without extra effort.
Here's how to change the contact fields that Outlook displays automatically. The directions differ entirely for Outlook 2007 and 2010.
Outlook 2007
In the left pane's Contacts section, under Current View, pick the view of your choice. If you don't find the perfect view, find the closest to what you prefer.
Once you've selected a view, scroll to the bottom of the list of views and click Customize Current View. In the resulting dialog box, click the Fields button to select which fields you want — and don't want — displayed, and in what order. You may find the other buttons in this dialog box helpful, as well.
Outlook 2010
Click the Ribbon's View tab, then Change View (the leftmost icon on the Ribbon). Select the view that's closest to what you want.
To make it exactly what you prefer, click View Settings (immediately to the right of Change View). In the resulting Advanced View Settings dialog box, click the Columns button (if the button is grayed out, try closing the dialog box, returning to Change View, and selecting another view). In the resulting Show Columns dialog box, you'll be able to select which fields to display, and in what order.
Back in the Advanced View Settings dialog box, you may find some of the other buttons useful, too.
In addition to the previous five nightmares, you may have some confusion about which Outlook software you're using. Maybe, for instance, you've heard that you can manage tasks and appointments in Outlook, but you cant find those features in the program.
This may make you feel a little silly, but the answer to this problem is easy: You've probably confused Outlook with another Microsoft program, Outlook Express. Outlook, the focus of this article, comes with Microsoft Office and handles contacts, email, calendars, and so on. Outlook Express last came with Windows XP, and all it does is email.
If youre using the right program — and you're using it correctly — the challenges of managing your email, your calendar, your contacts, and your to-do list shouldn't disturb your sleep. And a good night's rest can really improve your outlook on life.
(via Instapaper)
When you go to De Santos, a high-end Italian restaurant in New York City's West Village, don't expect to be handed a regular menu. Instead, your waiter will bring you an iPad 2 on which you can select your meal.
As of August 1st, De Santos -- located in a building that was once home to such music and literary geniuses as Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Edward Albee -- became the first restaurant in the Big Apple to be run completely on iPads. Not only can you order your food and drink on the iPad, but at the end of the meal you'll swipe your credit card on the device to settle your tab (De Santos uses Square to accept your charges).
You might think that US$500 menus are ridiculously expensive, but the owners say that the system will save money by streamlining food ordering. The iPads send orders directly to the kitchen over Wi-Fi, and customers can see the full "specs" of every dish on the menu. The system uses a custom point of sale system created for the 8 iPads in the restaurant, and the development and installation costs were about $18,000. That compares very favorably to traditional restaurant point of sale systems that normally cost a minimum of about $30,000 to install.
Since every transaction is entered into the system in real time, the owners of De Santos can monitor the restaurant remotely from an iPhone to view data about how sales are going. They can see how many orders are placed for what items, how many credit cards are used, and more. Co-owner Sebastian Gonella says that "You really have control over what happens in the dining room," which reduces costs for the restaurant.
The key feature might be the iPads themselves. Sebastian Gonella noted that "The customers love it. Who doesn't like an iPad? They go nuts." Once word gets out about how well the iPad-based system is working, we're sure to see more restaurants adopt the devices.
NYC restaurant completely reliant on iPad originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 23 Aug 2011 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Someone asked recently how to manage their mailbox. Great question and not an easy answer. How you manage folders, labels, etc. is highly personal and there's a ton of information on the Internet.
What I was able to provide were some tips on keeping the mailbox size manageable as well as minimizing clutter. Here's what I recommended.
Make a conscious effort to manually delete items that are either part of a thread (keep just the most recent item if the text exists throughout the chain of mails), delete anything with large attachments unless you positively need to have the attachments in the e-mail (it's better to save them to the file server). Personal messages with attachments I forward to my personal e-mail. Doing those things will keep the mailbox slim. Then, scan sent items for ones that can be deleted, and finally, empty the deleted items on a regular basis.
http://www.granddaddy.co.za/sleep/airstream_rooftop_trailer_park/
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How to learn to use gestures in Lion | Operating Systems | Working Mac | Macworld - got a Mac laptop or Magic Trackpad? Then you need to take a look at this.
