Monthly Archives: February 2012

Outlook 2010 has another nice feature you can set, which stops you accumulating tens of open mail windows on your desktop. You can choose to automatically close emails when you reply to them.

Just go to Outlook->File->Options->Mail. Scroll down to “Replies and Forwards” and check “Close Original Message Window when Replying or Forwarding” then hit OK to save.

Qlockwork is a sophisticated add-in built on Outlook. It talks in great detail to Windows using Microsoft’s excellent APIs (Application Programming Interfaces – basically, a defined way of talking to another computer program).

We can do this because Microsoft publishes some great APIs that make it very easy for companies take to Word, Outlook and Windows itself and customise them. We wrote a blog post last week about how to write VBA macros – they can be incredibly useful.

Google are also pretty good at implementing APIs. They aren’t Microsoft, but they are pretty decent. Apple are quite the reverse, they’re doing the creativity thanks very much.

We’d be incredibly sad to see more companies following the Apple model rather than the Microsoft one. If you want to write VBA macros or even Outlook add-ins that extend Qlockwork go right ahead. We follow the standard Outlook Object Model for our data, just like Microsoft does for standard Outlook appointments, so VBA scripts or add-ins that you write to manipulate standard Outlook appointments will work with Qlockwork tasks.

We love Outlook, but because we all track our time in Outlook with Qlockwork, we know how time and attention-consuming it can be. So here are our top tips for quickly improving Outlook efficiency.

1. Turn off your new email alerts. It’s too easy to lose your flow by checking out new emails. Go to File->Options->Mail->Message Arrival and turn all alerts off.
2. Save your common email phrases. If you write the same text a lot (like your signoff) then the next time you write it in an email, highlight what you’ve written and select Insert->Quick Parts->Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. In future just insert the text with Insert->Quick Parts.
3. Speed up filing with Quick Steps. If you want to file emails more quickly, set up some Quick Steps to do it for you. On the Home tab Choose Quick Steps->New and select “Move to Folder”. Pick the folder you want to file in and create a Quick Step with an easily recognisable name. Now you can click on a new email and rapidly file it by selecting your Quick Step.

Computer Science degree holders were the graduates most likely to be unemployed in both 2009 and 2010, according to the UK’s Higher Education Statistics Agency.

We don’t think this is surprising. Our hiring experience is that Computer Science degrees don’t give people very useful business IT skills. I’d rather hire an intelligent person with good communications skills and perseverence who has programmed in their spare time. The computing world changes quickly, we need people who can adapt and learn. A computer science degree is less important than the individual.

By the end of the month we should see the first Microsoft beta release of Windows 8, which is expected to be very feature complete. We’re looking forward to putting Qlockwork through it’s paces on the new release. We don’t expect any major issues – Microsoft have said that, despite the look and feel changes, Windows 8 is still Windows and desktop applications should just work.

Having said that, we expect some code tweaking will be required -  should be very enjoyable.