This is the second article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Today I am going to write more about Outlook calendar. If you recall, last time I discussed how to check availability of your co-workers and how to use the Label function for you appointments. Today we are going to learn three more tips, and I promise you, it is just as exciting (seriously, you’ve got to knock it off with the eye-rolling):

• How to change colors in the calendar (this is different than the Labeling)
• How to add holidays to the calendar
• How to add multiple time zones to the calendar

This is Part II (of how many, I still don’t know) in a series of articles about using some of the features in Outlook.

Coloring Your Calendar

If you read Part I then you know that I am a color freak. I’ll repeat that I like color EVERY WHERE (maybe if you’re good, I’ll post some picture of my house – bring your sunglasses). So, you might already have guessed that when I first discovered you could color your calendar, I about flipped!

This is how you do it:

1. Open Tools>Options
2. From the Preferences tab, click Calendar Options.

(I got a little over-zealous with the arrows.)

And guess what happens next? Are you sitting down? The Calendar Options window opens! (Look, mister, if you don’t get excited about the small stuff, what’s the point of living?.) From the Calendar Options window, select a color from the Background Color drop down menu.

And finally, click OK. Now look at your calendar. Isn’t it be-a-u-tiful? (I tell ya, I’m jumping up and down for you even if you are not.) Here are some examples of colors to choose from:

Adding Holidays

Are you the kind of person who is constantly forgetting Columbus Day? Or, [insert higher power here] forbid, Valentines Day (now, that’s bad, isn’t)? Well, if you are, Outlook Calendar can save you.

(Ok. Wait. Hold on - this is an aside. In trying to write this, I added holidays for Turkey to my calendar. And then I tried to get them out. And NOW, I’m stuck with Turkish holidays, in a screen I can’t get out of and I, I, I HATE MICROSOFT!!!!!!!)

(Five minutes later: I figured it out. I’m ok. I think. I’m recomposing my “I love Microsoft” face. Ready?)

From the Calendar Option screen, click Add Holidays.

(I tried turquoise-patterned arrows this time.)

From the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog, you can add holidays from countries ranging from Algeria to Yemen. You can see that I have United States holidays added. To add holidays, select the country (or countries) of which holidays you want on your calendar, and click OK. They are added to your calendar.

Now for the sad part – removing holidays you don’t want. It’s not just sad for us; it’s sad that Microsoft is so stupid they make you remove holidays in a painful way. (Did I just type that?? I’m supposed to have my happy face on.)

Let’s say you wanted to add the holidays from Turkey (what did I say about eye-rolling? GEEZ!!). And then, three seconds later you decide you don’t want holidays from Turkey. You’d think you could go back the Add Holiday to Calendar dialog and uncheck Turkey and click OK, right? Nope. Wrong.

To remove holidays, open View>Arrange By>Events.

Then, using the CTRL button, select all the Turkish holidays. Click Delete when done. And oh, by the way, you don’t just remove a holiday once; you have to remove multiple years. (Yeah. I know. Even *I’m* rolling my eyes now.)

(It doesn’t make as good of a story, but it is possible to click the Location column and then use SHIFT button to delete all the Turkey holidays in one fell swoop. Actually, fooling around with sorting your events/holidays in various configurations is sort of fun if you had nothing to do.)

One good thing about this feature is that if you do want to remove one or two specific holidays, like Flag Day, you can go in and edit your holidays.

Using Multiple Time Zones

Do you ever have meetings with anyone that lives in another time zone? Do you sometimes forget the time difference and schedule a meeting that for you is at 9am, but for your friend is 6am? Do they every call you and say “What the #$%@ are you thinking?!” Once again, Outlook calendar comes to the rescue. You can add time zones to your calendar and see your friend’s time zone before you send an invite.

I live in California, but I have regular meeting with a co-worker in New York. In order to make sure I don’t schedule something for her after 5:00pm, I want to add the time zone on the east coast. From the Calendar Option screen, click Time Zone.

From the Time Zone dialog, you see that my current time zone is already entered, but in order to add a time zone I checked the Show an additional time zone box and filled out the information. Then I clicked OK.

