Friendly Web Tools Blog

Here’s a secret: I don’t always feel as friendly, knowledgeable and responsive as I sound when it comes to tech support e-mails. I just have a little tool that helps me out: Microsoft Office 2007 Quick Parts.

It’s a small tool that’s part of Outlook 2007 that saves phrases or images that you might frequently include in outgoing e-mail messages. You can select that snippet from your personal library to insert into messages whenever you want.

I use it for signoffs (“If you need to contact me, my info is below”) tech support hints (“If you need a reminder of your password, click the link that says Forgot Your Password”) or any other little things I frequently repeat.

[This is the third in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

Emoticons, short for “emotion icons,” and also known as smileys, are punctuation combinations that can help soften an informal message. Here are some frequently used emoticons and their definitions. Use them in moderation; too many can make your messages look too doodled-on.

: ) happy

: ( unhappy

; ) wink, jest

: D laughing

: O shocked

: p giving the raspberries, poking out tongue

>: ( mad

: x lips sealed

<:-| dunce

:-\ unsure

[This is the third in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

Here are a few easy tips for tidying up messy messages:

Check spelling and grammar before sending. Spell-check goes a long way toward making you sound smarter, but some people surprisingly don’t use it.

Don’t use all caps. I thought everyone knew this, but apparently not. Type the way books read. Otherwise you’ll look like you’re yelling. DON’T DO IT. See? It looks like I’m mad at you.

Don’t use all lower case. You’re not e.e. cummings. Properly capitalize.

Use a descriptive Subject line. Subject lines are summary lines. They should give a good indication of what’s to come. Still, I receive many messages that say things like, “Hi” or nothing at all. Write your message first, then come up with a good summary based on it to use in the Subject field.

Keep your temper. Don’t say anything in e-mail you wouldn’t say to someone’s face. You have to be so, so careful with e-mail. Take extra care not to sound snippy.

Overall, be selective in who you send messages to. If you’re not going to mail something to 150 people, then why would you e-mail it?

[This is the second in a series about e-mail. Read earlier posts under the category e-mail.]

It seems e-mail overload is inevitable as long as people reach for the sometimes sinister “cc” field. By including everyone in your address book, or even a handful of people who you might like to include in a discussion, you can create an overwhelming influx of mail. The cc field also has political issues. Some employees will include a higher up simply to make the main recipient look bad.

Here’s a simple rule to institute in your e-mail policy (your organization does have an e-mail policy, doesn’t it?): If someone needs to know something, then send it. But if it’s just nice to know, don’t cc it.

If you simply must forward a message, make sure it’s readable. This includes deleting all the irrelevant To and From fields and sending it in a usable format, even if it requires copying the contents of message attachments and pasting them into another.

E-mail has seemingly boundless attributes and has shaped the face of modern correspondence, but it can create unequaled debacles. In the right hands, e-mail is a speedy and effective way to pass news and keep in touch. But careless fingers can send sensitive material into the wrong in-box, clog up disk drive space and spoil relationships.

Even though everyone uses it these days, it’s worth stepping back, looking at the way we communicate with each other, and figuring out how that can be refined and improved. This week, I’ll look more closely at e-mail etiquette and practices and offer a few tips and tools to help you massage the most common missives you send in any given day.

First up: turn off type-ahead.

Most e-mail programs have a type-ahead, or auto-complete, function that remembers and stores addresses you send to. When you begin to enter a previously contacted address, your e-mail program will recognize it and offer suggestions for completing the text for you. This is meant as a time-saver, but it could get you in trouble if you continue to be nudged with the wrong address. You might jut choose the wrong one.

By sending a message to the wrong person, or hundreds of unintended recipients, you can create wasted time and disk space, not to mention a heap of trouble.

Be especially careful of group distribution lists, which can be a hazard if you work for a large organization. You may have a message - either incriminating or innocuous - that you mistakenly send to a larger group of people if you accidentally send it to a distribution list rather than an individual.

You can turn off type-ahead altogether, if your e-mail program will let you. Each one is different. Gmail doesn’t let you turn off auto-complete (someone correct me if you have different information - all I can find is others complaining about this). But you can delete stored e-mail addresses from the drop-down box by using the arrow keys of the address you want to delete, and then press the Delete button.

How to turn off auto-complete in Outlook 2003/2007:

1. On the Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click E-mail Options, and then click Advanced E-mail Options.
3. Under When sending a message, clear the Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields check box.

Sending text-based e-mails is easy, but making them fancy with colors, background, tables or other HTML tricks is another story altogether. Not all e-mail programs will accept all HTML-generated messages.

Some of our clients sidestep some requirements by subscribing to services that do this for them by providing templates. While some of these can help you create fancy e-mails, they’re not perfect. Spam catchers often restrict messages that are sent from Constant Contact, for instance.

But you can still send custom, fancy HTML e-mails without using someone else’s template with Premailer. This service cleans up your existing HTML file and puts it into a format that most e-mail programs can use, or at least alerts you to red flags so you can clean up your files yourself.

Give it a shot; this site has a sample set up so you can see how it works.

We’ve been invited by a client that serves synagogues to put together a series of quick-hit webinars based on common problems their constituency has with technology. We’re still not sure which will be the most welcomed by the community, so I wanted to open up to you for your vote. In exchange, we’ll host a presentation on the same topic for no charge. You can post your thoughts by clicking the comments link here or by contacting me directly.

Which would you rather learn?

• Put your first video on YouTube
• Create your first podcast
• Start your first blog
• Understand search engine optimization
• Create a Facebook group/cause
• Put photos on Flickr
• Understanding RSS
• Effective e-mailing

Thanks for your vote!

It’s not a question of if it will happen, but when. For me, I lost all my data about two weeks ago when my hard drive melted down. I very nearly lost it all, and had to rebuild quite a bit of data. Thankfully, I have a network of little safety devices that cover up my natural human stupidity. Here are three friendly tools within the grasp of any small business or nonprofit, which will help avert disaster:

1. Mozy (http://mozy.com/). Fast and easy automatic online backup. There’s a limited free plan for individuals (great for e-mail), a cheap $5 plan for piles of space.
2. Red Drive (http://www.jscape.com/reddrive/index.html). Directly access your Web files through Red Drive. It lets you bypass confusing FTP programs and let you treat an off-site storage place like any old drive.
3. Any freemail account (such as Gmail or Yahoo! Mail). Automatically cc your free webmail account on any outgoing message, and you’ll have a low-tech duplicate backup.