1. Open Microsoft Outlook, then open a new message.
2. Open your Contacts in Outlook.
3. Arrange your windows so that you can see both the new message and your contacts list.
4. Drag the Distribution List from your Contacts to the new message, and send the message to the person who needs the list.

When the person receives the e-mail, all they need to do is reverse Step 4.  Drag the Distribution List from the e-mail to the Contacts list.

That’s it.  I told you it was easy.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

How to Share a Distribution List in Outlook

I have worked as Personal Assistant/ Companion for the last seven years?

I have never worked with calendars and extensive travel arrangements.

Which books or websites do you recommend for learning how to manage

Calendars and do extensive travel arrangements?

Hi, Beatriz.  Thank for your question.

Administrative Assistants have a number of places they can turn to learn new skills.  This blog is one of them.  I’ve written a number of times on both of these subjects.  If you look at the categories on the right, you’ll find a breakdown of topics.  Choose Travel for travel arrangement posts, and Microsoft Outlook for various topics on Outlook (I’m assuming you use Outlook as it’s the most prevalent calendaring software being used in offices).  I wrote two post specifically about managing the boss’s calendar: Managing Calendars: More Ways to Keep the Boss Productive and Managing Calendars Part 2: Scheduling More Than Meetings.

Other places to find information and get advice include OfficeArrow and AdminSecret.  For specific training on Outlook, Microsoft offers some great free tutorials.

As for books, Amazon has any number of books on Microsoft Outlook (affiliate link).  I hesitate to recommend any one book because I haven’t used any of them.

If you have more specific questions, just leave a comment here and I’ll help any way I can.  Thanks again for your question.

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• Where Are My Outlook Calendar Items?
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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Ask the Admin: Advice on Calendar and Travel

Hi Jodith

Is there a way in Microsoft outlook if you right click on properties for an appointment that you can see who created the appointment and when it was last edited and by whom?

If there is a way to do that I would create a monument in your honor!   Seriously!

Hi, Sheila.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m going to earn your monument, because I can’t give your the “who” in your question.  My understanding from perusing the Microsoft Tech Boards is that if your calendar resides in the default calendar location, and whose doesn’t, then the property for created and/or modified by will always be your name, regardless of who actually sent it.  So even if you were up to coding a custom calendar view, which is required to get this information, it wouldn’t do you any good unless you have a custom calendar set up.

Finding the Created and Modified Dates

I can, however, help you find the created date and last modified date.  The last modified date is easiest because it is in the appointment properties.  Open your appointment and click on the Windows button (in 2007) or the File menu (in 2003) and choose ”Properties”.  The last modified field is located there.

Finding the creation date is a bit more difficult.  Click on “View” and then “Current View” and then “By Category”.  Then click on “View”, “Current View”, and then “Customize Current View”.

Click on the “Fields” button.  Then, under “Frequently Used Fields”, you should see “Created”.  This is the field that tells you when an appointment was created.  Click on it and click the “Add” button.  Then click “OK”, and then “OK” again.  This will insert the “Created” field into this view, so you can look up the created time in this view.  Unfortunately, you can’t add it to other views unless you know how to do custom coding.

Sorry I couldn’t help more.  You can always talk to your IT team and see if they can do some coding for you to create a custom form for appointments to show who created it and made revisions.  And, of course, you would need a custom location for your calendars, which they could also help you with.

Talk To Microsoft

My main suggestion is give feedback to Microsoft on 2010, which is still in beta, to have these fields correctly added to the properties form in 2010.  I know you aren’t the first person who has wanted this.  Pretty much every assistant working in an Exchange environment has wished for this at one time or another.  If enough of us ask for it, they might add it in.  The best place I could find to do that is in the Beta Forums.  You’ll need to register, but it’s worth it.  The Microsoft forums is a great place to find answers to your Office questions.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Ask the Admin: Outlook Appointment Properties

Use the Snooze Button

The first option is to set a daily recurring task starting first thing in the morning.  When your reminder pops up, set the snooze time for 1 hour.  Then, throughout the day, whenever the reminder pops up, just keep snoozing it for an hour at a time.  At the end of the day, remember to mark the task complete so you get the next task popping up the next morning.  This isn’t the most precise option, since you may not see it immediately when it pops up, but it is the easiest to set up.  If you need to set your reminder for an hour after the last one, it works well.  If, however, you need to have your reminders at precise times, then try the next option.

