Setting up Outlook with your Office 365 account

I just got an Office 365 account for the very first time the other day so when I wanted to check my e-mail via Outlook, naturally, when I attempted to connect Outlook directly, it did not work!

This, of course, sent me on a hunt to find out the correct settings to hook up my Outlook Mail client with my Office 365 Mail account which I conveniently found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Outlook-settings-for-POP-and-IMAP-access-for-Office-365-for-business-or-Microsoft-Exchange-accounts-7fc677eb-2491-4cbc-8153-8e7113525f6c

Resetting an AutoNumber field in Microsoft Access

I was recently working with Microsoft Access to store some basic data and I wanted to reset an AutoNumber field in my MS Access database, so I found this article which described just how to do that!

How to reset an AutoNumber field value in Access

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/812718

Setting up Outlook with Google Mail and allowing Less Secure Apps

If you want to set up Outlook with your Google Mail account, you will want to check out this article: https://support.google.com/mail/topic/3398031?hl=en&authuser=1

If you are having trouble with signing-in with your Outlook Email Client, then this article is an absolute must: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/14257?hl=en&ref_topic=3397962

It basically points you to a setting that Google Mail uses which prevents "less secure" clients from accessing Google Mail by default: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/6010255

Therefore, you need to go into this setting for your Google account and allow "Access for less secure apps": https://www.google.com/settings/security/lesssecureapps

Once you turn on this setting, you should then be able to access your Google Mail using your Outlook email client!!

Office 2016 Preview now available!

Office 2016 Preview is now available!  You can download the Office 2016 Preview (either 32-bit or 64-bit) release from here: https://products.office.com/en-gb/office-2016-preview

If you want a direct link to be able to download the 32-bit release of Office 2016, you can download it from here: https://products.office.com/en-us/office-2016-preview?WT.z_clid=O16_Home

The name already exists dialog in Microsoft Excel

I was recently tasked with manually consolidating data from several Excel spreadsheets into a single Excel spreadsheet.

Of course, as you can guess, this meant manually COPYING over table data from other spreadsheets into a single new Excel spreadsheet.

However, as I started wading through more and more of the Excel spreadsheets, I started getting a strange Excel dialog stating something similar to the following:

The name 'XXXX', already exists. Click Yes to use that version of the name, or click No to rename the version of 'XXXX' you're moving or copying.

I could not figure out why this issue suddenly started occurring when it had not been occurring before.  Fortunately, a quick Google search indicated that I would have to Delete all of the existing named entries using Name Manager (Ctrl + F3)

NOTE: If you are copying from multiple Excel spreadsheets, you may have to repeat this operation over and over (like I did).  

In any case, once I did that, I could once again resume copying and pasting information from the other Excel spreadsheets without the annoying dialog boxes!!

Get Microsoft OneNote for Free!

If you have Microsoft OneNote in the past, you may think of the software that is typically bundled with every release of Microsoft Office.

However, Microsoft recently announced that it will be providing OneNote for FREE to all users!!

The details of Microsoft OneNote being released to the general public can be found here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/17/onenote-now-on-mac-free-everywhere-and-service-powered/

You can download the free version of Microsoft OneNote here: http://www.onenote.com/

How to manually configure Outlook for use with Yahoo! Mail

If you use an e-mail client such as Outlook for reading and viewing your Yahoo! Mail, you may have noticed that the wizard in Outlook does not always configure the proper settings to allow you to connect, therefore, you may have to manually configure your mail account in Outlook anyway.

Therefore, here are screenshots of how to configure your Yahoo! account manually for use with Outlook:

After you configure the basic settings for your e-mail account, you will need to click on the "More Settings" button to configure additional settings for use in connecting to Yahoo! Mail:

If instead of using POP for mail, you prefer to use IMAP, you can follow the settings below:

Just as with setting up your POP Mail account, you will also have to click on "More Settings" in order to configure the additional settings for Yahoo! mail to work with your Outlook e-mail client:

That should be it!  You should now be able to successfully connect to Yahoo! Mail and send and receive e-mail messages.

Exporting and importing e-mail signatures in MS Outlook

One of the operations that I have to configure each time I re-install the OS on my work computer is my e-mail signature in Outlook.

Each time I re-build my OS, I have to re-configure Outlook on my machine.  While I can archive my e-mail messages, I have discovered that every release of MS Office thus far does not offer me the ability to export (and subsequently import) my Outlook e-mail signature.  This information seems to sit out there in limbo and is not attached to my MS Exchange Profile (which would be preferable).

The process that I use right now is looking back at an e-mail message that contains my old E-mail Signature or creating a screenshot of my E-mail Signature prior to performing the re-install/re-build of my machine.  I then have to re-create my E-mail Signature in Outlook based on what I had previously captured.