And then my calendar looked like this:

I can see that if I want to schedule a meeting with my east coat friend before 5:00pm, I’d better schedule it before 2:00pm my time. Ok, that is a little exciting, right? I’m sort of jumping up and down again – still not quite recovered from the Turkish Holiday thing. Next time: I’ll write about something in Outlook other than the calendar (aren’t you ready?).
This is the second article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Karyn Goldstein was given the nickname Ryn when she was 16-years old. (We won’t say how old she is now.) She is the lone technical writer at Network Physics. She likes dogs, a lot. More than most. She’s been in the technical writing industry as either a writer or manager for 10 years. She’s trying to write a novel. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.

This is the first article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Outlook. I know all you techie types hate Microsoft. But I’m going to share some tips that you may or may not know about using your Outlook calendar. Not only does using your Outlook calendar help you communicate company-wide, it can be fun! (Yeah, yeah. Quit rolling your eyes.) This is Part I (of how many, I don’t know) in a series of articles about using some of the features in Outlook (not just the calendar). Today I’m going to write about checking availability of your co-workers and using the Label function to color your appointments.

Check Availability

Did you know you can check the schedule of all your co-workers? Now, don’t get excited; you can’t actually see what they are doing, but you can see when their time is available so that you don’t double-book them (which, in all honesty, is just plain polite). When you schedule a meeting with someone who is not busy, it is much harder for them to make excuses that they are busy – because you can see, plain as day, that they are not.

Note: I sure hope you know this, but this feature does not work for people not on your network.

Let’s see if Scott is busy since I need to speak with him about Insights. I schedule a calendar invite as usual, but before sending it, I click the Scheduling tab. In the example below I am trying to schedule a meeting with Scott to meet 11-11:30am.

The schedule shows me that we are both free. Scott’s is booked from 8-10:30am and then again from 12-2pm. I’m booked from 8-8:30am.

Let’s say I had originally picked 9-9:30am. The schedule would have looked like this, and I would have known Scott is busy:

I could change the meeting time by either typing in a new Meeting start time and Meeting end time at the bottom of the screen, or by dragging the green and red bars to appropriate times.Either way, once you have a time where both parties are free (or more, if you want the meeting to have multiple people), click Send.

That’s it.

Using the Label function

I’m a color freak. I like color EVERY WHERE. So, I like to color my calendar using the Label feature. Below is a picture of my calendar on a very busy week.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Ok, well let’s color the appointment we just made with Scott. How about orange? Prior to sending (or after you’ve sent; it doesn’t matter), open the Appointment tab and choose a color from the Label drop-down menu (you can see I have an extensive label coloring system).

By the way, you can use the Labeling with all appointments; they don’t have to be invites. For instance, on July 20^th I am going out to dinner. I have already the scheduled the appointment in my calendar but now I want to color it green. I right-click the appointment and the following menu appears. I pick green.

You can customize your labels by choosing Edit Labels.

You are now on your way to having your very own colorful calendar.

Next time: More Outlook calendar tips.

This is the first article in the Simply Put, by Ryn: Microsoft Outlook Tips series. Previous entries:

• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Karyn Goldstein was given the nickname Ryn when she was 16-years old. (We won’t say how old she is now.) She is the lone technical writer at Network Physics, dabbling in fiction on the side. But mostly, she runs around and drives the engineers crazy. We think they are happy she’s mostly remote. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.

These site is pretty new, but I hope it sticks around for a while, cause they’ve already got at least one great entry: 10 Linux Shell Tricks You Don’t Already Know. Really, we swear. And for the most part, they were right (I knew about backgrounding commands in a loop, using tar with -x, and the handy sed one-liners site). But this is an excellent resource and certainly has some useful tips. Technically these should probably be called “shell commands you don’t already know”, but I guess they seem like tricks until you learn the commands behind them. Great stuff, I look forward to more from VentureCake.