Multiple Recurring Tasks

If you need your reminders to occur at precise times, then the other option is to set up a recurring task for each time of the day that you need a reminder.  It takes longer to set up, because you have to set up multiple tasks, but you’ll get your reminders precisely on time.  For example, if you need to be reminded of a task on the hour between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., then you’ll set up 10 separate recurring tasks, each with a reminder for one of the hours (8 a.m, 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., etc., etc., etc.).  The set up is annoying, but you’ll get your reminders at the precise times you need them.  Again, remember to mark each task complete so you get the task to reoccur the next day.

Software Workarounds

Remember, no software will ever have all of the options you’d like.  Sometimes you have to use your ingenuity to make software do what you need.  When you need a piece of software to do something it isn’t designed to do, stop and think about what the software does do, and how the software works.  Often you can come up with what the tech folks call “workarounds”.  Essentially, you use the software to do the job the software isn’t designed to do, as we did above with the recurring tasks in Outlook.  Being able to come up with workarounds when you need them can make using your software a much less frustrating task.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Ask the Admin: Recurring Hourly Tasks in Outlook

Well, the folks at Microsoft have finally come up with a way to help us learn the new interface.  It’s called Office Ribbon Hero, and it’s a game to help you learn the 2007 interface and new functionality.  It installs seamlessly with all of your Office programs, and you earn points just through doing your every day work.  However, you can also complete the “challenges” within Ribbon Hero to go through tutorials teaching you the new interface.

Office Hero is still in beta, and it has a few bugs (some challenges don’t update properly), but I’ve really enjoyed playing and learning some really great functionality that I didn’t even know existed in Word 2007.  I’ve played through most of the challenges in Word 2007, and I’m looking forward to playing in the other Office programs as well.  If the game is popular, Microsoft is planning to release new content and challenges for it in the future, to help you lean to use more advanced functions in the Office Suite of programs.

If you want to learn the ins and outs of Office 2007, download and install Office Ribbon Hero.  Remember, it’s important to keep your software skills top notch, especially in today’s challenging employment environment.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Learn Office 2007 with Ribbon Hero

Microsoft Outlook gives you a number of ways to organize e-mail.

• Folders - You can create folders for various categories of mail.  These can be based on who sent the e-mail, the project the e-mail is about, the department it deals with, or any other logical pattern based on the needs of your boss.  I frequently set up folders for newsletters he receives, since those are often lower priority, and getting them out of the inbox makes it less cluttered.  Your boss may want you to set up a whole filing system for e-mails so old e-mails are easier to find.  I had one boss that I not only set up the folders for, but it was my responsibility once a month to file the old e-mails into the folder system.

• Color Coding – You have various ways to color code e-mail in Outlook.  You can have the e-mail preview be in a different color, you can apply different colored flags to the e-mail, or you can color code by category (in Microsoft Outlook 2007 only).  I’ve never been particularly fond of the color coding method, but for some people it works very well.  Again, you can color code based on whatever system works for your boss.
• Categories - You can also organize e-mail by applying categories.  You can either choose from the default list of categories in Microsoft Outlook, or you can create new categories as needed.

Using Rules in Microsoft Outlook

Regardless of the method you use to organize e-mail, the use of rules can be very handy at doing some of the work for you.  For instance, I mentioned earlier that I would create a folder for each kind of newsletter my boss received.  I would set up a rule that when one of these newsletters arrived, Outlook should move it to the appropriate folder.  You can make rules for all kinds of situations and with all sorts of effects, whether it’s moving the e-mail to a folder, changing the color, or applying a category.  You can even use it to autoreply to commonly received e-mail that always get the same response.   Using rules to organize e-mail is a great time saver for both you and your boss.

