Heya, Microsoft Developer people.  I just wanted to say that I really like Office 2007.  Oh, and Vista.  A Lot.

Thank you for your time.

–
Wayne

Where’s the keyboard shortcut for “Paste Unformatted”?

I use this a *lot*.  CTRL-C and CTRL-V are all fine and good, but there are so many times I use the clipboard between excel, word, the web, snagit, sharepoint designer, outlook, visio, picasa, etc that I REALLY want a keyboard shortcut for pasting unformatted text.  Maybe this isn’t even an Office issue but a XP/Vista request.  I don’t want to have to paste into notepad/vim and then re-paste into the app. 

Don’t get me wrong - I love the new dropdown on the Office Ribbon

It saves me some time.  But I want to save MORE time.

Speaking of keyboard shortcuts, where’s Mark as Read?

Outlook is awesome, really.  I use the “unread” search folder as my real inbox so I can manage all the various subfolders that have unread mail.  I used to have it set such that an item was marked read after a couple seconds of seeing it, but that got annoying because if unread was empty, and the item just popped up, then it was marked as read. I missed a lot of email that way.  So I set it to mark as read when I move away from it, and that works great, except for when I want to move it to a folder.  For some reason, the act of me moving an email to a folder keeps it’s read/unread status!  I want to be able to control this.  Sure, I can right-click and choose “mark as read” but I don’t like taking my hands off my keyboard (we’re very close).  So if I had a KB shortcut (or the ability to say that moving to a folder counts as “read”) that would fix that issue nicely.

Thread highlighting would be cool

It’s cool and all that Outlook lets you sort your inbox by conversation (thread), but sometimes that’s too much work for when dealing with hundreds of emails a day with lots of people.  I did say Outlook was awesome, didn’t I?  Help me, help you make it more awesomer-like.

So you know what I’m talking about, when I manage my email, I use the preview pane on the right with the folder list on the left:

And what I’m talking about is easily finding the related messages (ie, emails in the same thread) visually when you click on one message.  I also want a little indicator at top and bottom of header scroll pane to tell me if there are more above or below.

And then I guess my follow-up suggestion is a quick keyboard shortcut where you can auto-filter the header scroll pane to just that conversation (for quick delete / file) and then back to non-filtered.

Think of it as a graphical pivot-table filter for email.

I’m getting goosebumps just THINKING about how good my suggestion is.

Ooh, Ooooh!  It would be REALLY cool if it did different colors for different similarities!  Like emails in same thread would be pink, and emails from same sender would be green and emails with similar distribution lists (TO:)!  How cool would THAT be?!?!?

Sharing Calendars with others in Outlook 2007

At our company, we use “open calendaring” meaning just about everyone’s calendar is shared to the rest of the company.  If you have something private, mark it private.  This is more than just free/busy.

In Office 2003 and earlier, you could right-click on the Calendar, select Sharing or Properties, and then add a person or distribution group as a “Reviewer”.  This enables them to open your calendar and actually see the items on it. 

It’s real convenient when scheduling meetings because you can just hover over the “busy” time and see what they’re doing instead of just seeing that they’re busy:

But in Office 2007, this is NOT available any more.  At least, as far as I can find.  Nope, in Office 2007, you need to go to your calendar and select “Share My Calendar”.  When you do this, it brings up an EMAIL dialog box where you send a “sharing invitation” that allows the recipient to view your calendar and optionally asks to view their calendar.

This might be fine and good if you just want to share to one person, or maybe a couple.  But our standard is to share to ALL the company (”Company All”) and if we had every person sending an email to the whole company all the time (not to mention the request permission part), that would be pure pandemonium.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun to watch.

I’m just saying I wouldn’t want to be the one held responsible