The Elvidge Family

MS Office & Outlook

Sync Outlook Calendars with Google Calendars (Multiple)

Monday, 31 August 2009 00:00 | Author: Paul |

Here's how you can still use Outlook - but have all the benefits of Google Calendars

Using Remote Calendars tool in Outlook:-

1. Close all instances of Outlook.
2. Visit the Remote Calendars download section and download the latest copy of the Remote Calendars zip file.
3. Extract and run setup.exe from the downloaded zip file.
4. If you get an error message saying "The Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Runtime is not installed.", you'll have to download and install VSTO 2005 from Microsoft's Downloads Center then run the Remote Calendars setup again.
5. If you get an error message saying "The Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies have not been installed.", take a trip back to Microsoft's Download Center; This time to download and install the Redistributable Primary Interop Assemblies. Don't let the technical jargon scare you. It's just a simple download and install.
6. Once you have Remote Calendars installed, open Microsoft Outlook. It may take a while to load the first time you run it after installing Remote Calendars.
7. When Outlook opens, you'll be presented with the Options Screen. You can tweak these as you like, or leave them as the defaults.
8. You'll notice a new toolbar that looks like this:
9. Click on the "Subscribe a remote calendar" button (the +.)
10. The dialog prompts you for your Remote calendar's url. In a separate browser, go to calendar.google.com or click here. Click on the down arrow next to the name of the first (or perhaps only) calendar you want synced with Outlook and select Calendar Settings. Right-click on the icon next to Private Address and select Copy Shortcut (or Copy Link Location in Firefox.)
11. Go back to Outlook and paste that url into the "Remote calendar's url" field.
12. Enter whatever you want for a name for this calendar, and adjust any other settings you like then hit Ok.
13. If you have more calendars on Google Calendars that you'd like synced with Outlook, complete steps 10-12 for each additional calendar.
14. Click on the "Reload all iCalendars" button in the plug-in's toolbar (second from the left) and all your Google Calendars will be imported into Outlook! Click this button whenever you make changes to your Google Calendar that you want imported.

Now all your Google Calendar items will work with your Outlook alerts, and you can sync them with your phone or PDA. Here's a few extra tips for tweaking your Remote Calendars:

-If you imported your Outlook calendar into Google Calendars, using Remote Calendar will put duplicates of each item into your Outlook calendar. I haven't found a good way to do this, but here's what I did:
.....Once you're comfortable with Remote Calendar, delete all your Remote Calendars using the "delete remote calendars" button. o Manually delete all the entries from your Outlook calendar that would conflict. Your Outlook calendar at this point should be basically bare. o Re-enter your entries into Remote Calendar. You'll then have just the entries imported from Google Calendar.
-If you have multiple calendars on Google Calendar, you can make entries from your separate Google Calendar appear in different colors in Outlook much like they do in Google Calendar. Here's an example of how to do this:
.....Let's say on Google Calendar you have two main calendars, Business and Personal colored blue and green, respectively.

When adding your Business calendar to Remote Calendar, click on the "Add categories to this calendar" button and select Business. Select whatever other options you prefer, then click Ok.
When viewing your calendar in Outlook, go to Edit>Automatic Formatting in this toolbar.
Click the Add button. Type in Business for the name, and select Business for the label.
Click the Condition button. Select the More Choices tab. Type Business in the Category field and click Ok, and Ok.
Do the same for Personal, substituting Personal for Business. Now your personal items in Outlook will appear in green, and your business items in blue. You can do the same thing for any type of category with any of the available label colors.

Any items you add directly to your Outlook calendar will not show up on your Google Calendar. * If you have synchronization software for your cell phone or PDA that works with Outlook, it will now be synchronised with your Google Calendar as well!

To have your Outlook sync with your Google Calendars whenever Outlook is loaded, go to the Options in Remote Calendar (rightmost button on the toolbar) and check the Automatic Update check box. Be careful! If you have a lot of items in your Google Calendar and this option selected, Outlook could take a long time to load.

