I ran into a colleague today who posed an interesting question. (Shout out to Tina O. and Eric B.!)

Paraphrasing, “I’m replying to an email message in Outlook, and I open a file in Word, and edit that file. Now I want to attach that file to my Outlook email message. Is there a way to do it?”

There’s the save-and-send option in Word, but that will attach the file to a new email message, not attach it to a reply, so that’s not going to work here.

Option 1 (least desirable). In the Outlook message, click the Insert tab, then click “Attach File,” and navigate to the file.

Option 2 (less desirable). Open the Documents folder, navigate to the file, drag and drop the file onto the message to attach it.

Both options 1 and 2 require you to remember where you saved the file. My colleague explicitly said that she doesn’t want to have to remember where the file has been saved and then have to navigate the folder system to find it. Fair enough. I don’t want to do that either.

Option 3 (not that great unless you’re a programmer). You can write a little code that will allow you to open the containing folder of any Office file. See this blog for instructions. Fortunately for my colleague she is a programmer. I suspect she’s going to take this route. I’m normally the adventurous sort, and I briefly dabbled down this path.

And then I remembered something.

Option 4 (for those who have $25; try it with limited functionality for free). A couple months ago I read about an Office add-in that opens files as tabs, and I’ve been trying it out. Appropriately, it’s called Office Tab (works with Office 2003, 2007, and 2010). In the screenshot below you can see I have two files open in Word 2010. Just like most web browsers, I click on the tab to switch documents. But here’s the cool part. Right clicking on a tab generates a menu.

From here I can create a new document, open an existing document, close this file, close all of the other files open in this program, save this file, save it as a new file, or save all of the tabs I have open.

Now I get to the answer to my colleague’s question. I can “open folder”. Yes, this opens the folder where this particular document is saved. Now just select the file and drag it onto the email message to send it as an attachment.

To finish out the nifty stuff in this menu, I can also choose to open the file in a new window, rename the file, or lock the file.

Office Tab works with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. If you go with Office Tab Enterprise, it will work with those programs plus Publisher, Visio, Access, and Project.

[Update 12/15/2012 : Given the issues with Google Calendar Sync, I wasn’t surprised to hear that it was being sunsetted.  Use gSyncIt instead.]

To users of Google Calendar Sync (synching Google Calendar with Outlook)
[Everyone else can safely ignore.]

Warning: Appointments added to Google Calendar may show up in Outlook one hour off for the next week.

Possible solutions:

1. Free option: Double check your calendars to make sure the times are correct.
2. $19.99 option: Switch from the free Google Calendar Sync to the $19.99 gysncit for synchronizing Google Calendar and Outlook.  (http://www.fieldstonsoftware.com/software/gsyncit3/)

    

Why the federal government is to blame:

It all started when they changed the dates for daylight savings time.  Apparently Google Calendar Sync is coded in such a way that it recognizes the old dates for daylight savings time.  Between the last Sunday in October and the first Sunday in November, it will sync appointments one hour off.  You’ll have the same experience in spring when we do this again.

Why Google is to blame:

You’d think it would be simple to do a little recoding in Google Calendar Sync to recognize the new dates that have been in effect since 2007.  But apparently not.

As you all know, I’m a Dropbox fan. But what happens when your Dropbox capacity is 2GB and you’re sharing a folder with someone who has 16GB, and that person puts a 3GB file in your shared folder? (Shout out to the attendees of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s Best Practices conference – especially to the person who raised this question!) Well, Dropbox chokes.

Here’s an alternative.

JustBeamIt.com (via LifeHacker) lets you transfer large files others. How it works? You go to JustBeamIt.com, drag your file onto the webpage.

Copy the URL (CTRL-C), and send it to your collaborator.

You have to stay on the page until your file has completely uploaded and until your collaborator appears. Your collaborator needs to stay on the page until the file has been completely downloaded.

See the “waiting for recipient” message in the bottom right corner? Once the file download is completed, it changes to “transfer complete!” The file will be in your recipient’s browser’s download folder.

