McCombs Office Solutions and Tips
SharePoint Calendars are a great way to keep calendars that multiple people can edit. That is, they’re great until you have to open SharePoint to add or edit an appointment. Personally, I much prefer calendar management in Outlook. If you feel the same way, I have good news for you–you can view and edit a SharePoint calendar in Outlook.
Any appointments you add or change while in Outlook will appear on the calendar in SharePoint, and be visible to anyone else viewing this calendar in Outlook.
The calendar will be visible through the folder list (pictured below) and in Calendar view.
I often notice that when people want to reply to specific parts of an email, they will type responses within the body of the original email, and change the color of their text to make the answers stand out. Outlook has a great tool that makes it even easier to distinguish between these comments and the original email text by marking replies with your name.
If you type within the body of the original email, it will mark replies with your name in a different color. If you type within the reply area of the email (at the top), it will not mark a reply with your name.
This feature is available in both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 for rich text and HTML messages, but will not work with plain text messages*.
Turn on In-Line Comments
* Updated March 23, 2010.
Track Changes is a great feature in Microsoft Word that can be really helpful in editing and collaborating. When you use Track Changes, any changes made to the document by you, or another person, will be marked. Reviewers can also add comments. All changes can later be accepted or rejected, and comments can later be deleted.
One not so great thing about Track Changes is that it’s easy to accidentally send a document to someone else, not realizing that the changes and comments were still in the document. A coworker sent me a great, very funny, example of a business proposal gone very wrong thanks to poorly managed tracked changes. Read Rick Segal’s blog post about this business plan (this post does contain one word of profanity, but you can read a summary post that does not contain profanity).
Don’t want this to happen to you? I found a great demo video on Microsoft’s web site that explains how to use Track Changes, and how to make sure you don’t send out a document containing tracked changes and comments. Have a look! Here’s another demo explaining how to remove tracked changes.
For those of you using Word 2003, most of the tools used in the demos can be found on the Reviewing toolbar. You can bring it up by going to View > Toolbars > Reviewing.
Last week, in preparing to write the post about shared attachments, I sent several test shared attachments and later found that my SharePoint site was littered with test workspaces. This led to the question, how do you delete a workspace?
1. Go to your main SharePoint site (not a document workspace).
2. Click on Site Actions (top right corner).
3. Click on Site Settings.
4. Under Site Administration, click on Sites and Workspaces.
5. You should see a row for your document workspace. Click on the grey X in the Delete column. Only the owner of a workspace can delete it. If you are not the owner, you will not see the grey X.
6. If asked whether you really want to delete the workspace, click Delete, then OK.