Lose your license info for software you've already installed? Use this: Product Key Finder | Personal website of Dave Hope
Hands on with Lion Recovery Disk Assistant | Operating Systems | Macworld
http://www.macworld.com/article/161664/2011/08/hands_on_with_lion_recovery_disk_assistant.html?lsrc=top_1
by Dan Frakes, Macworld.com Aug 10, 2011 12:30 pm
[Editor's note: This article is part of our series of articles on installing and upgrading to Lion.]
Apple this week released a free utility called Lion Recovery Disk Assistant that provides an easy method for creating an official Lion Recovery drive from any 1GB (or larger) USB hard drive or thumb drive. You can download Lion Recovery Disk Assistant from Apple's Support site; it's about 1MB in size. Apple provides some brief instructions for using this utility, but those instructions don't give you the whole story—while the utility is indeed simple to use, there's a lot more you should know about creating and using a recovery drive.
A must-have for any Mac user is some sort of bootable utility disc or drive—I call it an emergency drive, while Apple's taken to calling it a recovery drive. If your startup drive gives you trouble, you can boot from the recovery drive and in many cases perform any necessary repairs. With luck, you'll be back up and running in no time.
As I explained in our hands-on with Lion Recovery, when you install Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) on a Mac with a supported hard-drive configuration, the Lion installer creates a hidden, 650MB partition called Recovery HD. You can boot your Mac from Recovery HD by holding down Command-R at startup (or by choosing it from within Startup Manager, which you access by holding down Option at startup); you're then presented with options for verifying or repairing your normal startup drive and for reinstalling Lion. You can also browse the Web for troubleshooting info using Safari, and if worse comes to worst, you can even erase your startup drive and restore its contents from a Time Machine backup. Apple calls this feature Lion Recovery.
However, there are some considerable limitations to Lion Recovery. The most significant is that since Recovery HD is a partition of your Mac's startup drive, if that drive has hardware or partition-map problems, you may not even be able to boot from Recovery HD. Likewise, if you replace your Mac's hard drive, the new drive won't have a Recovery HD partition until you install Lion. So it's still a good idea to have a separate bootable utility disk.
One option for an emergency drive is to create a bootable Lion-install drive. Such a drive lets you install Lion on any Lion-capable Mac, but it also offers the same options as Lion Recovery. If you've got an 8GB-or-larger USB stick, or an external hard drive, I highly recommend creating a bootable Lion-install drive now so you'll have it handy if you should ever have a problem.
But with Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, you can now create a basic Lion Recovery drive in a few simple steps. While such a drive isn't quite as handy as a bootable install drive—more on that below—it's a useful tool to have.
(Note: Macs introduced at the same time as or after Lion's release—a group that includes the latest Mac mini and MacBook Air models, as well as any new Macs released going forward—feature special firmware that lets the Mac boot into Lion Recovery even if the internal hard drive fails completely or has been replaced. This feature, called Lion Internet Recovery, works by initially network-booting the Mac from Apple's servers over the Internet. The software then tests the computer's memory and hard drive to make sure there are no lingering hardware issues. If not, your Mac downloads, and boots from, a Recovery HD disk image, at which point you get the standard Lion Recovery options. For these Macs, a separate recovery drive isn't as vital, but it's still handy—the recovery drive will be faster than Lion Internet Recovery, since you won't have to wait for lots of data to download.)
To use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, your Mac must already be running Lion and have a Recovery HD partition, as the utility uses the data on Recovery HD to create the Lion Recovery drive. In addition, the target USB stick or USB hard drive must be formatted with a GUID partition map. You can check this by connecting the USB drive, launching Disk Utility (in /Applications/Utilities), and selecting the drive in the list on the left; the type of partition map is displayed near the bottom of the window, next to Partition Map Scheme.
If the text reads GUID Partition Table, you're good to go. If it instead reads Master Boot Record or Apple Partition Map, you need to reformat the drive using the GUID partition map. Follow Steps 1 through 4 in this slideshow to do so. (Confusingly, if you don't reformat the drive, Lion Recovery Disk Assistant won't complain—it will proceed to create the Recovery HD volume, and it will even tell you it was successful. However, your Mac won't actually be able to boot from the drive.)