That’s it.

The theme for the last week on this blog has been email management. This morning I ran across a LifeHacker blog post that was talking about the same thing. See “Top 10 Tricks for Dealing with Email Overload.”

That post reminded me that I’ve been wanting to show you how to turn off Outlook 2010 email notifications – that little popup box that appears in the lower right corner of your screen when a new email comes in.

If you’re like my colleague Deb M., you are able to completely tune it out and ignore it. If you’re like me, you see it, and if it’s more interesting that the task you’re currently working on, you click the popup and read the message. And then spend the next half hour crafting the perfect response to it, gleefully ignoring the less interesting task while still feeling like you’re working.

I finally just turned it off the notification.

In Outlook 2010, click “File”, then “Options”. Click “Mail” to bring up this screen:

In the message arrival section, uncheck the “Display a Desktop Alert” box. Done. If you want to get rid of the little envelope icon that appears in your taskbar (the row of icons in the lower right part of your screen), then uncheck the box right above that one, “Show and envelope icon in the taskbar.”

UPDATED 5/17/2014
Videodropper is now Orchard, which is nothing like Videodropper.  If you’re looking for a video downloader, check out KeepVid.  This blog post explains how it works.

UPDATED 6/24/2012
A visit to the videodropper.ep.io website shows that the service is no longer available.  It has been replaced with a mysterious message. “We’re working on something new. Want to be the first to hear?” with a place to enter an email address to get updates.  

UPDATED 10/13/2011.
My sincerest thanks to the developer for posting his comment below.  I tried the service again this morning, and it worked perfectly.  Dropbox even downloaded it to my computer within a few minutes.  The videos download as flv files.  If you’d like to convert the videos to a different file format, go to Zamzar.com, upload the file and choose the you’d like to convert it to.  This is going to be a great service!

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I have written before on how to download YouTube videos using ZamZar. For Dropbox users, downloading videos may get a whole lot easier. The key word is “may”. This product has a lot of potential, but it’s not ready for primetime.

Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers) posted on his blog about a new service called Videodropper. (Word of warning. This Videodropper is at videodropper.ep.io. Videodropper.com is a porn site.)

When you visit the non-porn Videodropper, you’ll be asked to connect your Dropbox account to this service. (You can probably imagine what your options are when you visit the porn Videodropper. Let’s just say that that’s beyond the scope of this blog.) Following the link takes you to your Dropbox account where Dropbox asks if you’re okay letting the non-porn Videodropper add stuff to your Dropbox. Once you have granted permission you get bounced back to Videodropper.

Go to YouTube and choose the video you’d like to download. Copy the URL . Go back to to Videodropper and paste the URL into the box, and click “Send to Dropbox.” (Don’t use the link you get using the YouTube “Share” button. At this writing, Videodropper didn’t recognize the youtu.be URL.)

Videodropper will acknowledge your request with this message.

“Test Your Awareness: Whodunnit?” is the name of the video I want downloaded. That link is clickable on the Videodropper page.

The video will be put in your main Dropbox folder. Once there, you can move it wherever you’d like. For me, the video was available in my account at Dropbox.com, but it didn’t sync with my computer so it never appeared in my computer’s Dropbox folder. I had to download it from my Dropbox.com account, then move it from my downloads folder into Dropbox, where, weirdly, it automatically earned the Dropbox green checkmark, acting like it was there all along. I then uploaded an image file to Dropbox.com, just to see if I was having Dropbox issues, but that file synced into my computer’s Dropbox folder without incident.

Then I thought I’d try it again to see if it was a one-time issue. I went back to Videodropper, entered another YouTube URL and clicked “Send to Dropbox”. I was returned to the opening Videodropper page. Where I’m invited to log into Dropbox. So I click that again, and it takes me to where I just was, the screen that tells me my previous file was successfully added to my Dropbox account. I entered the URL again, and zing, back to the opening page I go. I was using Chrome to do this, so I thought maybe it’s a Chrome issue. Now I try Firefox, where I have the exact same experience.

