If you are like me (and thousands of other users) then I am quite certain that you do not save your documents, spreadsheets, presentation in the My Documents folder on your computer. There is nothing wrong in doing that. But we just don't do it. At homes we like to create a folder by our names and then save in our stuff in there and in office we all have been allocated a home drive and / or a shared folder on the network drive. Saving your stuff in the My Documents and it's sub folders makes sense if you are the only one who will be accessing it. Like your tax records or personal information. In a situation where you have to share it with many people, it makes sense to store it in a common location.

How many times do you have to open or save a file in that particular location and always have to navigate to that location. If that location is on the network and network is slow, then it probably takes forever to navigate to that location. Here I offer a way to reduce the amount of time it takes to navigate and save files by adding the location in the "Places" tool bar in Windows. In the open and save dialog boxes, Windows provides a "Places" bar located vertically on the left hand side of the window.

If you are using Office XP or 2003:

1. Navigate to the location (folder) that you want to add to the Places bar.
2. Click on the tools menu on the right hand side top corner, and click on Add to My Places

If you are using Office 2007 Beta2:

1. Navigate to the location (folder) that you want to add to the places bar
2. Right click on the Places toolbar itself and click on "Add folder_name".

All the context sensitive functions (by right click) like rename, remove work for these shortcuts as well so you can choose to remove it or rename it if you wish.

The folder will start appearing in the Places tool bar in all office location from the next time. Once you have done that, you can export the registry keys from the registry in case you have to reformat the computer or move to a new location. The registry key is located at:

For Office XP

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\10.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces

For Office 2003

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces

For Office 2007

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces

In addition to some great new features, Microsoft introduced XML based file formats for Word, Excel and Powerpoint 2007. However, the new formats can be the newest annoyance till the time Office 2007 is not deployed and adopted in enterprise and home users. Microsoft Office 2007 saves all the files in the XML formats by default (.docx, .xlsx, pptx extension) which are not readable by the previous versions of Office.

To ensure compatibility with older versions, you have to save the files in 97-2003 format. Trying to remember to do that everytime you create and save a document can be irritating, especially if you create a lot of documents, spreadsheets or presentations.

To avoid remembering to save the document in 97-2003 format, you can setup office so that it saves all new files in the 97-2003 format by default. However, this is not a global setting and this must be done for each of the three office applications, i.e. Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

To change the setting, click on the Office icon in the left hand top corner and click on <Application> Options (Where Application is either Word, Excel or Powerpoint). In the resulting window that is shown above, click on Save to customise the settings and in the Preserve the backup information for your documents section select Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc) from the drop down list next to Save Files in this format: option.

Once you set this option for all office applications, Office will start saving the files you create henceforth in what it calls as Compatibility Mode.

Recently one of my co-workers came to me asking me whether it was possible to send automatic response to message directly from the server. There are situations where it is necessary to send automatic response directly from the server. The preconfigured Out of Office rule is a working example of that. Only, it sends a Out of Office: preamble to every message and it sends response only to the first email received from a particular sender. It may be necessary to send response to every message and with a customised subject and message.

Step 1: In your Outlook Client click on Tools --> Rules and Alerts. If you are using Office XP or older, then you will see Rules Wizard instead of Rules and Alerts.

Step 2: In the Rules Wizard select the Start from a blank rule - Check messages when they arrive option and click Next. In Office 2003 and previous versions, the Start from a blank rule option is available at the top of the dialog window. This will apply the rule to messages as they arrive in the inbox. In the next screen don't select anything and click on Next. It will pop-up a warning that the rule will be applied to all incoming messages. Click Yes to proceed.

Step 3: In the next window, select the action have server reply using a specific message. Click on the specific message link in the lower pane and it will open up a new mail message window. Type in the subject and the message you want to send to all leaving the To: and CC: fields blank. Once you are satisfied with the message, click on Save and close at the top left of the message window.

Step 4: In the next window, select the appropriate exclusion option if any and click Next. Give the rule an intuitive name. Make sure that you don't check the check box next to Apply this rule to messages in Inbox folder. Click OK after turning on the rule.

For any message that you receive after this point, the server will send an automatic reply to sender whether or not your Outlook Client is running or not.

Thanks to reader Doug Mason who pointed out a special case in setting up an automated response to emails directly from the server. Many a times we have a generic email account that is published on the internet for customers / vendors to send emails to for making inquiries. The emails to that mailbox are generally forwarded to another mailbox of a real person who will then read and respond to the email. Depending on the volume of the incoming email and the nature of the inquiry, the response to the email may take anywhere between 1 day to 7 days. In the meantime we don't want to keep our customers in dark and with a feeling that the emails go into a black hole and want to respond with a canned message which would go out automatically only when an email is received from the generic id and none else. This would be because the person may be receiving emails from many people and it is not desirable to send out this message to them.

In such cases, the previous entry on this subject does not work as intended if you choose the first option "from people or distribution list" (circled in red) and give the generic id as the email address. No email will be sent out to either the original sender or the generic id. This is because when setting up the forward at the server level, Microsoft Exchange instructs the intermediary mailbox to act as a mailman and it does not add any headers to the email. So the final recipients still received the email from the original sender and not the generic id. But in the To: field, the recipient still remains as the generic intermediate mailbox address.

To overcome this, instead of setting the rule to trigger on receiving email FROM someone, set the rule to trigger on receiving email SENT TO someone (in this case the generic Id) by checking the box next to "sent to people or distribution list" (circled in blue).

Once this change is made, this rule will again start working.

It might so happen that you might have to access another person's email for a number of reasons, or you have a generic common mailbox (say enquiries@yourcompany.com) which you are required to monitor and respond. The easiest way is to configure that person's mailbox in another profile and open your MS Outlook client using that profile. But then that limits your ability to access your own email and it quickly becomes a pain to close and re-open Outlook in different profiles. You might also use another computer to access the other mailbox, but then that is also tedious and a less than elegant / efficient solution. What you really want to do is to open the other mailbox right from within your mailbox and keep it open. Fortunately Microsoft Exchange and Outlook provides such capability.

To add another mailbox to your profile, click on Tools --> Email Accounts (Account settings if you are using Office 2007). In the resulting window that pops up ensure that View or change existing email accounts is selected and then click Next.

In the next window where you see Microsoft Exchange Server, ensure that the Microsoft Exchange Server is selected / highlighted and click on Change. In the next window, click on More settings. In the resulting pop-up window that appears, click on Advanced tab and then click on add. In the next window, enter the user's name and then click OK. You should now see the account name in the previous window. Click OK your way out and you now should see the new mailbox below your regular mailbox.

Note: For this to work, your email administrator must have granted read access to you on the destination mailbox. If not, although you will be able to add a mailbox, you won't be able to access it and get a failure warning.