I recently had to do some modification to my Office 2003 installation, which included re-installing part of it. That reminded me of the trouble I had when I first installed 2003. Not that there was anything wrong with the new software, it was just that the new Office doesn’t include the old Microsoft Photo Editor, which is actually my editor-of-choice. Nothing I’ve tried is faster to use to crop an image, blur parts of it, and set it up as a jpg for a web page. In addition, it is the easiest thing to use to make a background transparent.It turns out that I’m not the only one who misses Photo Editor. There’s a great post at TechTrax that explains exactly how to get this jewel back. Essentially, it’s a pain in the neck. Oh well, something you should only have to do once, hopefully ;)

For an even shorter set of instructions (but not nearly as much fun to read), check out the official Microsoft Help and Support page.

An email discussion with a new friend of mine made me think about my backup strategy. It’s actually pretty complicated, making use of command-line WinZip, Vice Versa Pro, and FolderShare. However, she pointed out that something she thought was being backed up actually wasn’t (specifically her EverNote database). This made me think, and check how recent my backups were. It turns out that neither my EverNote database nor my Outlook.pst file were being backed up.

Let’s ignore EverNote for now and focus on the Outlook.pst. I managed to get a backup going, but it required some scripting with AutoIt, because I had to end some processes. Now, it turns out that if Outlook is open, you can’t zip, or copy, the outlook.pst file. Fine, just shut down outlook. However, it still wasn’t working on my machine. I did some debugging, and discovered that my Rainlendar (see my review) was keeping a lock on the file. This makes sense, since it was showing the outlook data. However, even shutting that down didn’t work. What else could be locking that file?

Well, it turns out that Copernic Desktop Search (see my review) was *also* locking the pst file. Interesting. It doesn’t lock any other file that I know of. Anyway, knowing this, the scripted backup isn’t too bad: shut down processes, copy desired files somewhere, start processes up again. I just finished tweaking it this morning.

Then, tonight, I was reading the Download Squad RSS feed, and there was a post about a Big list of free Microsoft apps. I was curious and so followed the link to The Road to Know Where and from there to another page on the same blog that lists FREE Microsoft Office Software. Halfway down the page is a link to the Personal Folders backup, a Microsoft Outlook 2003 Add-in. I downloaded and installed the add-in. Pretty painless. To run, you open Outlook, goto File, select Backup and then follow the prompt. So I tried it. Sigh. It runs as soon as Outlook is turned off. Unfortunately, Rainlendar and CDS are still running at the time. So, it doesn’t really work for my system.

However, if you use Outlook 2003, and want to be able to backup your personal folders easily, and don’t have other programs like Rainlendar or CDS that are locking the file, this would be a great solution for you :)

Back in November 2005, DownloadSquad had a post about the Rainlendar Desktop Calendar. I decided to try it out and liked it; however, I wanted to use it for a while before giving my opinion on of. After all, did I really want/need a calendar that sat on my desktop, especially when I always had Outlook open? I did use to use the Active Desktop Calendar, which I absolutely loved, but at that time, I wasn’t using a combination of Outlook and my Palm to organize my GTD stuff. ADC was great in itself, but it didn’t hook (at that time) into Outlook like Rainlendar does. (Aside: I notice on the ADC web page that it does now have “direct connection with Outlook”, hmmmm.)

I’ve been using it for a couple of months now, and Rainlendar gets to stay in the stable, or on my desktop, depending on how you look at it. It’s a great little piece of software that I use to give me a quick view of what’s on my hard landscape. I use Rainlendar to show me two months of calendar, plus a list of the next seven days of hard landscape items. You can see what it looks like on my desktop in the image below. I’ve blurred out the details to protect the innocent.

You’ll notice that there’s actually details, but I didn’t input them into Rainlendar. Instead, I let it hook into my Outlook calendar information - what a great ability! I don’t have to keep two sets of info, and yet I get to see my calendar in a nice, easy-to-read format, without all of that Outlook bloat. It is also possible to show your task list from Outlook, but I found this overwhelming - there was no way to filter it.

There are even more details about what you can do with Rainlendar in another DownloadSquad post. Also, it’s skinnable; there are some pretty nice skins. I’m sticking with the transparent look for now (the skin is called Shadow3.1 and I think it came with the program). And, oh, it’s freeware :)

Here’s a few good/bad points I’ve noticed over the past two months:

Good

• plug in to tie in directly to information available in Outlook, so don’t have to enter any more information (however, this is read only)
• like the Events list: shows me exactly what I’ve got on my hard landscape for the next 7 days in an easy to read format
• like the fact that I can choose exactly how I see my calendar, e.g., I choose to see this month and next month. You can see an entire year if you want, or just one month, or anywhere in between. You can also choose how many rows and columns to display them in, e.g., I have 1 column x 3 rows. You could do four months in a 2 x 2 fashion, etc.
• arrows to scroll through months as well
• tool tips show up when you mouse over a particular date in the calendar - even shows notes in a calendar entry

Bad

• no way to really sort entries in to do list; inserted LIFO fashion, i.e., last one entered is at the top of the list; but offers an interesting perspective of your NA list (actually, it is possible to have the new task entries added at the bottom of the list, but that runs off the screen for me, and it’s not very useful for me to see the oldest NAs)
• no way to pick what categories of NAs go into the To Do list - this would have been a useful feature
• annoyance: to do list doesn’t come back on reboot, have to go into config/advanced/outlook plugin settings, select okay, okay, then it shows up

Categories: software, outlook

There’s an active thread over at the David Allen GTD Forum that ends up comparing EverNote and OneNote. Follow this link to the second page of posts and look for Euler’s post #17 and Emuelle1’s post #18. There’s just too much stuff there to repeat here. But if you’re looking for more information on what you can do with OneNote and EverNote, check it out.

Categories: evernote, onenote, gtd

======================================:: GTD Wannabe:: Command to append text to a file:: 22 Jan 06:: In response to: http://groups.google.com/group/43Folders/msg/68b3cc8169188eb4:::: First param is name of the file, including extension:: Second param is the text to be appended to the file:::: Assumes that this command will be run in the same:: directory as your target text files

:: Filename is first paramset filename=%1%

:: Remove the quotation marks from the second parameterset text=%2%set textclean=%text:~1,-1%

:: Write the current date/time and second parameter::text to the appropriate text file

:: These two lines put the date/time and text one one line.  Remove the:: if that’s what you want.::echo %date% %time% %textclean% >> %filename%::echo. >> %filename%

:: These lines put the date on a line, time on a line,:: and text on a line.  Add in :: if you don’t:: want it done this way.  See block immediately above.echo %date% >> %filename%echo %time% >> %filename%echo %textclean% >> %filename%echo. >> %filename%======================================================

command: appfilename: app.batstartup path: F:… <== wherever you hid the batch file parameters: $I$  

app testing.txt "Get the darned milk!"

Sun 22 Jan 0619:37:40.60Get the darned milk! 

Categories: slickrun, scripts