One more browser: Internet Explorer.

I get some new options on the screen. Check out the “Download” and “Play Now” buttons. I’m hopeful.

I enter the new YouTube URL, cross my fingers, and click the partially-obscured “Send to Dropbox” button. And… back to the main Videodropper page I go.

In short, Videodropper only let me download a YouTube video to my Dropbox account once. Choose the video wisely. If you get it to work more than once, please let me know!

Quick Tech Tip. Tired of guessing which way your USB cable needs to be inserted? Look for the logo. That way is up.

For those of us who have to squint to see the logo, add a little white out or nail polish to the top side. Never guess again.

(Thanks to Lifehacker for the suggestions from Royce Eddington and one of the LifeHacker readers.)

*The frowny-face in the USB cable image wasn’t intentional.

I’ve left Firefox. It was using up a massive amount of RAM (Firefox 6) and had slowed to a crawl. I started looking at my add-ons to see what might be slowing it down as I did with previous iterations of Firefox. And then I stopped. I thought, “Using a web browser shouldn’t be this hard.” I had tried Chrome before, but I had Firefox set up exactly as I wanted with the add-ons that I wanted. Then the scales tipped. I didn’t have many add-ons left that worked, and Chrome had many more add-ons available. I’ve been happily, and speedily, cruising the web with Chrome. Now, in all fairness, Firefox 7 is supposed to be faster than 6, so I just did the download, and its speed certainly appears to be on par with Chrome’s. But I’m a little gun-shy. Chrome, for now, is my primary browser.

And I’m not the only one. New data shows that Chrome’s global market share has grown 9 percentage points since January. It’s expected to slip into the second spot behind Internet Explorer by the end of the year. “As of Wednesday [9/28/2011], Chrome’s global average user share for September [2011] was 23.6%, while Firefox’s stood at 26.8%. IE, meanwhile, was at 41.7%” (Computer World, 9/29/11).

Speaking of market share, according to ComShare Android continues to eat it up jumping 5.6 percentage points between May and August. My original Motorola Droid is starting to feel like a Commodore 64 in comparison to the newest products on the market. I was considering moving to the Droid Bionic on Verizon’s 4G network, but with the Droid Prime rumored to be available in November, I think I’ll wait.

And the last Google product on my mind is Gmail. In an earlier blog post I suggested that you unplug yourself from your email. That advice still holds, but with one more addition. IBM Research found that filing email in folders may be a waste of time. If you use your email’s search function, it takes an average of 17 seconds to find an email. If you dig through your folders to find it, it takes an average of 58 seconds to find it. (See this LifeHacker blog post for the summary and a link to a pdf of the original study.)

When Gmail was first introduced a number of people panicked. “No folders?! How can I find what I need if there are no folders?!” You search your email for it.

I don’t know that I’ll be able to let my Outlook folders go. When I’m looking for a particular email message, I usually just use Xobni to search for it. But I am inspired. Perhaps I will get rid of my folders as they currently exist, but create new ones that are specific to tasks. For example, I already have a “grade these” folder for the assignments my students submit electronically. There’s no reason I can’t create new folders that serve a similar purpose.

How do you manage your email? Does it work for you?

Feeling harried?  The latest edition of Faculty Focus encourages you to take back your time.

We know that humans don’t multitask.  Instead, we switch from one task to another, and in the process we lose time during that switch as we try to refocus.  The author suggests scheduling “like with like”.  Do similar tasks together to minimize losing time to refocus.

The author also suggests scheduling your tasks.  Block time off in your calendar to get stuff done.  During that time, focus on that task.  Sometimes we get so caught up in being available for our students we forget to take care of ourselves. It’s your time.  You can use it however you’d like.

