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In-cell editing in Outlook views

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You can use in-cell editing in Outlook views to change an item without opening it. This is on by default for certain views such as the “Address Cards“ view, see it in action:

1. Select your contacts folder
2. Select a contact
3. Press F2

The cursor will be put in the middle of the address card, and you can change the text there (use tab/shift-tab or the arrow keys to navigate fields). This can be a quick way of updating contacts.

It's also possible to do in-cell editing in email views, although this is not likely to be useful to everyone, there are some scenarios where I've found it useful. Recently, I needed a list of all the posts to the Exchange blog as well as the author of each one, so that I could put together some statistics on whose blog entries had the most views. I have them all downloaded into Outlook via Newsgator, but no easy way to extract the author from each post.

I tried poking around to find an expression to grab the names via the signature line at the end of every post, but I haven't been 100% consistent in posting in the same format and I ran into some idiosynchrasies, so I decided to just type in the users' names manually. But I wanted to store them along with the posts so that I didn't need to do the entire list again. So I decided to do some inline editing in the Outlook view. There are only about 100 posts so it wasn't too bad (I type pretty fast and I knew from memory who posted what). Here's what I did:

1. View | Current View | Define Views
2. New
3. Name the view “Blog“ and choose Table view
4. Click on Other Settings, check “In-Cell Editing“, click OK twice
5. Apply View
6. Right click on a column heading like “Subject“ and choose Field Chooser
7. Click New
8. Name the field “Post Author“, accept the default type/format
9. Drag the newly created field next to Subject and close the field chooser
9. Select the first item in the view, click in the Post Author field for that view and start typing the user's name
10. Press Enter to move down a row, and then F2 to edit each one

One nice part of this solution is that if you choose “This Folder, Visible to Everyone“ at step 3, you can use this view on that folder in Outlook Web Access as well (you will need to click around to a few different folders first to flush the view cache). So now I have items in my Outlook store that have the author stored as a property on the item, which made it easy to programatically pull out the title and author for providing statistics. It's not elegant, but I couldn't think of anything that was. Plus it only took me a few minutes, so that's a success by my definition.

How do you use in-cell editing?

[Update 6/10: See Sue Mosher's comment for a potential pitfall when using in-cell editing with custom forms]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 09, 2004
    I use it for putting a subject in emails from people who don't type a subject originally.
  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2004
    On a slight divergance - what I would find most useful would be the ability to print an address direct from the outlook contacts rather than having to load word. Always wondered why this was never offered.... perhaps there is an add-on somewhere that I have missed.
  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2004
    One of the potential pitfalls of in-cell editing is that users can turn it on at any time, even in a public folder. If the folder holds items that depend on a custom Outlook form for certain functionality, that functionality may be impaired. Worst case: The user may be able to change values without the business rules embodied in the form being applied.

    The solution is to include code in the form that prevents the user from saving changes unless the item was actually opened in the form. I've posted a general structure for this at http://www.outlookcode.com/codedetail.aspx?id=79
  • Anonymous
    June 10, 2004
    Excellent point, thanks Sue.