Archive for the Microsoft Outlook Category

Increase Productivity With Microsoft Add-in Tools

02.27.2009 by Don Wood.

We all want to work smarter, right? Well, I have a great way to increase productivity and improve your communications at the same time. There are software companies offering tools that provide additional functionality to Microsoft Outlook. I’m not promoting any particular company. However, there are two providers that I have tried and used their products with success:

Both companies offer similar products. I have successful experience with two products that offer these features:

  • Manage attachments
  • Send an individual email to multiple email addresses

There are other add–n features that I have not tried but sound promising such as:

  • Hide fax numbers
  • Reply to all monitor

My experience
The manage attachments add-in was a huge productivity boost to me when I worked for a firm that limited the size of our inbox. This add-in automatically removes the attachments in an email and saves them on your hard drive. There are options on how you organize the attachments. The tool, inserts a link in the email that you click to open the attachment. For example, if John Smith sends me an email with a 2MB file attached, the tool takes the file, removes it from the email, replaces it with a link, and saves the file to a folder organized, in my case, by the sender’s name. It saves me from having the 2MB file in my Outlook folder and getting a warning that my mailbox is over the size limit.

My favorite tool is the Send Individually by Sperry Software. In the past I have sent emails to a large number of people using blind copy to protect everyone’s privacy. But when I do this, if I’m soliciting advice, I get few responses. I believe most people think “oh, someone else will respond to him”. With the Send Individually, add-in I can have the tool send an email to multiple addresses, each with the person’s name inserted into the body of the email, this makes it appear to the receiver that I typed a personal email to them. When I have done this, I get a much higher percent of people responding.

The other two products I mention sound promising but I have yet to try them.

Hide Fax Numbers
When you click the “To…” button on an email compose screen you get a dialog box that lists all of your contacts, the list includes fax numbers. This tool hides the fax number entries.

Reply to all Monitor
How many of us have clicked the “reply to all” button in an email and regretted it later? The Reply to all Monitor add-on pops up a warning anytime you select “reply to all” to make sure you really want to send it to everyone on the email list.

There are many more add-ins for Outlook. I encourage everyone to consider these tools as an easy productivity boost.

Posted in Process Improvement, Productivity, Microsoft Outlook, Real Estate Software | Print | 1 Comment »

|