If you're using a drive that's significantly larger than 1GB, you may also want to partition the drive into at least two partitions: a 1GB volume for Recovery HD and one or more other partitions for general use. If you don't take this step, the entire drive will be used for Recovery HD, which means a lot of wasted space on larger drives.
With those caveats out of the way, here's how to use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant:
To use your new emergency disk, follow these steps:
Note that according to Apple, if you create your new recovery drive on a Mac that originally shipped with Lion, the resulting recovery drive will work only with that particular Mac. If you create your recovery drive on a Mac that was upgraded from Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) to Lion, the resulting recovery drive will work on any other Lion-compatible Mac that didn't ship with Lion. (Although Apple doesn't explicitly say so, I suspect the latter drive won't work with Macs that feature Lion Internet Recovery, although those Macs shouldn't need it, since they have a version of Lion Recovery built into their firmware.)
In my testing of the initial release of Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, I encountered an apparent FileVault conflict. If I used Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to create a recovery drive while FileVault was disabled, the resulting drive would successfully boot any compatible Mac, whether that Mac had FileVault enabled or disabled. However, multiple recovery drives created on Macs with FileVault enabled would not boot compatible Macs, regardless of whether the Macs being booted had FileVault enabled or disabled.
Similarly, of the respondents to a quick survey on Twitter, no one who had created recovery drives with FileVault enabled was able to boot compatible Macs with those drives. I can't confirm that this is a universal problem, but if you have FileVault enabled when you create a recovery drive, be sure to test that drive. If it doesn't show up in Startup Manager, or if it does but your Mac doesn't boot successfully from it—you never see the Lion Recovery utilities screen—you'll want to erase the recovery drive and repeat the process on a Mac that isn't using FileVault. (Alternatively, you can disable FileVault, create your recovery drive, and then re-enable FileVault.)
Like the Recovery HD partition created on your startup drive when you install Lion, the new Recovery HD partition of your USB drive won't appear in the Finder—it's invisible. Similarly, if you open Disk Utility, you'll see the USB drive itself, as well as any other partitions on that drive, but not the Recovery HD partition.
The reasons for this are obvious: Because Recovery HD—whether created on your startup drive by the Lion installer or on an external drive using Lion Recovery Disk Assistant—is for emergencies, Apple doesn't want you to mount it in the Finder and accidentally or purposely modify it. If you really want to see it in Disk Utility, open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities), paste the following command (without the trailing period), and press Return: defaults write com.apple.DiskUtility DUDebugMenuEnabled 1. Then launch Disk Utility and choose Show Every Partition from the new Debug menu. Recovery HD will magically appear. In fact, you'll likely see two versions of it: the one that's part of your startup drive and the new one that's part of your USB drive. You can select either of these Recovery HD partitions and click Mount to mount Recovery HD in the Finder and take a look around. Just be careful not to change the partition's contents in any way—you may prevent it from working properly—and to unmount it when you're done.
You may be wondering which is better to have on-hand: a recovery drive created with Lion Recovery Disk Assistant or a bootable Lion-install drive.
If you've already used our instructions for creating a bootable Lion-install drive, you don't need to create a Lion Recovery drive using Lion Recovery Disk Assistant. The Lion-install drive provides the same interface with the same options for using Disk Utility, browsing the Web with Safari, reinstalling OS X, and restoring a drive from a Time Machine backup.
If you haven't yet created a bootable Lion-install drive, should you? Or should you just use Lion Recovery Disk Assistant to make a recovery drive?
The advantages of Lion Recovery Disk Assistant are two-fold. First, it's easy to use. Second, it works with USB thumb drives with as little as 1GB of capacity, making those old 1GB drives you paid too much for five years ago, or got for free at the last conference you attended, useful again.
However, if you've got a larger USB drive (at least 5GB), creating a bootable Lion-install drive has a compelling advantage: It contains nearly all the data necessary if you decide to reinstall Lion on your Mac's startup drive or to install Lion on an empty hard drive. With a basic recovery drive—as with Lion Recovery and Lion Internet Recovery—reinstalling Lion requires the installer to download nearly 4GB of data on the fly.
[Senior editor Dan Frakes needs a recovery mode to recover from Lion Recovery.]
(via Instapaper)
