Tip o' the Week #141 - more Outlook 2013 tweaks

 

A couple more tweaks for those of you who are enjoying Outlook 2013 (or Outlook “15”). The first comes from ToW stalwart Stuart Handley, who is driven to near distraction by the Reading pane in Outlook. In his own words…

How can I disable in-line reply in the Reading Pane?

To provide a more streamlined experience without the need of popping up extra message windows and dialogs anymore, Outlook 2013 introduces in-line reply which allows you to press reply and directly start writing your reply in the Reading Pane (which means that it is not really a Reading Pane anymore and they should have changed the name) .

You can press POP OUT to open your message in a regular Message editor window which provides access to additional formatting options and features.

To always use the regular Message editor window instead of in-line reply, disable the option:

File-> Options-> Mail-> Replies and Forwards-> Use inline replies when replying or forwarding

Maybe the new Reading/composing pane thing is a mixed blessing, although a lot of the time, progress means having to adopt an at-first uncomfortable change. Maybe try it out and if it causes you to want to cast a spell on its designers, just switch it off.

On a more benevolent level, there’s one nice design feature which is highlighted by Phil Hand…

I just typed out an email in Outlook 2013 which contained “attached” in the body. As usual, I forgot to attach the attachment but wow!, I got the following popup J

Wonderful! – now if only it was Clippy that was telling me ;)

If, like Phil, you have a wistful thought when Clippy is mentioned, you could always sign the Bring Back Clippy petition. Only 51 signatories at the time of writing, so don’t hold your breath for People Power bringing the Clip back from the great wastepaper basket in the sky.

If you’d rather not be warned about missing attachments, you can always switch it off by going into …

File-> Options-> Mail-> Send Messages and clear the “Warn me…” checkbox.

It’s also worth noting that now and again, clearing the Auto-Complete List could be a good idea – as people leave the company, you might find their names & old addresses are still being listed. Of course, you can always ditch individual addresses from the cache by clicking the X that appears at the end of the errant address.