End of the semester wrapup and Out of Office AutoReply

Well, it’s that time of year again. The ground is frosty, students aren’t sleeping, and faculty have a long week of grading exams ahead. It must be almost Christmas break! We want to make sure that you know one more Outlook trick before you go off for your relaxing vacation.

Out of Office AutoReply

If you are going to be out of the office for an extended period of time (Christmas break, for example), and you won’t be checking or responding to email often, it might be a good idea to use the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Outlook. You don’t want to leave others wondering why you’re not returning their emails! The Out of Office Assistant sends an automatic email message to anyone who emails you letting them know that you are out of the office. It is a very simple process to turn this feature on.

In the menu at the top of your Inbox in Outlook, click on the Tools menu, and then click Out of Office Assistant. In the Out of Office Assistant dialog box, click the button next to “I am currently out of the office.” In the “AutoReply only once to each sender with the following text” box, type the message that you want to send while you are out of the office. Make sure to remember to include when you will be able to get back to them.

Now, when you get back to the office, you will want to turn this off. To do this, click on Tools and then Out of Office Assistant. Click on “I am currently in the office” and then click OK. Your Inbox is now functioning normally.

Thanks for a great semester

That’s all for now! We would like to thank all of our readers for making our first blogging semester a successful one. We will be “Out of the Office” from blogging until January, so check back in 2009 for more tips that will help you along in all of your Office Endeavors.

The elite Program will be open for business during Winter Term, so please give us a call (x5000) or email us (elite@elon.edu), if we can provide you with assistance.

Until next year!

The elite Program

Reveal Formatting

Ever try to fix formatting that refuses to change? You can start with a clean slate by removing all formatting from the selection—select the block of text and press Ctrl-Shift-N.

Alternatively, you can use Word's Reveal Formatting task pane to modify the formatting. In Word 2007, just hit Shift-F1.

When you click on an underlined link, an options dialog will display settings that you can modify. By checking the Distinguish style source option, you can view whether formatting was applied directly or via a style.

Fast Formulas

In Excel, sometimes you need to copy a formula or data to a series of non-sequential cells. You can do this quickly without having to paste it into each cell individually. First copy the data from the source cell. Then hold down the Ctrl key as you click on each destination cell. Once all the cells are highlighted, you can paste the data by pressing Ctrl-V.

Similarly, you can type data into a series of cells. Again, while holding down the Ctrl key, click on all the cells you want to enter the text into. Next, type the text you are entering and then press Ctrl-Enter to add the text to all the selected cells.

Viewing Conversations

Outlook lets you view messages by thread, which is a convenient way to scan your inbox much faster. Just choose View | Arrange By | Conversation to see your mail arranged this way. If you have the reading pane on the right, you can get to this setting faster by clicking on Arranged by at the top of the message list. You'll find that if each message contains the earlier messages, you can read just the latest message in the thread instead of working through each one, so you can easily clean out your inbox by deleting earlier notes and keeping only the latest one.

That’s all for now! Until next week,
The elite Program