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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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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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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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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