10 Linux Shell Tricks You Don’t Already Know. Really, we swear. [VentureCake]

Do you want to brush up your shell scripting skills, but can never really find a decent resource that gives you good examples? Or maybe you’ve just never had the opportunity to learn any scripting at all. Well, I just found a fantastic site that so far seems to be a really awesome review/intro/guide to Bash Shell scripting (warning: I’ve only perused the first couple of sections so far–there is a ton of information here). I don’t know how I haven’t run across this page before, because it appears to have been around for a while. The Bash shell is a standard component of just about all Linux and UNIX systems these days, and Windows users can get it with a tool such as Cygwin to get the functionality available too (I’ll be writing a guide to using Cygwin on Windows soon, but until I do, take a look at Lifehacker’s excellent Introduction To Cygwin series).

Here is a snippet from the Intro of the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide:

This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction . . . all the while sneaking in little snippets of UNIX® wisdom and lore. It serves as a textbook, a manual for self-study, and a reference and source of knowledge on shell scripting techniques. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation, under the premise that the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts.

The doc reads easily, and progresses fast, but doesn’t assume you are already an expert (something many books and tutorials are guilty of). It covers many topics in detail that most other documents simply gloss over. This is a good one folks, I highly recommend it.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide [The Linux Documentation Project]

The other day I was trying to help troubleshoot a networking problem with our Virtual Appliance on a VMware Linux Host. I could pretty easily surmise that the problem was somewhere in the configuration, but I was unable to tell what exactly the host’s networking configuration was because you must run vmware-config.pl to configure the network on a Linux VMware host (Windows has the very handy “Manage Virtual Networks” tool that you can use, but alas, no such analog exists on a Linux host, to the best of my knowledge). The problem with running vmware-config.pl is that it requires all virtual machines to be turned off before it will even show you any information, which is a total pain when I just want to see what is bridged to what. So I went searching for a way to extract the information I wanted form the system, and eventually I found it (I was unable to find it on a google search or by searching the VMTN Forums or VMware Knowledge Base, which is pretty rare, so I ended up digging through my own files to find it). Eventually I discovered that the information I was after was stored in /proc/vmnet, which has an entry for each vmnet that is configured on the system. By simply looking in the files, I was able to tell what was going on, hooray!

On my system, I only had a few bridged interfaces, but there were still a lot of files there:

root@my-server:/proc/vmnet# ls
bridge0 hub0.1 hub0.5 hub1.1 hub1.5 userif22 userif50 userif66
bridge1 hub0.2 hub0.6 hub1.2 hub2.0 userif23 userif51 userif73
bridge2 hub0.3 hub0.7 hub1.3 hub3.0 userif24 userif64 userif74
hub0.0 hub0.4 hub1.0 hub1.4 netif0 userif4 userif65 userif75


A little exploring and I was able to surmise that hubX mapped to what we commonly know as vmnetX, with X usually being 0,1, or 8 for a default VMware configuration (in Windows land these are usually called “VMware Network Adapter VMnetX”). I think the hubX.Y files actually show which interfaces of which running machines are connected to that hub, kind of like link lights on a real hub, but I didn’t spend enough time to really be sure. In any case, I was able to determine that since I only have bridges configured on this system, the files bridge0, bridge1, and bridge2 were the ones I was after:


root@my-server:/proc/vmnet# cat bridge0
connected hub0.0 mac 00:50:56:00:00:00 ladrf 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 flags IFF_RUNNING,IFF_UP,IFF_PROMISC dev eth0
root@my-server:/proc/vmnet# cat bridge1
connected hub2.0 mac 00:50:56:00:00:00 ladrf 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 flags IFF_RUNNING,IFF_UP,IFF_PROMISC dev eth1
root@my-server:/proc/vmnet# cat bridge2
connected hub3.0 mac 00:50:56:00:00:00 ladrf 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 flags IFF_RUNNING,IFF_UP,IFF_PROMISC dev vmnet1


It is pretty plain to see that bridge0 connects hub0 (aka vmnet0) to eth0, bridge1 connects hub2 (aka vmnet2) to eth1, and bridge2 connects hub3 (aka vmnet3) to vmnet1 (I’ll explain this funky mapping another time).

Hopefully someday VMware will implement a handy tool like the Windows “Manage Virtual Networks” tool on Linux hosts, but until then, this will be good enough for me to at least tell what is going on on an unknown system. If you’ve got any better ways to get this information, please post them in the comments or email tips@itsnotthenetwork.com.