I was just talking with a colleague, Kaddee L., who has decided that she doesn’t need work email sent to her phone between 6pm and 8am on weekdays or at all on weekends.  Walking around with our work email being delivered to us 24/7 wherever we might be makes it hard to let our brains take a break from work.  Taking a page from Kaddee’s book, I just turned off push notification to my phone during those times.  (Android users: Check out the email program Touchdown; $20, but worth it.  Thanks to Rich B. that tip!) 

Having a hard time turning away from your email?  You know what?  It’s not life or death.  It’s just education.  Email can wait.

Are you frequently distracted by email?  It’s okay to close your email program while you work on that concentration-heavy task.  Really, it’s okay.

The author also suggests zipping through email quickly.  Read a message and decide what to do with it.  Delete it if it’s not relevant to you.  If you think it might be at some future point, file it away.  Reply if a reply is warranted.  (Another colleague, Ruth F., finds the conversation view in Outlook very helpful. On Outlook’s ‘View’ tab, check ‘Show as Conversations.’ Click on ‘Conversation Settings’ to tweak how it looks. Try different combinations until you find the one that works for you.)

If a particular email is not something you want to deal with right now, there are a number of options for getting it out of your inbox so you can focus only on what needs to be dealt with now.

Outlook: Use the follow-up feature in Outlook to be pinged with a reminder.  There are standard times, but you can also customize for any date or time.

Followup.cc: Forward the message to, say, tomorrow@followup.cc, and tomorrow morning at 7am, followup.cc will send you that message back. (No attachments, though.)  Nothing special about ‘tomorrow.’ Choose any future date or time.  Still not ready for it?  Click the embedded snooze link for the time you want to see it again. (See this blog post for more info: http://suefrantz.com/2010/12/10/followup-cc-remind-yourself/)

Simplyfile: This is a little program that integrates with Outlook.  It lets you quickly file email messages into folders.  By quickly, I mean one mouse click or one keyboard shortcut.  It also has a “snooze it” function.  Any message you ‘snooze’ gets dropped into a ‘snooze’ folder.  You assign a date and time for that message to be returned to your inbox.  It will reappear at the date and time if was originally from, so only use this if you can keep your inbox uncluttered.  (See this blog post for more info: http://suefrantz.com/2009/08/11/simplyfile-an-outlook-addin/)

One last bit of psychological research for productivity.  Minimize barriers.  Whatever you want to get done, remove as many barriers as you can between you and the task.  If I need to grade electronic assignments, I open them on my computer.  Even if I don’t grade them then, they will be ready to go when the mood strikes.  Want to go to the gym tomorrow?  Pack up your stuff and set it by the front door the night before.  It works the other way, too.  Want to reduce the amount that you snack?  Put the snacks in the back of a cupboard – in the garage – of your friend – who lives on the other side of town. 

Now, take a deep breath.  Close your email.  And get to work on that project that’s been nagging you.

Today’s Faculty Focus article is on using mind maps to get students to engage with the course material. While the author recommends using a large sheet of a paper, I would ask faculty to consider pointing their students to SpiderScribe.net.

Earlier this year I wrote about SpiderScribe. (See this blog post.) It has a very short learning curve, and with the ability to include text, images, URLs, and documents, the maps that students create could be very powerful study aids.

Using the share feature, students could work in pairs or groups to create the maps. No need to print them off. Students can add their instructor as a ‘reader’ so the instructor can stop in to see how the map is progressing. Alternatively, students can save the map as an image and email it to their instructor.

While I really like this tool, I should note that it’s still technically in beta. As of this writing, there hasn’t been an update to the SpiderScibe blog since June.

“Ellen Finkelstein invites you to join this free webinar series to learn how to eliminate Death by PowerPoint and make your presentations come to life. Listen to guest experts share their best techniques and answer your questions!”

There will be seven sessions on Wednesdays at 11am PT/2pm ET beginning tomorrow, September 6, 2011 and running through October 26^th (no session on September 21^st).

Visit the PowerPoint blog to see the list of speakers.  Or visit the OutstandingPresentationsWorkshops.com website.

Register here.

Hope to see you there!