Do You Mange Your Boss’s E-mail?

How do you organize your boss’s e-mail?  Do you have any tips to share to help us all out?  Just leave a comment and share your e-mail tips.  Remember, if you are reading this in e-mail or a feed reader, you’ll need to click the title and go to the website to leave a comment.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

How to Organize the Boss’s E-mail

We’ve all gotten the dreaded “You’re Over Your Limit” messages in our e-mail.  There’s no better way to ruin a good day than to realize you must suddenly drastically reduce the size of your e-mail (or worse yet, your boss’s).  You really only have two choices: delete or archive.

Deleting E-mail

This is not your preferred option.  Why?  Because more and more, courts are treating electronic documents the same as paper ones for legal purposes.  You’re probably thinking that you wouldn’t delete anything important.  But unfortunately, we often don’t know what is important until after the fact.  I keep all e-mail, including those annoying “me too” responses.   That “me too” could prove that someone had read the e-mail.  Your best bet is to just keep everything.  That means you really only have one alternative.

Archiving E-mail

When we talk about archiving e-mail in Microsoft Outlook, what we mean is moving the e-mail to a Personal File Folder, also referred to as a .pst file, because pst is the extension on the computer file.

There’s a few things you need to remember when working with .pst files.

1. When you create a Personal File Folder, Windows will create it on your hard drive by default.  Most IT departments don’t run backups on individual computer hard drives, so if you have access to a private network drive that is regularly backed up, create your Personal File Folder there.  If your folder is already created, you can change it’s location by clicking “File” and then “Data File Management”.
2. Personal File Folders do have size limits.  Folders created in Outlook 2002 and earlier have a size limit of only 2 gigabytes.  That may seem large at first glance, but if you frequently e-mail large files, you can fill that up in no time.  In Outlook 2003 and later, the file size limit was raised to 20 gigs.  So if you have some of these earlier file folders, export them to the newer file type to get more storage capacity.
3. By default, Windows gives Personal File Folders the terribly descriptive name of “Personal File Folder”.  I recommend giving a name with a bit more meaning, especially since over time you are likely to have multiple folders in your archive.

Getting Your Inbox Size Down Fast

To get your Inbox size under control quickly, try these tips:

• Sort your e-mail by size.  Move the largest e-mails to archive immediately.
• Archive your “Sent Items” folder especially if you often send out large attachments.  These count against your mail account limits, and people often forget to check this folder.
• Check for Sync Errors.  If your e-mail administrator has you on cached mode, you will likely have a folder for Sync Errors, which will contain a copy of every e-mail that was duplicated by a Sync error.  These files can be quite large.  However, you can’t find it in Mail mode.  Go to your Folder view in order to see the Sync folders and clear them out.
• Don’t forget your Calendar items, Tasks, and Notes.  These also apply to your limit, so archiving old items can bring down your total size.

Manage Your Inbox Size with AutoArchive

Once you get your account (or more likely, your boss’s) out of the red zone, keep it down by using the AutoArchive function in Outlook.  When you set-up your AutoArchive functions, remember to click the button to “Apply these settings to all folders now”.  Folders are generally set to “D0 Not AutoArchive” by default, so you want to be sure to apply the AutoArchive to all folders.

How Do You Manage?

How do you manage the size of your e-mail account?  Share your tips with all of us here!  Just leave a comment.  If you receive this by e-mail or RSS feed, you’ll need to click on the title to go to the web page to make and read comments.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

“You’re over your limit”

Hi I read your article about setting up recurring tasks and wonder if there is any way to do automatic email reminders to my staff. My staff members have tasks with different due dates. For example, staff A has a yearly recurring task with due date on July 1, staff B has a yearly recurring task with due date on March 1…. Is there anyway I can set up auto email reminders to them respectively 5 days, 1 day prior to due date? Or do I have to buy a third party application for that?