Of course, this process is very annoying and not guaranteed to replicate my e-mail signature EXACTLY (same font color, font size etc.) as it was before.  I really wish that Microsoft would simply offer an Export and Import button on the E-mail Signature dialog so that I could easily backup these settings prior to a system rebuild.

If you are like me and also wish that Microsoft would offer an Export/Import button for the E-mail Signature dialog, please vote for this UserVoice Feedback Item here: http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/3690660-export-e-mail-signature-in-outlook

Unhiding the Office Outlook Ribbon

If you have ever accidentally lost the Outlook ribbon, you can use the Ctrl + F1 key combination to unhide the Office Ribbon.

You can read more about how to do this here: http://blogmines.com/blog/2010/08/23/how-to-unhide-office-ribbon-in-outlook-2010/

Applying a Watermark to all pages in an MS Word Document

I recently had to apply a "Draft" watermark to an MS Word document that had been handed to me from my co-workers.  However, the problem that I encountered was that each time I attempted to apply the "Draft" watermark to the document, it would only apply the watermark to a single page!!

If you are wondering how I attempted to apply a Draft Watermark to a page, this is how I did it (in Office 2010):

1. Open up the MS Word document
2. Click on the Page Layout tab in the Ribbon
3. Click on the Watermark button
4. Select the Draft watermark

Well, one of the problems that was introduced by the document is that all of the pages in the document did not use uniform standard headers/formatting.  Therefore, as soon as the Watermark was applied to one page, it would be wiped from the other pages.  I discovered this by attempting to apply the Watermark to various different pages with success in applying it to multiple pages while others only had it applied to a single page.

Fortunately, after some Google searching and investigation, I discovered the solution to be much more subtle.  As tedious as it was, I had to copy and paste the Watermark applied to each page in the header to all of the other pages that had varying headers.  Therefore, if I had 3 or more pages with varying headers (such as a Title page, Table of Contents and main content page), I had to copy and paste the header Watermark to each of these varying pages.

In this manner, I was able to get my "Draft" watermark to apply to all of the pages in the document!

The solution posted by Ross (in the comments below), looks like the following:

1. From the Design tab in the Office Ribbon, select Watermark
2. Select Custom Watermark...
3. Choose Text watermark and from the Text dropdownlist, select "Draft"

Send to Bluetooth Add-In causes Office 2010 Apps to crash

I recently uncovered a very strange and unusual behavior with the Office 2010 Applications on my laptop.

Every single time I attempted a copy and paste operation from one of my Office 2010 Applications to another, the source application would crash!!  I most often encountered this issue in Visio 2010, but it seemed to occur in other Office Apps as well.

Well, one of my colleagues pointed out that the underlying culprit was a feature that shipped that with my laptop--Send to Bluetooth.  When this Add-In was enabled in Office 2010, the copy and paste operations inevitably caused the Office application to crash.

So, in order to rectify this problem, I had to disable the Add-in:

1. Open the problematic Office 2010 Application (this has to be done for each Office App in the suite)
2. From the File menu, select Options
3. Click on the Add-Ins menu item
4. Look for the Manage heading at the bottom of the Add-Ins screen
5. You should find a Go... button next to the heading
6. Make sure the dropdownlist selection is set to "COM Add-ins"
7. Click on the Go... button
8. You should now see a dialog with an option checked for "Send to Bluetooth"
9. Uncheck the checkbox next to "Send to Bluetooth"
10. Click the OK button to close the dialog.
11. Re-verify that your application now supports the copy and paste operation without crashing!

Office 2013 Preview now available for download!

For those of you interested in checking out the new features in Office 2013, you can now download it from MSDN Subscriber downloads here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions

Using Outlook to read Lotus Notes e-mail messages

If you are a current user of Lotus Notes, but a former user of Outlook, like most individuals, you probably prefer to use Outlook for checking and reading your e-mail messages rather than Lotus Notes.

Fortunately, IBM has released a connector to allow you to do just that! 
It is called the Domino Access for Outlook Connector.

Instructions on how to configure the Domino Access for Outlook connector can be found here:
http://www.sharepoint2007security.com/blog/2009-10-09/using-office-outlook-2010-lotus-notes-backend-connector-damo-windows-7
http://www.slipstick.com/addins/services/connecting-outlook-to-lotus-notes/

If you are looking to download the DAMO connector, you can visit the IBM website to download it.  The most current release of the DAMO connector is Fix 6 and should have a file name of setup.DAMO.InterimFix6.2010.exe.

How can customers get access to the latest Domino Access for Microsoft Outlook (DAMO) release?

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21321549