Migrated Outlook, blocked senders list gone

I just upgraded machines, and from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2013. One quick tip for anyone else doing this - don't forget to export your blocked senders list BEFORE you move your .pst file from the old pc to new. It turns out, as best I can tell, that the lists are email account name specific. This means unless you name your new account the same (which I am guessing I did not), that the old list will be stranded and Outlook will start a new blank one (argh).

Microsoft Office 2012 Preview

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/en

You can preview the next version of Microsoft office today! Note that the preview version is “the service”, rather than the product. Something you’ll want to understand better when the full version comes out.

iPhone/iPad database and spreadsheet apps

Well I have been investigating the current state of database and spreadsheet solutions for the iPhone/iPad, for something I have been working on. It's certainly not as dismal as it used to be, but there's still lots of room for improvement.

I'm not going to list all the apps I've taken a look at or considered or not considered because of some missing feature. I just have some general comments to make about the subject.

One thing you see in Apple's apps, that you don't see in everybody else's, is the understanding that usually you are not standing still while looking at the screen. In fact this was one of the big aha moments for me moving from Windows Mobile to the iPhone.

The classic analogy is the yardsale sign, with 30-100 words in magic marker on a piece of cardboard less than two feet square, tacked so it can be seen from the 55 mph highway. It looks great in your house when you draw it up, with the date and times, a phone number, some key items, and the word YARDSALE nice and large. But what you realize when you get in your car and drive by it at 55 mph, is that the sign is much much too small to read even the word YARDSALE. In fact it probably should be twice as large just for those two words on different lines.

This creates a big challenge for doing real data-crunching on a two-three inch screen. Your font is going to be 4 or 5 or 6 in order to get 2 or 3 pieces of data on the screen. Try to read that while walking. Impossible. Apple, idealistic to the end, thus only puts a tiny bit of data in front of you, which works really well. The challenge is to adapt workflow such that you can work efficiently that way. Thus all the database solutions on the iPhone completely eschew tables. Their only interface is the form, where you can look at the fields from one row at a time. The spreadsheet solution give you the tables. But it's like Windows Mobile all over again. You can zoom in and see one cell, or you can zoom out to see the table but the font is illegible.

That being said I will mention a couple of my favorite spreadsheet solutions (as I need table-view). Google docs works just fine on the iPhone, and even offers editing, though the editing interface is a little clunky. But still this is an amazing and free web solution. Documents to Go is not free, and costs quite a bit for the premium version, but if you get that version you can edit Word, Excel, and Powerpoint directly from DropBox. That means you can swap documents back and forth between people and computers and phones. That's pretty sweet.

Office 2007 - Service Pack 2 released

Office 2007 - Service Pack 2 released

Here's all the info:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

Along with a couple of my less-favorite features:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968773/

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968918/

Update: ack forgot to credit Paul Thurrott!

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/28/now-available-microsoft-office-2007-service-pack-2.aspx

Google calendar synching roundup

http://www.goosync.com/

http://rareedge.com/gmobilesync/

https://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=697660

http://www.scheduleworld.com/tg/cal/day.jsp

http://www.snoopsoft.com/webcal/default.asp

http://www.calgoo.com/

http://syncmycal.blogspot.com/
http://www.syncmycal.com/

http://www.companionlink.com/products/companionlinkforgoogle.html

http://code.google.com/p/pocketgcal/?

http://oggsync.com/

http://www.daveswebsite.com/software/gsync/

http://www.plaxo.com/info

Ugh, this is some list! As best as I can tell none of them is perfect at this point..

Threaded email in Outlook

http://lifehacker.com/software/email-apps/make-outlook-thread-conversations-like-gmail-157042.php

This seems like a revolutionary idea to me, especially given how important Outlook and email is to my day-to-day routine (work and non).

I have changed my view to include the conversation header, and enabled grouping. I have set up the rule to copy sent items to the inbox. It's not clear here, but new mail does end up at the top with sorting by conversation, even though the threading is "kinda" by subject.

This is a huge change but I am going to give it a serious trial, as it makes so much sense. Further I plan to leave the sent items unread until I get a reply - that gives me the ability to track emails I am waiting for a response to, something I have always wanted.