How to color code email messages in your Outlook inbox

There are many ways to organize and categorize your email. One thing is clear and that is if you don’t make some kind of a system for yourself you will be snowballed by your own inbox.

In this post I will show you how to give some incoming emails a nice color. I also categories a lot but those I use mainly for the calendar. I have  special colors for projects, clients or super important stuff. It’s nice and colorful you shoot try it some time.

A good way of sorting is to use rules based on any condition using the rules wizard on the home tab in the move section. But what if you want something like urgent messages send from a monitoring system to stand out or the once from your boss? In that case it’s a good way to color code them.

Here’s how

Go to the view tab and in the beginning you find the current view section. Here you find a nice orb with a gear button called view settings. In the menu that pops-up we want the conditional formatting button. Here’s where the magic happens.

Just add a new rule with a nice catchy name and now we need to tell it what to do so we set the conditions. This part is similar to the rules wizard. Under the Advanced tab >> Fields button you find the all mail fields section. Here’s for instance the subject line you can use for server messages which often have the same subject.

Hope it helps you out and have fun color coding.

Compare differences in Word files using SharePoint versioning

A moment ago I got a question from a user who wanted to know what the differences where between two files (versions) in a document library which where uploaded.

I knew in Office there was a function to compare two documents but how to use it with SharePoint versions I never tried. Sometimes the answer is so close in front of you it turns invisible.

The trick is to just open the file from SharePoint in Edit mode. Word will open and under the review tab you find a button called compare. Just choose Specific version from the pull downmenu and a list with the versions inside SharePoint is being displayed. From here Word will take over and do the rest. Even if you choose to combine SharePoint will turn it in to a new version.

This function only works if versioning is enabled for that document library and is not available in Office Web Apps. You need the full Word application for this.

I had to shamelesly steal some images of the internet and make one with a Dutch version of Word, but all together it gives a nice image of the words descibed above  🙂

InfoPath form cannot be displayed because sessionstate is not available

Yesterday I had to place an InfoPath 2003 form on a MOSS 2007 farm. Everything seemed to be configured correctly. Accept after publishing I found the newly created form library and the form but when I tried to open it I was spoiled with a nice error message in a soft lightgray kind of way. It could have been red cause an error is an error people light gray or not it was not going to work.

Error Message
The form cannot be displayed because session state is not available.

 

Solution
The solution to fix this is simple, in the web.config of your site collections you find the SessionStateModule commented. just uncomment >> iisreset /noforce (so do this outside office hours 🙂 ) and you are up and running again.

To find this section just use ctrl+F and search on HTTPModules

 

Before

After

 

I have not checked it in SharePoint 2010 but I think it’s default already as it should be.