Outlook 2016 search workflows for Alfred

  I love the app launcher Alfred. I use it all the time to launch app, but it’s also a very powerful productivity tool that supports workflows to extend it capabilities for searching, offer new actions on the results, etc. I’ll strongly encourage you to at least take a look. A while ago, I created a custom workflow to search in your Outlook 2011 identity directly from Alfred. The workflow was posted in the Alfred forums: www.alfredforum.com/… Since then, Outlook 2016 was released, then updated,…

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Reset the preferences in Outlook 2016 for Mac

Sometimes the Preferences in Outlook get corrupted, leading to all sorts of troubles (user interface, messages not sending, app freezing, etc). The Preferences file hosts a number of settings, but nothing critical per se as the accounts and other related important parameters of the app are saved int he Identity itself instead of the Preference file. The best way to delete the preferences in Outlook is to quit Outlook, launch the Terminal and use the command: defaults delete com.microsoft.Outlook; killall csprefsd   The first half…

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Generate Tagged PDFs (with active links) in Word for Mac 2016 15.23.1+

Starting with Word 15.23, Word can now generate tagged PDFs with properly active links (all sorts of links, including the TOC links and internal links like the ones generated through EndNote). You need: Word 15.23.1 or more recent with an Office 365 subscription Make sure that you do NOT have any input method for Right-to-Left languages in the System Keyboard Preferences or a corresponding language in Languages & Region Use the Save As command and select PDF and you should see an option for “Best for…

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Spotlight issues in Outlook 2011 (searches and smart folders)

This is basically a repost from my other post about troubleshooting Spotlight issues in Outlook 2016 edited specifically for Outlook 2011. Outlook 2011 is only 32 bit and you can therefore only use mdworker32. It also stores its files in a different location than Outlook 2016. Most of the time, you can correct the indexing issue by simply adding the ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities folder to the Spotlight Exclude list in the Spotlight System Preferences, then a few minutes later, remove it from the…

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Outlook for Mac 2016 database basic sqlite3 commands

Outlook 2011 had a proprietary database format and we (as users) had very few options to work with it. Outlook 2016 now uses a sqlite3 databases for its identity (just like Mail). While there is very little we can run from the app itself in terms of maintenance or troubleshooting, in theory we should be able to tap straight into the database through sqlite3 itself. ********* NONE OF THIS IS PUBLISHED/APPROVED/SUPPORTED BY MICROSOFT FOR OUTLOOK FOR MAC ********* As none of this is officially supported, I would…

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Deleting the Cities for the weather in Outlook 365 (v15)

Outlook 15 allows you to display the weather in the calendar for various locations. Unfortunately, even though adding cities to the list there is trivial, deleting the locations is not. The question was raised in the Answers forums. I asked around and here’s the information I collected: The list of locations shows the last 5 used locations and cannot be removed manually. The Outlook preferences file has these locations, and removing the preferences would therefore clear the locations. However removing the preferences file would also…

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Doing your dissertation with Microsoft Word: A comprehensive guide to using Microsoft Word for academic writing (by Jacques Raubenheimer)

Introduction Throughout my academic training, I’ve had to write a number of reports and memos of all sorts. As an undergrad during my PhD training, I wrote scientific articles of various complexity, but it’s only really when I had to put together my Thesis defense that I realized that I wouldn’t make it unless I took a serious look at how my workflow could be improved. A thesis defense in my field is a long and complex manuscript with a detailed introduction section providing a…

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Outlook SP2 fails to upgrade the Outlook Identity

There are a number of posts in the MS forums from users who had significant issues upgrading their Outlook identity for Office 2011. The upgrade process begins, then you get a message telling you that it failed and you need to repair the identity with a previous version of the Database Utility. My take on the warning is that the identity had some sort of corruption that the new Database Utility doesn’t know how to fix. MS posted a Knowledge Base note about the issue…

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Before installing the SP2 update for Office 2011…

…I would suggest rebuilding your Outlook identity. Launch Outlook pressing the option key down to get to the database utility. Rebuilding the identity will: Ensure you are upgrading a somewhat clean identity Automatically create a backup of your current identity in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities in case something goes bad during the upgrade (there has been numerous reports of corrupted identities that failed to upgrade). In case you didn’t use these steps and your identity failed to upgrade, MS now has a Knowledge Base…

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Office for Mac 14.2 changes the location of Support folders

Office for Mac SP2 just came out. The new update brings a horde of corrections and improvements. As always, I’m sure people will notice a few new problems here and there, and I just found one such change that prove problematic for some. In the process of updating your installation of Office to the latest and greatest, the updater moves some folder to a new location. Most files and folders previously in ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft and in the ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/ folder are now migrated to ~/Library/Application…

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New languages for spelling support in Mac OS X 10.7.3

Mac OS X 10.7.3 came out recently. Among the many little things it corrected here and there, it also brought new localizations for Catalan, Croatian, Greek, Hebrew, Romanian, Slovak, Thai, and Ukrainian. This means that the System now provides proper spelling dictionaries for these languages too! Since Outlook tape directly into the standard Mac OS X spelling API, it should provide spell checking for these languages as well automatically. (though Hebrew remains an issue since there is no proper right-to-left support in any of the…

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[Off Topic] NetNewsWire 4: Send To Papers

You can create a new “Send To Papers“ item in the Share menu in NetNewsWire Lite 4. All you need is to create a file named SendToApps.plist in ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire Lite with the following text inside: <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”> <plist version=”1.0″> <dict> <key>Papers</key> <dict> <key>URLTemplate</key> <string>; <key>BundleID</key> <string>com.mekentosj.papers</string> </dict> </dict> </plist> If you want, I create one that can be downloaded here: www.cortig.net/temp/… Corentin

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Antidote HD v5

(This article is about Antidote HD v5, a software that integrates with Office 2011 to provide significantly enhanced French spelling and grammar checking. It‘s useless unless you speak French so this post is in French only) J’ai posté différents articles ces dernières années sur Antidote de Druide. Pour résumer les faits, Antidote est un excellent correcteur orthographique et grammatical, qui propose en outre divers dictionnaires de la langue française. La dernière version (Antidote HD) vient d’être mise à jour en v5 et apporte le support…

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Office 2011

I know I haven’t been posting much on the blog lately. There are several reasons behind it and being completely unable to find any free time to do so might be the main one unfortunately. I still wanted to mention that Office 2001 for Mac had been released and is also — for the first time — available on MSDN (Premium and Ultimate accounts) and Technet. Once the dust settles, I’ll try to be more diligent at posting here :-\ Corentin

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SyncServices Disk Utility: Spanning Tools for Mac

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the product. I’m just a satisfied user. I just heard about it when it was in public beta, tried it and immediately liked it, but as with anything, your mileage may vary. Spanning Tools for Mac is a set of utilities that have been created by the authors of Spanning Sync. The tremendous potentials of Sync Services are obvious to all. Being able to share data between applications, between computers or with additional devices (iPhone anybody??) is wonderful, but for a lot…

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PCalc for iPhone

(L’application n’est pas localisée à ma connaissance, aussi je ne poste pas ce billet en français – mais je vais contacter l’auteur pour lui faire la suggestion 😉 ) Now I usually don‘t post here too often about applications that are not in direct relationship with Office, but I thought I could make an exception 😉 I spend a lot of time at work crunching numbers in Excel or other applications (Prism is my friend). Very often, I just want to run a quick calculation.…

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