As you may know, the latest installment of the Microsoft’s globally acclaimed office productivity solution – Office 2013 – has many differences from the previous one, and the list is increasing even as we speak owing to frequent updates. While most of the changes are quite expected: feature upgrades, fixes and new feature implementations; there are some that came as a surprise.
To improve the overall security measures regarding Office and Windows system stability, Microsoft decided to remove the possibility of implementing a so-called “custom action” Outlook rule configuration scenario. Basic Outlook rules, an all-powerful tool created to achieve the broadest of goals as far as scope and in terms of improving one’s Outlook and Office experience, were left intact. However, the removal of the “custom action” function naturally restricts some rule configuration scenarios.
Your colleague sent you a script file or HTML Help (.chm) document or even link (.lnk) to the file stored in the file server but Outlook blocks access to the file. What to do? Outlook blocks certain attachments or, rather, blocks access to certain types of received files, because of potential risks associated with these file types. The file type, indicated in the extension, a few letters following the dot at the end of filename, determines whether the file may or may not present a potential threat to the user’s security. For this, Outlook has a blacklist of potentially hazardous file types including a few dozens of items, such as .exe, .bat, and .cmd. (full list of blocked attachments can be viewed here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/blocked-attachments-in-outlook-434752e1-02d3-4e90-9124-8b81e49a8519). As you may have noticed, the key word of the paragraph is ‘potential’, and that is to say, unlike your anti-virus, Outlook can’t tell whether the file is really dangerous or not. As a result, it blocks a lot of useful files, even if they come from highly trusted senders, just to be on the safe side. The question is, why does it happen?
Today an average email user receives around 50 to 100 messages per day. Regardless of whether you use your Outlook 2013 mailbox for personal or for business correspondence, a certain percentage of emails you get can be considered excessive. Naturally, the first example that comes into your mind, is spam, or, if your spam filtering is near-perfect, various subscription emails that need unsubscribing. However, there is another source of mess in a mailbox, and it is duplicate emails. Although Outlook 2013 is already an extremely sophisticated email client, duplicate email messages may still present a problem to its users.
If you use Microsoft Office for business purposes and your responsibilities include frequent communication with partners and customers, sending mass email from Outlook may be a part of your daily or, at least, weekly or monthly routine. Within the organization, mass email with Outlook is normally performed through internal distribution lists including members of certain departments or subdivisions. However, when it comes to mailing customers or partners, the list of recipients can grow excessively long, making your message rather bulky. Moreover, the recipient sees all other addresses in the TO or CC field; and they sometimes are not only irrelevant, but present some information you might prefer not to disclose.
Here we come to the origin of one of the most successful Microsoft Office productivity features – Mail Merge, in Word 2003 – an equally one of the most successful and popular Office installments by a wide margin. Mail Merge in Word took an impressive start by appearing on this platform after its birthplace – Word 2002 (of ‘Office XP’, released in 2001).
Office 2003 is now officially no longer supported by its parent, but, despite this fact, and despite it being somewhat outdated (in comparison to the more modern Microsoft Office installments released over the years) both interface-, security- and feature-wise, many people who still own the license use it and prefer it over the rest of the ‘Office’ family. For these people, and professionals who have to use the feature in Word 2003 over the line of duty, we will explain how to use the Mail Merge in MS Word 2003, thus continuing our series of articles which describe the Word Mail Merge feature.
From this article you will learn how to send custom HTML emails using Outlook. Send Personally plug-in allows you to send individual and bulk emails and prevents Outlook from messing up the code.
Microsoft Office was designed from the ground up as a powerful productivity platform for numerous PC-related tasks and jobs, and has gained massive popularity over the years, becoming the leading solution on the market.
However, making it a truly all-purpose tool, able to perform in practically every scenario that the modern workplace produces, is no small task.
To counter this limitation, Microsoft has included the possibility for independent developers to create their own functions into the platform, without compromising its integrity or copyright licenses, by introducing the MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) protocol – a sort of “bridge” for anyone to use between the closed architecture of Office and supplemental software written in popular programming languages in order to include a desired feature. This protocol has allowed many to produce their own long-sought productivity improvements that Microsoft had or has no desire to implement owing to small margins – the main features of Office require many man-hours to maintain as it is. Consequently, an impressive number of such software products have appeared on the Internet over the years as the result.
Since the 2013 version, Microsoft Outlook users have had the option to activate automatic reminders concerning message where attachments may have been forgotten.
Have you ever had to send out similar messages to a substantial number of recipients with just a few slight alterations in the body and the subject of the message? Have you ever had to deploy a personalized marketing campaign or send special offers to your most loyal customers so that any of them would feel truly special? Then you might have probably made use of the mail merge technology, or, at least have heard of it. In a nutshell, mail merge works as an inverse template or, rather, super-template, when, instead of using the same template to create similar messages over and over again, a user creates just one template with a number of placeholders which propagates itself across all the messages adding specific values for each recipient from a pre-set database, such as the recipient’s email address, first name, date, price, city or position.
As you may know, the famous Mail Merge Outlook function that Microsoft introduced more than a decade ago has endured almost every iteration of the Microsoft Office family. Today, we are going to describe its use in Microsoft Office 2007.
Mail Merge in Outlook 2007 works the same as in other Microsoft Office family releases and targets the same goal: the creation of convenient and efficient mass mailings with some degree of personalization while drastically improving the work process for the people in the field. It allows creation of bulk email letters to each individual on a mailing list, using a single message / Word document, by employing “Macros”, which serve as placeholders for data taken from an external “data-source” and are replaced by the actual values when the messages are generated.