Thank you to Grinn's Blogg for this information

How to open a Word 2.0 document in Office Word 2003

Wednesday, 03 December 2008 00:00 | Author: Paul |

If you are unable to open older Word / Excel or Powerpoint documents in your version of Office - This guide worked for me. It involves making changes to the system registry. Make sure you either doa registry back-up or system restore point before proceeding.
Here is the site

Fixing Outlook trying to send e-mail that doesn't exist (and Outlook Express)

Saturday, 08 November 2008 00:00 | Author: Paul |

This is usually a Read receipt that outlook is trying to send, its a common problem
If you have read receipts that won't send: Especially if you are away from home where you don't have SMTP working.
Option 1: Try changing the SMTP server in Outlook for the account to a server you can access and change it back to the one you normally use for the account.
Option 2: If that still won't send, you can delete them from the data store by following these steps.

Close Outlook, download and install OutlookSpy.
Select the folder you need to delete a hidden item from. For Read Receipts, this is the top level of your message store (Outlook Today folder).
After selecting the folder, click the IMsgStore button on the OutlookSpy toolbar.
In the new window, click the Open Root Container button at the top left of the window to open a new window.
Click the GetContents Table tab. The receipts are listed on the left. Select a receipt, choose Open entry button and a new window opens.
Click on IMsgStore::Abort Submit. Click OK, close the window. Now choose Delete. Repeat for each receipt. Close all OutlookSpy windows when you are finished. Close Outlook and uninstall OutlookSpy.

TO AVOID IN FUTURE: When Outlook asks you if you want to send a read receipt say no if you are away from your usual internet connection.

Here is what you do in Outlook Express:

Open Outlook Express and click 'send/receive'. Here you see the send error message - make a note of part of the e-mail address in the "To" field of the error email address.
Now open the Outbox. The outbox appears empty but the read receipt message is hidden.
Right-click on the outbox folder and click 'search'. Use part of the e-mail address you noted in the error to search for the e-mail.
The hidden e-mail should appear in the search results and you will be able to delete it.

Last Updated (Thursday, 29 October 2009 09:22)

Restore Outlook folder shortcuts

Saturday, 08 November 2008 00:00 | Author: Paul |

If Outlook messes up all your shortcuts in the left hand list, this is how I get them back to the default setting. (Happens too often for me!!)
1. Exit Outlook completely (no icon in the system tray)
2. Navigate to the folder that Outlook stores settings in. In Windows XP it defaults to:
C:\Documents and Settings\...your profile....\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
3. Find a file called Outlook.xml. Rename the file (in case you need to revert back) by calling it Outlook(old).xml or Outlook.xml.old.
4. Restart Outlook and you will notice all of your favorites are gone. Reset them to the way you would like, exit Outlook again and restart and you will have created a new Outlook.xml file which is not corrupt.

Removing Outlook Security Warning Messages

Thursday, 25 October 2007 00:00 | Author: Paul |

Outlook Security Settings bypassed easily

Advanced Security for Outlook allows you to determine the violator and specify the permanent action for this program (and remember the selection): allow access, block access or run the default Outlook handler. In future, the action specified by you will be executed automatically and Outlook Security will not bother you with messages about trying to access e-mail addresses you have stored in Outlook.

Advanced Security for Outlook Default Outlook warnings The standard security system has two drawbacks. First, it does not allow users to determine the source of the threat. Second, a lot of other applications developed before the security system appeared can be really annoying due to their constantly appearing warnings. Since the security system is constantly being updated, a "fresh" program can get into the list of such applications. There is still another drawback resulting from the first two: the user can temporarily disable the security system consequently allowing any other program to work without any security system restrictions.

Advanced Security for Outlook solves all the above problems providing the information not only about the type of an alert, but also about the program that caused. It is also possible to specify for this (and only this!) program the permanent action: allow access, block access or run the default Outlook handler. Later on you can change or delete the action. You probably know that there is a range of tasks (which is rather narrow) that an Outlook developer can implement only by using the object model and its "blocked" methods. In this case Advanced Security is an indispensable program.

Download Advanced Security plugin from Microsoft here