My reply to Json:

You have two options here.  You can schedule an e-mail to each team (I have directions here in my post about scheduling e-mails in MS Outlook), or you can create a task and assign it to the team, which will put the task on the task list of the person or persons assigned to the task.  Just create a task and set the recurrence for yearly, and set the due date and start date for the task.  Then click the Assign button and assign it to the person or persons who will be working on that task.  Don’t forget to set the reminder before sending the task.

I prefer the second option.  Microsoft Outlook has a nice setup for working on tasks as a team.  You can put notes in the task to note the progress.  Set up regular reminders of the task, and even attach documents the team needs to do the work.  And it allows the boss to monitor the progress of the task and keep track of it.  I think, probably, that most people don’t use even half of the powerful capabilities of Microsoft Outlook.

Thanks for your question, Json.

What’s Your Opinion?

Anyone have any alternate ways to solve Json’s issue?

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Ask the Admin: Scheduling Tasks for Others

This is actually quite easy.  If you look at the Task Recurrence Window:

If you choose Monthly as the recurrence period, you’ll see that you can insert not only the day of the month on which the task occurs, but also how many months between occurrences.  If you want it every 2 months, enter 2 in that box.  If you want it every 8 months, enter 8 in that box.  Very simple, very easy.

Hope this helps you, Pierre!  Thanks for the question.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Ask the Admin: Set up Recurring Tasks at 8 Month Intervals

The Problem with Delegates

It turns out that the problem is caused by delegates.  If more than one person receives calendar invites for a particular person, everyone must mark them approved.  If you delete a meeting request from your e-mail without approving it, even if someone else already has, then it will delete the meeting from the calendar.  This can also happen if you access Outlook from more than one computer.  If the meeting request comes up in e-mail on both computers, you’ll need to approve it in both places.

Limit Delegates on Your Calendar

This is a good reason to limit delegates on your calendar.  It’s great to have a back-up for your boss’s calendar, but you need to work out an agreement with how to handle meeting requests.  I recommend that one of you be the primary approver, and the other approve only after the primary has already approved.  Then the primary will let the secondary approver know when she (the primary approver) will be away from the office so the secondary knows the duty of approving appointments falls to her.  Wow…what a complicated couple of sentences!  But the concept is actually pretty simple.

More Outlook Tips

Microsoft has a number of great tips for managing calendars in Outlook at this link.  I highly recommend it for anyone who handles calendars in Outlook, but especially for administrative and executive assistants managing calendars for others.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Where Are My Outlook Calendar Items?

1. Don’t make the message too short.  Be sure to include all pertinent data about when you will be out and when you will return.
2. Use actual dates in your message.  Statements like “I’ll be out next week” can be confusing.  Is this last week’s message or this week’s?  Use actual dates so even if you forget to turn the assistant off, people will know when exactly you are out and when you’ll return.
3. Spell out the months in your dates.  This is especially important if you have international clients or colleagues.  1/2/2009 could be January 2 or February 1, depending on where you live.  Go ahead and use the long dates, January 2, 2009.
4. Always give alternate contact data.  Tell people who to contact if they need an answer before you return.
5. Keep things clear and concise.  Don’t let things get confusing.  If there are multiple people to contact depending on the client’s need, put them in a bulletted list so folks don’t get confused.

6. Leave off personal details.  People don’t need to know that you’re going to be away from home for a month to attend the birth of your grandchild.  You don’t need to let people know your home as well as your office is empty.  Remember, whatever you put in your Out of Office message could be going to strangers.  Don’t include anything you wouldn’t be comfortable with strangers knowing.
7. Don’t give your cell phone number.  Unless you really want to be fielding calls, don’t give your cell phone number.  Give them an office contact who can call your cell phone if it is really is important.  Let someone triage the calls before they come to you while you’re out.  If people can contact you directly, believe me. they will.
8. Include your return date.  These days, not everyone is a M-F worker.  So just saying that you are out one week doesn’t tell people when you’ll be back.  In addition to the dates you’ll be out, include the date and time of your return to the office if it is known.

