The Nerd Guru has an excellent Introduction/Refresher on Troubleshooting and it happens to be an entertaining read as well (with a site named “Nerd Guru” would you expect anything less than at least one summarization of the plot of Start Trek II to make his point?).

One of the most important things to do BEFORE you actually start any real troubleshooting is to define the problem. The most common mistake I see when people are trying to resolve some issue is that they don’t take the time to articulate exactly what the issue is in the first place. Here is an example:

User: “My computer doesn’t work.”
Admin: “What did you do to it?”
User: “Nothing.”
Admin: “Liar, you must’ve done something.”
User: “Really, I didn’t. I came in to the office, sat down, and tried to use it, and it isn’t working.”
Admin: “Ok, I’ll come to your cube and take a look.”

Notice anything wrong there? The first question the Admin asked should have been “what exactly do you mean by that?”. If he had, the User would have told him that he couldn’t log into email because it didn’t recognize his password. By narrowing down the problem the Admin could have resolved it remotely, without having to actually visit the User’s computer. By not asking any questions about the exact problem, the Admin not only wasted a bunch of time, but will also be pretty angry when he gets to the User’s computer and realizes that the computer is fine and the User’s password just needs to be reset. The Admin will leave thinking the User is an idiot and the User will be thinking that the Admin is a condescending jerk.

The point is that before doing anything else, you need to take the time to identify what the problem REALLY is. A good reference that makes this point pretty well and gives you some example questions to ask is Cisco’s System Troubleshooting Methodology. This is a very useful guide even if you don’t have any Cisco gear.

If you aren’t convinced about why you should spend some time taking a quick refresher on troubleshooting, I highly recommend you take a look at The Universal Troubleshooting Process. This site makes an excellent case for why you should define a troubleshooting process and practice it regularly, and it gives you lots of tips on troubleshooting and troubleshooting methodology. Brushing up on troubleshooting will save you time, money, and effort, and will make you look smarter and harder working in the eyes of your colleagues.

Links:

Troubleshooting Techniques [The Nerd Guru]
System Troubleshooting Methodology [Cisco]
The Universal Troubleshooting Process [Troubleshooters.com]

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• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer

Today’s fascinating tips on Outlook cover the following:

• Junk email filtering
• How to compose email in HTML, rich text or text
• How to force a spell check before sending email

This is Part IV (of I’m guessing VI) in a series of short articles about Microsoft Office Outlook. However, after this one, I *might* take a break and write about something else. I think I’ve had it with Outlook for a bit. I mean, is anyone enjoying it? Reading it? Or are you just thinking “would that chick shut up about Outlook already?” (That’s what I’m thinking.)

Junk Email Filtering

So, I have to be honest and tell you that for years I’ve been using Outlook and I didn’t even realize there was a junk mail folder. But here it is – right in the folder list.

I mean, I guess I knew there were junk mail filters, but since I only use Outlook when I’m forced to (as in “at my job”), there has always been a higher level Network junk mail filter, so I never used my own settings. But, that doesn’t stop a few junk mails from getting through. Like Hallmark. How do they even know I exist at Network Physics???

After investigating, I am now able to block Hallmark – all future Hallmark mail will go to my junk mail folder. I’m pretty stoked (word from 80s surfer vocabulary that describes extreme happiness).

I also must mention that the person who requested I write about this feature told me he HATES the junk mail filter (his exact words were “can you tell people how to turn off the horrendous junk mail filter?”). So, you can use these directions to educate yourself about the filter and then turn it off (if you want to).

To get to the Junk E-Mail Options window, open Tools>Options and then click Junk E-Mail….

(Really been missin’ those arrows.)

The Junk Email Options window opens.

(I want to point out that Microsoft uses “e-mail” while I use “email” and sometimes just “mail.” Hopefully this won’t confuse anyone too much. And if it does, well…you know what they say – “It’s better to say nothing at all than to….”)

From the Junk E-Mail Options window you can set the level of protection (if you are like the person that HATES the junk mail filter, you’d set it to No Automatic Filtering), configure safe senders, safe recipients, etc. All these tabs are pretty self-explanatory. Here is some literature I plagiarized from the Outlook help (and added some of my own comments):

The Junk E-mail Filter in Outlook is turned on by default, and the protection level is set to Low. This level is designed to catch only the most obvious junk e-mail messages (I wonder what “most obvious is?”). You can make the filter more aggressive, but if you do, (I had to add that comma) it may catch legitimate messages sometimes. Any message that is caught by the Junk E-mail Filter is moved to a special Junk E-mail folder (luckily we know where that is). You should review messages in the Junk E-Mail folder from time to time to make sure that they are not legitimate messages that you want to see.

