Office XP Tips: Fast Access to Key Files; Outlook Time-Savers

Use Word's Work menu and Outlook's right-click tricks.

Jim Welp

Long before I became OfficeGuy--when I was still a wee OfficeLad--I used to love the jokes in the back of Highlights for Children magazine. Remember those? One in particular made me spit grape juice all over the place when I read it. It went something like this: "At a fancy dinner party, the hostess turns to the guest and says, 'How did you find your steak?' The guest replies, 'I just looked under my potato and there it was!'" Okay, maybe you have to be six years old to appreciate it. Anyway, that joke came to mind this week when I discovered a couple of Office XP tips that had been hiding under potatoes. Or maybe, as Mom would say, I was just playing hooky from Office School on the day they taught these tips. First, Word has a hidden Work menu where you can store your most-used documents for easy retrieval. Second, Outlook has a couple of handy right-click tricks you might not have found.

Word's Work Menu

A few weeks back I wrote about quickly accessing recently used Word documents from the File menu or the Task Pane. In that newsletter I describe how to expand the recently used file list from the default four to as many as nine. To complement the recently used file list, Word offers a Work menu you can use to list files permanently. By adding the Work menu to your menu bar and putting your most enduring documents on it, you'll always have critical data at your fingertips. Unlike the recently used file list, the documents on the Work menu don't get bumped when you open other files. This trick is great for any files you use over and over again.

Here's how to do it: Choose Tools, Customize to open the Customize dialog box, then click the Commands tab. In the Categories list, scroll down to Built-in Menus and click it. Now scroll to the bottom of the Commands list, click Work, drag it to your menu bar or a toolbar, and let go. If you choose an off-limits location, Word displays an X near the mouse pointer. Otherwise, you'll see a plus sign and an I-beam that indicates where the button will go. Once you drop the menu where you want it, close the Customize dialog box. When you open the Work menu the first time, you'll see one command: Add to Work Menu. Use this command to add any open document to the menu. Once you add a document, its name appears as a Work menu command. Choose the name from the list to open that file. Pretty cool, eh?

If you think the procedure for adding the Work menu is hidden, wait until you get a load of how to remove files from the Work menu: To remove a file from the Work menu, first you must wait until the third Thursday of the month, but only if it's rainy. Then you must position your monitor so that it's facing Italy, and press the Home key seven times while chanting... Sorry. It's not quite that bad. Here's really how you do it: Hold down the Ctrl and Alt keys and press the Hyphen key. Your mouse pointer will turn into a large green minus sign. Now, open the Work menu and carefully click the file you want to remove.

Outlook: Right-Click Tips

Outlook has a couple of right-click tricks up its sleeve, both of which are handy for navigating. When you right-click an icon on the Outlook Bar (choose View, Outlook Bar if it's not on the left side of the Outlook window) or an item in the Folder List, a menu appears. On this menu are two commands I've come to deeply admire: Open in New Window and Advanced Find.

Open in New Window. Say you're tooling around in your Inbox and you want to check your calendar. If you click on your calendar in the Outlook Bar or the Folder list, the calendar replaces your Inbox. After you check your calendar, you need to return to your Inbox and find your place again--but not if you right-click your calendar and choose Open in New Window. When you do, Outlook opens a new window for your calendar and you can toggle back and forth using the Windows taskbar. This command is also great for checking e-mail in other folders and for opening tasks and contacts.

Advanced Find. Now say you're working in your Inbox and you want to search for another message in another folder. You know the message's contents and what folder it's in. Instead of switching folders and searching for it manually or choosing Tools, Advanced Find and specifying a folder to search in, do this: Right-click the folder you want to search in the Folder List or Outlook Bar and select Advanced Find. The Advanced Find dialog box appears, already hip to what folder you want to search. Specify your search criteria (such as the sender or keywords in the body text) and click Find Now. Lickety split, Outlook displays the message or messages that match your search terms in a window at the bottom of the dialog box.

Val Shares Her Shareware

In response to a couple of recent newsletters about Office XP macros, a kind and generous reader named Val Ingraham, of Lawrenceville, Georgia, wrote to recommend a keyboard utility called Keyboard Express. Val says, "Your article was very interesting, but I wanted a macro that would work in Outlook. Then I came across a shareware keyboard macro utility that works in any application (that I've tried so far anyway). It is very simple to use, and captures up to 514 keystrokes per macro. It's called (surprisingly) Keyboard Express 95, but it works with all versions of Windows through XP and Office XP."

Val, thanks for writing.