The Outlook Out of Office Assistant is a great tool.  Just remember to use it wisely to give clients enough information, but not too much.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

8 Tips for using Outlook’s Out of Office Assistant

Check out OfficeArrow’s article on to do lists.  Be sure to read the comments as well, since they have great information there as well.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Using To Do Lists

1. Open a new e-mail.
2. Then switch to your Contacts in Outlook.
3. Find your distribution list in your Contacts.  Click on the distribution list to highlight it and then type CTRL-C to copy it.
4. Go to your new e-mail, and with your cursor in the body of the e-mail, type CTRL-V to paste it.  This will paste the distribution list as an attachment in the e-mail.
5. Send the e-mail as normal.
6. When the person receives the e-mail, they can copy and paste it from the e-mail to their contacts list.

Voila!  Distribution list shared.Similar Posts:

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Sharing Your Distribution Lists

In your appointment or task dialog box, in the bottom right hand corner, is a check box marked private. If you click this check box, your appointment or task will be viewable only by you. Anyone else, even delegates with Editor status will only see it as PRIVATE.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

For the Boss: Keeping Your Personal Life Private

We all have those tasks that we do on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. However, if you have a short attention span like me, you’ll think about doing it, but as soon as the phone rings, it completely slips your mind, and you don’t think about it again until the next day. For folks like me with a short attention span, not to mention the short term memory loss that comes as we get older, the recurring task function in Outlook is a big help.

You begin to create your task as you would any other by opening a new task window. In that window, click on the recurrence button.

This will bring up the Task Recurrence window. You have 4 choices for the type of recurrence you want.

1. Daily Recurrence
   

   You have several choices for how you want the daily recurrence to happen:

   • Every day
   • Every weekday
   • Regenerate each task however many days after the first one is completed

   Most of the time, I use the Every weekday option, since I use this mostly at work. It will generate a task for every weekday. Every day works the same way. The 3rd option, though, will only generate one task, and won’t generate the next until you mark the first one complete. Essentially, you can snooze the task for a week, and won’t get another one until you mark it complete. With the first two options, if you snooze the task for more than 24 hours, when you mark it complete, it will generate the next task for the day after the creation of the first one. If you choose the third option, it will generate the next task 1 day after the completion of the first one. If you will be snoozing these tasks for more than 24 hours, it is best to use the 3rd option. Otherwise the first two work.

   Remember, though, if you use the first two options, and you let it get more than 24 hours behind, once you mark it complete, you will stop getting reminders, since the reminder date/time of the newly originated task will already be past. You’ll need to go to your task list and either mark the new one complete or open it and reset the reminder time. If you miss several days, you’ll need to keep marking the new ones complete until you get it current. This applies to Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly options as well.

2. Weekly Tasks
   

   Weekly tasks can be set to recur every week on the same day of the week or to regenerate every a number of weeks after the first is marked complete.

3. Monthly Tasks
   

   Monthly tasks can be set to recur on a specific day of the month, or on a specific weekday of the month. For instance, if you send out the agenda for a meeting on the 3rd Wednesday of each month, you would want to use this option to generate the task. As usual, you can also set it to recur one month after the completion of the first.

4. Yearly Tasks
   

   Yearly tasks can also be set for a specific date (a reminder of the boss’s birthday, for instance), or for a specific weekday each year. And, of course, set for one year after the completion of the first date.

Once you have your recurrence options set, you need to set how many times you want the task to recur.

Set the date you want the first task to begin, and then set how long you want it to recur:

• No end date
• End after a specific number of occurences
• End on a specific date

I usually use no end date, since most of my tasks are things I do as part of my job duties. However, if you are taking on a task for a limited amount of time such as when someone is on vacation, you can use one of the other two options to limit how long the tasks recur.

You may also want to note that this is the same window that is used when you create a recurrent meeting on your calendar.

Once you have all of your recurring task options set, click OK. This sends you back to your Task window to finish putting in the rest of the data for your task. Don’t forget to set the reminder time or you won’t get reminders!

If you have any questions about any of this, just ask. My e-mail address is linked in the right sidebar or you can just use the handy comment function.

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Copyright: Administrative Arts

Creating Recurring Tasks in Microsoft Outlook