Category: Managing your Team

For those of us who use calendar appointments and tasks everyday, using natural language, such as next Friday or 30 days from today, may be a quicker way to both set schedules or remind ourselves of deadlines.

For this post, I’ll focus on using Outlook calendar, but the same should apply for Outlook Tasks. Please note, if you’re using the Outlook online version this may not work.

When creating a new invite, to skip scrolling through the calendar use the natural language in the start date to quickly move to that date on the calendar. For example, if you need to meet with Sally next Friday, then create a new calendar invite and in the start date type next Friday. The invite will automatically update to next Friday, then click scheduler from there to pick the time you both have open.

This handy trick also works for setting up meetings or reminders X days from today’s date. For example, if you’re project, compliance, or any type of deadline oriented, you could type in today + 29 days to get you to a 30 day mark, without having to type it all.

Using natural language can work in a variety of different ways. For example, if you have to be reminded to create, set or upload a fiscal calendar for the following year and you want to ensure you do it the last Monday of this year, then you could input something like the below.

You can also use it to set days before a specific date as well. For example, if you want to remind yourself to find buy a card and gift for your mom 30 days before Mother’s day, you could set it to look something like the below.

There are lots of different mixes and matches to use, but to get you started Outlook accepts the following statements: day(s), week(s), month(s), year(s), day of the week (next Tuesday, last Friday of month), tomorrow, yesterday, after, now, before, and last, to name a few.

It wasn’t until I was well into my career that I noticed something very curious about documentation I worked on with others. Some people I worked with on projects, added an extra space after the period of a sentence. I saw this in Word documents, emails, and PowerPoints.

So I would write this something like this

“This policy is applicable to everyone. Any exceptions to this must be notated.”

But I found some people would send documents to me and it would look like this

“This policy is applicable to everyone. Any exceptions to this must be notated.”

I was confused. Why would we eat up so much more space on a page when one space would do? And why was it just some people and not all people who typed like this.

After some research I learned that many people who learned to type on a conventional typewriter were taught to add double spacing. But this was as a result of the inability for the mechanical typewriter to create proportional spacing. With the advent of the computer though, documents could now include the appropriate spacing without requiring a double space. So which is correct? According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the one space is correct. Learn more about the history of this fascinating topic on this Wikipedia page.

But, don’t despair if you’re a two-spacer OR if you continue to receive documents from a two-spacers, below are tips on handling both.

Two-spacers, even if Microsoft Word doesn’t agree with you, there is a way to update your setting to accept your double space, so you aren’t called out with the annoying red squiggles. Open Word, click on File, Options, Proofing, then scroll down until you see Grammar& Refinements, then scroll down to the Punctuation Conventions. From there you can select your preference to two spaces.

And if you’re one of those people who continues to get the double spaced documents and you want to avoid an awkward grammar interaction, then use this handy trick to remove all the double spaces before you submit that document. Go to Replace and Find “. “, replace with one space.

Nothing is more painful then searching for a folder over and over and over. Whether daily, weekly, or ad hoc, this quick tip is a huge time saver for those of us who may not be as, er… organized, with our electronic filing system.

I use this for anything I need to have handy (ie. Expenses) and I don’t want to have to dig multiple folder levels for it.

Like your “Favorites” in Outlook, this will pin your “Favorite” folders to your Quick Access menu in File Explorer. From there its easy access to find or add documents to it. I use it when I download files and I want to quickly save them or move them to one of the Quick Access folders. Its also really handy if you need to begin uploading a lot of files.

You can pin the folder in a few ways.

In file explorer, search for the folder you want to pin and then go to the Home tab at the top and click on the far-left icon “Pin to Quick Access”. You should see it populate under the starred Quick Access menu.

You can right click on the folder and then select “Pin to Quick Access” at the top of the action.

You can drag and drop the folder to “Quick Access” and it will add to the bar.

To remove the folder, just right click on the path under Quick Access and click “Unpin from Quick Access.”