Use color to identify messages from specific senders

Expecting important mail? Identify it as soon as it comes in by displaying it in a distinctive color. Start by select an existing message from the sender in question, if you have one. If you don’t, that’s okay; you can enter the sender’s name manually. Now follow these steps:

1. Go to the Tools menu up on top and click Organize
2. In the Ways To Organize Mail pane, click the Colors link on the left side.
3. In the first condition statement (we won’t use the second), choose From in the first drop-down list.
4. If you chose a message before starting, the sender’s name will appear in the text box to the right. If it’s the wrong name, enter the right name or the person’s e-mail address.
5. Choose a color from the second drop-down list.
6. Click Apply Color and close the pane.

Afterward, Outlook will display all messages, existing and new, from the person you specified in step 4 in the color you selected in step 5.

Force “Reply to All”

Sometimes you need to talk to your entire team at once and have everybody be in the loop on the conversation. You may be working on a common project or trying to organize an office function of some sort – so you need people to “reply to all”  to make it easy. Then some knucklehead doesn’t follow protocol. Well, good news! You can configure your message to automatically “Reply to all” before you send it. Here’s what you do: Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so your printer has a mind of its own. Sometimes it prints with no problem, other times it throws error messages at you… or even worse, it says nothing and does nothing. Here are 10 common things it could be. I bet if you walk through them in this order, you’ll fix 95% of printer problems right there on the spot. Or, of course, you could submit an IT support ticket for help.

1. Make sure the printer is plugged in. It sounds silly (and “of course it’s plugged in — I plugged it in myself”), but check anyway. You may just be surprised.

• Plug the printer in and try printing again

2. Make sure the printer is turned on and that all status lights are green. A red or yellow light may indicate a problem like a paper jam, low toner, no paper, etc..

• Some problems will be pretty obvious. For example, you will easily spot a paper jam by sliding out the paper tray or opening the top cover. Some printers will even show you where the problem is by flashing designated lights or displaying messages on the LCD screen. Other problems will be more difficult to understand. Some older Brother printers, fox example, showed a different combination of error lights and blinking sequences to alert users to common problems. You will obviously need the printer’s manual to decipher those.

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Got a ‘berry? Here are some cool shortcuts to help you talk to it:

• When typing an email or a text, simply push the Space Bar twice to create a period at the end of your sentence and automatically capitalize the first letter of the next sentence.

• When typing an email or a text, hold down a letter for one extra second to capitalize it.

• When in your messages inbox (text or email), use B to get to the bottom of the list, and T to get to the top.

• In the phone application, you can dial 1-888-FLOWERS (or any number that contains letters) by simply dialing 1-888 then press the ALT key to spell out the desired letters. The device changes the letters into a format that the phone system recognizes, therefore dials the appropriate number tones. This also works for spelling last names in a company directory! So, using this method to dial 1-866-ATT-SMBZ would automatically dial 1-866-288-7629.

• To type an accented or special character, hold letter key and roll trackball to the left or right, then release letter key when accented or special character appears.

• When viewing pictures, zoom in by pressing 3; zoom out by pressing 9; to return to center of a picture press 5 and to rotate a picture press L

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