David Gardiner - Office

Viewing my work calendar (but no email) on my iPhone

2021-02-06T15:30:00.000+10:30

I've been trying to be more intentional about setting appropriate boundaries between work and personal time. I use the Outlook app for email and calendars on my iPhone. Up until a few months ago I had my work email configured in the app along with my personal email account.

The problem I noticed was that usually the first thing I do after waking up is check my phone a) to see what time it is and b) if there's any interesting messages. That often included work messages that did not have to be acted on immediately. But it's too late - I'd seen them, they were in my head and competing for my attention.

And so I chose to remove my work account from the Outlook app. If it's a work email, I'll see it when I actually start work for the day and open up my computer.

The only downside to that is not being able to see work meetings and appointments overlaid against my personal (and family) appointments. This is particularly handy when booking in to see that health professional (especially now I'm working from home) - will I have a car or I do I need to make other arrangements?

But the Outlook app doesn't let you choose to just display a calendar but not the inbox. It's all or nothing.

Option 1

My personal email is hosted by GMail. You can add external calendars to your GMail account. Those will then show up as an additional calendar in the Outlook iOS app.

To make this work you need to share your work calendar. If you're using Microsoft 365 for work then do the following:

Go to Settings
Select Calendar
Select Shared Calendars
Under Publish a calendar, select the calendar and then choose how much you want to share (one of 'Can view when I'm busy', 'Can view titles and locations' or 'Can view all details') and then click Publish
Two links are displayed - one for a HTML view and one in ICS format.
Click on the ICS link. A pop-up menu appears.
Select Copy link

From Google Calendar

In the calendar list, next to Other calendars click on the +
Select From URL
Paste the ICS link
Click on Add calendar
The name of the calendar defaults to the link. You can rename it to something more friendly by going back into Settings and editing the Name field.

So this works, but I found there can be a significant delay between adding or modifying an event in your work calendar and when those changes show up in Google Calendar (and hence in the Outlook iOS app). I presume caching is happening and it seems it only refreshes once or twice a day. If you can live with that then fine, but I found it a bit annoying.

Option 2

Use the default iOS Calendar app. Not ideal as I'd really like to just use the Outlook app, but if it doesn't do everything I want then having another calendar app is an option.

The nice thing here is that in iOS settings, you can be specific about which services you want (so I select Calendar but not Mail)

And with the recent improvements in iOS (Windows Phone Live Tiles anyone?) that allow widgets to be a part of a normal screen, you can even have a larger Calendar icon on your screen to see upcoming appointments at a glance.

Option 3

Maybe one day Microsoft will implement this suggestion in the Outlook UserVoice for iOS. I've commented and voted on it!

Option 4

Have you solved this another way? Let me know in the comments.

Batch-converting JPEG files for OCR

2008-03-08T17:47:00.001+10:30

I was sent a whole bunch of .jpg files of scanned documents with text that I wanted to extract.

I have Microsoft Office Document Imaging (MODI) installed, so I was keen to use that to perform the OCR (instead of re-typing all the text!). The only problem is that MODI only understands TIFF and MDI formats.

I used ImageMagick to do the conversion. Convert might sound like the best candidate, but mogrify did the job for me.

You can convert a whole lot of files using the following command:

mogrify -format tiff *.jpg

This creates new tiff files for each JPEG file. The only problem is that MODI doesn't like the particular flavour of TIFF generated. Fortunately ImageMagick has 1001 options to configure exactly what you want to happen.

A bit of experimentation and I've found that the following extra options generate TIFF files that can be read without problems:

mogrify -format tiff -colorspace RGB -compress RLE *.jpg

All good, except that I then discovered that the scanning was at such a low DPI that the OCR wasn't able to find any text :-(

Something else that sounds interesting is that MODI can be programmed against. Maybe I could automate this even more!

Importing Excel 2007 into Windows SharePoint Services 2

2008-01-08T11:40:00.001+10:30

In WSS 2.0, there's an option to create a new list by importing an Excel Spreadsheet.

I've got Excel 2007 installed, and so after selecting the cell range of an .xls file I got this error message:

Method 'Post' of object 'IOWSPostData' failed

Searching for this gave me a possible solution

Because this particular SharePoint is still version 2.0, I figured that lVer = 2 was appropriate, and the good news is it worked.

Office 2003 Service Pack 3

2007-09-19T09:33:00.001+09:30

I see that Service Pack 3 for the Office 2003 products has been released.

As well as the main Office suite, there are also updates for Visio, OneNote, Project, SharePoint and Portal Server.

Virus protection for Vista 64bit

2007-01-08T11:28:00.001+10:30

I'm back at work after two weeks leave over the Christmas/New Year's break. Not too many emails to sort through, and not too many problems to fix so far.

One nice thing was that Michael from ISTS (our IT Unit) got hold of the latest build of Symantec AntiVirus which finally supports Vista 64bit.

It's been the one big uncertainty about running Vista 64-bit - having to tread very carefully for the last month or two without that extra safety net.

I also got access to the RTM of Office 2007 Enterprise Edition just before I went on leave, so it's nice to be running the release version of Office 2007 now.

Microsoft Ready Summit '06

2006-11-29T10:23:00.001+10:30

I've managed to attend two of these events this year. The first was in Sydney as it coincided with family holidays in that state.

It was held at the Sydney Convention Centre (the same venue as Tech-Ed). I think there were more exhibitors in Sydney compared to Adelaide, but again the catering let Sydney down.

I didn't get to see as many sessions in Adelaide yesterday, as I also needed to get back to work to oversee our building's emergency evacuation drill (all went well I'm pleased to report).

I do think Adelaide does a much better job of putting on a seminar like this (really nice food for lunch, and they even know about dessert!) It isn't the main point of a day like this, but I do think it reflects on the quality of the venue and location. Yay Adelaide.

Windows Desktop Search 3.0 RTM

2006-11-08T10:07:00.000+10:30

Windows Desktop Search 3.0 is now released

Office 2007 is RTM

2006-11-08T09:26:00.000+10:30

Microsoft Office 2007 is now finished. It will be good to get our hands on the final version- I've really liked the new version while running the Beta 2 preview.

Installing Office SharePoint 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh

2006-09-20T08:56:00.000+09:30

Like a few other people, I experienced a problem installing the Beta 2 Technical Refresh for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.

Everything went by the book until the "SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard" got to the final step, when it failed with an error "could not find stored procedure 'dbo.proc_MSS_cleanup'".

The solution is outlined in this newsgroup post (Broken link, was originally www.microsoft.com/office/community/en-us/default.mspx?cat=&lang=en&cr=US&guid=&sloc=en-us&dg=microsoft.public.sharepoint.setup_and_administration&tid=e4cab64e-b11b-4266-8751-25e440938fee&mid=2412db7b-436c-4172-8e7f-9ff29e823829&rmid=2412db7b-436c-4172-8e7f-9ff29e823829&helpful=1&p=1&stgxml=http%3a%2f%2fwww.microsoft.com%2foffice%2fcommunity%2fen-us%2fsettings.xml).

Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh

2006-09-15T13:38:00.000+09:30

The Technical Refresh of Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 is now available to download. This is a patch/update for Beta 2 - you need to already have Beta 2 installed to apply these updated.