Starting with Microsoft Office 2003 Service Pack 2, messages that are moved to the Junk E-mail folder are automatically converted to plain text format, and any links that they contain are disabled. Any message that you move out of the Junk E-mail folder has its links enabled and the original message format restored, unless the message is considered by the Junk E-mail Filter to contain suspicious links.

You can read more about mail filtering in the Outlook help. Just make sure you aren’t like me and you actually look in the Outlook help instead of the Word help (because I can assure you, there is no mail filtering information in the Word help and all it will do is frustrate you.)

Just to follow through with my story, Hallmark is now blocked:

How to Compose Email in HTML, Rich Text or Text

There is a default setting for how your mail messages are created. To view that default (or change it) complete the following (I’m not sure where this formal voice is coming from):

1. Open Tools>Options and click the Mail Format tab.

2. From the Compose in this message format list, select the format you want.

(Hmm…I use HTML, but I think I’ll switch to Rich Text.)

You can also use a specific format for one message. In other words, create a one-time email in a format different than the default format. (If you still don’t get it, I don’t know what to tell you.) To do this open Actions>New Mail Message Using and then select what format you want to use for your one-time message.

(What the heck is More Stationary???)

(Ok, I checked it out…OMG. It’s made for color freaks like me. But I also know I’d drive everyone insane if I started using it, so I’ll just stick with “blank.” Feel free to look at it.)

How to Force a Spell Check Before Sending Email

It’s just plain embarrassing to send an email with spelling mistakes. If I send one, I usually send a follow-up email pointing out which word I misspelled and apologize. Now, I’m a writer, so it could be considered more important that I don’t make a spelling error.

But…did you know you can force a spell check before you send? Yes! It is one of the ways Microsoft makes you look like you actually know what you are doing.

To do this, once again open Tools>Options and click the Spelling tab.

Select the Always check spelling before sending check box. You can see that there are a lot of other exciting options for checking your spelling.

Next time: I don’t know.

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

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 3: Moving Outlook Files to a New/Different Computer

About Karyn: Karyn was given the nickname Ryn when she was 16-years old. She is the lone technical writer at Network Physics. She just bought a new bike, bringing her bevy of bikes up to five. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.

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• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

Today’s topic is only going to cover one thing: how to move your Outlook emails to another file for easy transport to a new or different computer. This is useful if you quit (or are fired/laid off from) your current job and you want to take all your email and contacts with you. Well, now you can. (It’s also useful if you get a new computer, but that doesn’t have the intrigue of getting fired.)

This is Part III (of how many, I still don’t know because the list keeps growing — see Jed’s comment in Color Your Emails – in a series of short articles about Microsoft Outlook).

There’s one thing that makes this topic (as in the topic of today, not Jed’s topic) a bit difficult to write about: it is a slightly different procedure depending on which version of Microsoft Outlook you are running. And to further complicate things, there are many different paths you can take to get to the same destination. In other words, there are few ways to back up your mail to a file. (Wait for it…wait for it…OK! There. Appropriate eye-rolling and all directed at Microsoft.) So before we pick a version and I show you how to move your email, we are going to have a little history lesson (with the help of Wikipedia).

Microsoft Outlook Versions

How many versions of Outlook are there? Well, let’s see:

· Outlook for MS-DOS bundled with Exchange Server 5.5

· Outlook for Windows 3.x bundled with Exchange Server 5.5

· Outlook for Macintosh bundled with Exchange Server 5.5

· Outlook 97 (version 8) released January 16, 1997, also bundled with Exchange Server 5.5

· Outlook 98 (version 8.5) released June 21, 1998

· Outlook 2000 (version 9) released June 7, 1999, also bundled with Exchange 2000 Server

· Outlook 2002 (version 10) included in Office XP released May 31, 2001 Office

· Outlook 2003 (version 11) released October 21, 2003, also bundled with Exchange Server 2003

· Office Outlook 2007 (version 12) released November 30, 2006

Here’s a little known fact (at least I think it is little-known): with the release of Outlook 2003, the official name of Microsoft Outlook became Microsoft *Office* Outlook. Also, probably a more known fact is that after Outlook98, the Outlook for Macs, became Entourage (not to be confused with the HBO series).

