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I am a packrat, I keep everythign or at least try to keep everything and that of course includes any computer stuff. I have a folder on my home computer called Bills Business and I dump anything to do with online marketing in there, it is sitting at 4.5 gigs Anyway at work I currently have 3371 read messaages in my inbox (not very GTD) and a ton more in my Outlook PST files. That backgrounder will kind of tell you why I care about indexing.

I have tried lots of apps to try to do quick searching of my Outlook because the built in search for Outlook is horribly slow. I have tried the built in Microsoft Search, Google Desktop Search and a couple of others but I always get performance issues. There never seems to ber a way to index stuff on my PC without it slowing down everything on my computer.

Xobni seems to have changed that. Xobni is a free plugin for Outlook that Microsoft is apparently trying to buy that will index all of your mail as well as data mining your people and conversations so that you can know more about your conversations and easily get a chance to have contact info related to your Outlook contacts / email.

Xobni is just in public beta right now but it seems to be really stable and is very unobtrusive, Xobni just sits as a compressed sidebar in the right side of your Outlook available by one mouse click. Xobni also has indexed all of my email really quickly and has not slowed down my computer at all and with a simple search window at the top of Xobni I am able to search quickly and instantly get results.

Not many tips before Office 2003 is done as Office 2007 will be out in just a couple of weeks but I ran across this yesterday.

When you want to save the names and email addresses that autofill as you type in Outlook as you delete a profile or move someone to a new computer and are not using the files and setting transfer wizard then there is one file that you need to save.

Go to the C:\Documents and Settings\ \Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook folder and copy out all of the files. The file that autofills names and emails that you have used previously is the file that ends with .NK2 Now that you have this file saved you can just drop it into the new folder after created by the installation of outlook on the new machine or computer build.

The NK2 file is an encrypted, or at least not very readable file that can only be read correctly in Outlook but this is a great timesaver for many and I know people hate it when they have lost the autofill for their Outlook email addresses

This time we will talk about some related to your office daily work. Did you encounter the following situation? You want to send an email with a Word file attachment, but the email cannot be send out cause the Word file is too large. And you waste many efforts in making the file slim. You can try the following methods, which can reduce the size a lot.

1. Save as
In Menu, choose “File > Save As”, and save the file with a new name. You can compare the new file with original one; you will find that the file size of new one is much smaller.

You can also work in this way. Select the whole content of the document, copy and paste it to a new blank document and save it. Again, you will that file size of two documents is different.

2. Delete old versions
If there are many old versions kept in the file, the file size will be larger. In Menu, choose “File > Version”, check to see if there is any old version saved. You can delete those versions with no value to make the file slim.

3. Insert pictures wisely
“Insert Picture” is one of the main reasons for the word file get fat. Try to insert a smaller picture. You can use graphic editor to reduce the size of picture before insert into the file. The file format should use GIF or JPG and do not use those high-resolution graphic, like BMP.

4. Don’t “Embed True Type Font”
“Embed True Type Font” will increase the size of word file. In Menu, choose “Tools > Options”, switch to “Save” tab page. Confirm that your word file have no true type font, and cancel the “Embed True Type Font” option. If you embed true type font, then choose “Embed characters in use only”.

Try the above four methods, you will see your word file getting slim.

About The Author
Isaac Chu is Project Director of Evinco Solutions Limited. Evinco provides innovative business softwares, include emarketing web solutions, email marketing software, e-catalog publishing software, invoicing software, and electronic cheque writer. Visit: www.evinco.com.hk.

Here is how to create a menu with the documents in Microsoft Word that you are currently working on

On the Tools menu, click Customize and then click the Commands tab.

Under Categories, click Built-in menus, and then from under Commands, drag the Work menu to your toolbar.

Opening and Saving of files in Microsoft Office 2003 can be much faster. If you would like to add custome places in the left hand column of the open or save as dialog boxes just create a text file and add the following text inside it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces]

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\Open Find\Places\UserDefinedPlaces\Place2]
“Name”=”root”
“Path”=”c:\\”
“SortAscending”=dword:00000000

And save this file with a .reg extension so that it adds to the registry. The above example will create a place called “root” and will open up the C: drive to save in or open from. You can of course change it to whatever folder is your default that you would like to use.

If you are using Microsoft Office XP instead of Microsoft Office 2003 then simply change the 11.0 in the script to 10.0 and you will be fine