JayMcCormack.com

Have just been playing with a tool called TimeBridge, it’s a meeting planner type application that integrates into Outlook and allows you to setup of a meeting. Sounds simple, but as soon as you add people from multiple companies in multiple time zones it get complex and a down-right waste of time.

Timebridge solves the typical back and forth issue by allowing you to suggest up to 5 time slots from your own outlook calendar and then sending invitations off to the attendees. The attendees then choose the best time slot for them (no registration required) and then once a consensus is agreed the meeting is booked and everyone notified.

It’s a nice solution to a complex problem, and just seems to work. The only thin I’m a little unhappy about is the upsell that happens. “Did you want to book a web conference?” but hey? What did you expect for free?

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I plan on writing a few posts over the next couple of weeks around Google docs, Google’s online document system, but to get started wanted to talk briefly about what the application is attempting to do.

If you think about the average document what normally springs to mind is something like a letter or a proposal and typically you would use a word processor to write it up.  Something like Microsoft Word, OpenOffice Writer are the normal tools you think of too.  If you think a little harder though about the actual process you use for assembling a document you may be in a position where you need to move the document around your organisation/friends/family to finalise it… everybody needs to put their 2c in.  The problem this presents is that you need to manage this process, you need to send it to each person and then get their responses back into the document.  If your organisation is anything like ours then everyone does it in their own way too, some people just change the document, other’s might ‘mark up’ the changes for approval.  Some people might add comments inside the document and finally others might just respond in an email with the changes they want made, ahhhhhhhh!

Google docs is designed to make this process of collaboration easier.  When you are in a situation where more than one person is building the document then you can open up or share your document with other people and all work on it at the same time.  Thankfully Google takes care of knowing who changed what and allowing you to track back through the changes.

It does by providing a web based interface to these tools, so using only a web browser you can open up a document, make changes, save and close.

Right now Google offer three different document types:

• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations

So your basics are covered.

Now some people talk about this being a replacement for Microsoft Office, I just don’t think that’s the case.  The functionality in these applications is just not rich enough yet to compete with the offline tools.  You get the ability to do a lot of what you can do in things like Word, but not enough to through away Word altogether.  I think it’s a matter of the right tool for the right job.

If you don’t already have a Google account, you can get one right now and it’s free, and then you can start working online and sharing your documents.

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Great article that shows how to use some simple techniques to do in-cell graphing in Excel.  I find this a really simple way to align data with a graphical presentation of such, sometime it’s just too hard to get the data to align with the information you are graphing when using a true Excel chart.  This appears to be a great little work around.

It uses a REPT function in Excel that I didn’t even know existed.  The purpose of this function is to repeat a string a certain number of times.  The function accepts 2 parameters…

=REPT(string to repeat, time to repeat it)

As is typical in Excel, a string in a function or formula needs to be wrapped in double quotes…

=REPT(”-”,17)

The above would repeat the hyphen 17 times.  Not so useful however replace the hyphen with a bar (or pipe character, it’s the one on the backslash key) and the 17 with a reference to a cell containing the information you want to graph, and you’re all done!

I played with the font sizes a little to get something reasonable. Let me know how you go if you use it.

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Turn this..
“CHURCH”,0801 - Cathedral Catholic Parish
“CHURCH”,0811 - Casuarina Catholic Parish
“CHURCH”,0811 - Nightcliff Catholic Parish
“CHURCH”,0812 - Sanderson Catholic Parish
“CHURCH”,0822 - Daly River Catholic Parish

Into this…
Cathedral Catholic Parish
Casuarina Catholic Parish
Nightcliff Catholic Parish
Sanderson Catholic Parish
Daly River Catholic Parish

No big deal, i know, but sometimes you get stuck in the place. You know when you have a choice to make, do I do this manually for the next 5 minutes or do I write a script to do this for me. The script might take 5 minutes, but it might take 45 minutes also. This is a nice compromise when it suits.

If you have a list of data that you want truncate at the front or back (or middle) of each line, then you can do what I call ‘vertical highlighting’ in word. Paste the text into word, then while holding down the ALT key drag down through the text you want to delete. Hit delete and it’s gone.

What’s cool is that also works for formatting, so you could for example take a table of numbers (that’s separated with tabs as an example) and format a column with numbers.

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I sometimes assume too much, like I assume anyone can find what they are looking for on the web.  Or that people go looking for better and more efficient ways of doing things instead of just coasting along.

But… finding something on the web can be challenging, some might call it an art form?

So I though I would spend the next few posts talking about pieces of software I regularly use, and how I use them, to make me day easier.

To start with I wanted to talk about LookOut.  This is an amazing tool that integrates right into Outlook. It’s basically a file indexing and email indexing tool.

Now interestingly this tool has recently been bought by Miscrosoft, I guess with the view that the technology will be bought into the Office suite at some stage, regardless it is still available for download.

I know, I know, Google desktop does searching however I have a problem with this product (or a couple of problems).

Firtsly google works by adding a small webserver to your system.  You can see this when you search for something, the results pop ip in a browser window, the address line of which is your local computer and some strange port address.  This is an overhead that I can do without.  Additionally the Google search results window in Outlook is clunky, can’t be sorted well and is difficult to do complex filtering.

So what is Lookout.  Basically it’s a small service installed on your system that as scheduled by you goes and indexes the Outlook folders and file folders you want it to index.  It indexes the content of the messages and the content of the files.

In addition to this service it adds a new toolbar to Outlook to do rapid searching.  The interface for the search results is deceptive.  It looks really simple however there is a lot you can do in search results window to get to the message you need.

To demonstrate, let’s say I am looking for a message from Julie that relates to a flight I booked to Brisbane.  Specifically I am looking to reprint the confirmation I received (a PDF) that was attached to this message.

In the search toolbar I type “brisbane flight from:julie”

I then sort the results by date by clicking on the date column, and then filter the results by only showing those messages that had attachments.

In this way I can rapidly locate the message I am looking for.  If you are looking for a better way to find your messages then install this product, you will be amazed.

Update: I am pretty sure that this only works with Outlook, not Outlook Express.

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