Moving Your Mail

I am going to specifically discuss how to move your email to a Personal Folder using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. We are going to pull your mail off of the Exchange server and put it in a Personal Folder that resides on your hard drive, and in turn, you can copy this folder like any other folder. There is one thing you must understand before going forward: I use .pst and Personal Folder interchangeably. They are the same thing.

If you aren’t using Outlook with an Exchange server, your mail is already in Personal Folders, so they are already cleared for transport (although you have to locate them, which is difficult).

Ready? Oookay. (Any of you who were a cheerleader at some time or another will get that reference. If not, oh well…)

From the File menu, select New and then Create Outlook data file.

Select Office Outlook Personal Folder (.pst).

Rename and save the Personal Folder to your desktop. I called mine Karyns_email.pst. (I know, I know. SUPER original.) Now, keep this in mind. This is the name of FILE – not the name of the folder.

Once you name your .pst file and click OK, the Create Microsoft Personal Folder window pops up. On this screen you name the folder, that is, what you will see in your Outlook folder thingy. I named my Gossip. This is where I’m going to store all the emails about any gossip I get about my co-workers. I wouldn’t want to keep that on the server, right?

This brings up an important point. You see, you are only saving the .pst file to the desktop so you can easily copy this folder to another place. BUT, let’s just say you wanted to have some Personal Folders to keep email off the server but you didn’t want to store it on the desktop. In reality, you see, I have a folder called Past Projects. After a project is done, I move all the email associated with that project to my Past Project folder.

I did not save my Past Projects folder to the desktop, but to its default location, as shown below:

So, in short, you can save the .pst file any where, but if you are copying your email some where else, it’s good to save it on your desktop because you can easily locate and move it.

Ok, back to Gossip. Once I save Gossip as the name, the folder is now visible in the Outlook thingy (Folder directory?). But the FILE is visible as Karyns_email on my desktop. Do you get it? They are the same thing, really (for us simple-minded).

Now all you need to do is drag email from My Stuff into the .pst you just created (Gossip). Once it is fully populated, the file (Karyns_email.pst) is ready for transport.

Deleting Personal Folder

If you ever want to delete a Personal folder, right-click the folder and select Close [name of folder]. You might want to make sure it is empty first. Then throw away the .pst file.

Next time: More email information

By the way, every thing you ever want to know about Microsoft Office Outlook is here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/default.aspx . In essence, this site makes the articles I’m writing completely useless (although I’m still going to write a few more.)

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

• Part I: Checking Availability and Calendar Color Labels
• Part 2: Calendar Colors, Holidays, and Time Zones
• Part 4: Junk Mail; Composing in HTML, Rich Text, and Plain Text; and Spell Checking

About Karyn: Karyn 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 has had a life long love affair with ice cream. She will be contributing articles like this one regularly to the site.

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For you emacs folks, there is even a script to enable Emacs Emulation.

Five scripts that make life easier with Vim [Linux.com]

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Once you get started, I also suggest you go here and print out the Vim cheat Sheet, which will help you remember things until you build the required muscle memory to really fly. They also have an excellent 7-step tutorial based on cheat sheets of slowly increasing complexity.

And another great beginner resource is the Vi Survival Guide. This is a good crash course in getting started with Vi, and it includes some advanced usage too.

• UC San Diego’s Beginner’s Guide to the Vi Editor [Via Lifehacker: Learn to use Vi]
• Vim Graphical Cheat Sheet and Tutorial
• Vi Survival Guide

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Paul Nilsen has done a great job with this extremely short screencast that shows you how to automatically apply color to incoming email in Microsoft Outlook. Although it is a little light on written instructions (the kind you could print out), this task is so easy a short screencast might be just enough. Maybe I’ll ask Ryn to write about it in one of her upcoming articles (she may already have this planned for the Outlook series we are currently in, I don’t know). Paul has done a great job with this screencast, the production quality is very high. I’m going to have to learn how to do some of the things he does with Camtasia, because it really takes the recording to the next level. Warning: this one has sound, that some people have commented is LOUD. I think Paul has fixed the problem, but I didn’t notice a problem in the first place.

Paul Nilsen’s Lifehacker Short Screencast [Via Lifehacker]

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