ActiveWords and Scripting in Outlook 2007...

I seem to live in Outlook and the browser.

Living in Outlook is not where I had planned to spend my life, but having resolved to build the best relationships for ActiveWords that I can, I have resolved to master Outlook, and to script those things that I need to do, or do all the time. For those that take the time, you can pretty quickly figure out that there are keyboard equivalents for all kinds of things in Outlook, but whoever designed them must have had a different logical view of the world than I do, which maybe isn’t such a bad thing.

To here’s today’s problem and solution for three things I do in Outlook all the time.

Problem 1, I go to lots of events, meet lots of people and see to follow up with them. The problem starts when I get a business card. I have tried card scanners with mixed results. So I am left with getting the card into outlook the old fashioned way, e.g. type in the name. Normally not a problem, but when you go to an event and get the cards say from 6 people from the same company. And all of the cards have lots of the same detail, nightmare in terms of re-typing all the stupid stuff over and over. But do not fear, inside Outlook is a command called “New contact from the same company”.

You know it’s there somewhere because you have seen it before. And after spending some time digging around you find it. If you take a moment you will realize that if you were to type say:

<ALT>h</ALT>aw<ALT>c</ALT>

You would get a new contact from the same company with all the right stuff filled in.

So, I have named it “sameco” and whammo it works.

Problem 2, you have got the contacts name in a record and you want to send them a follow on E-Mail, either pitching your product, or doing whatever you want to do with that contact. You find yourself staring at the record and you look at the “ribbon” in Outlook and you see a tab that says E-Mail. So, you can take your fingers off the keyboard and reach for the mouse/trackpad and try to hit the E-Mail icon.

Or you can type say:

<ALT>h</ALT>l

And whammo you have a new E-Mail to the person whose contact record is open. I call this “nm”

Problem 3 And finally with the contact record open you may choose to want to calendar it to follow up.

<ALT>h</ALT>w<ALT>c</ALT> will do it just fine, and I call this script “fup” and insert a date.

I never know how important this kind of stuff is, but in the age of the elimination of admin help, getting this kind of stuff done fast is mandatory in my world.

Simply copy and paste these scripts into the “action” field in scripting in ActiveWords, and if there are other things that you want me to try script just leave a comment.