Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: How To

  • Exporting a list of a given users group memberships from Active Directory

    A while back, I showed you how to export a list of all members of a group, as well as all computers, from Active Directory. On a related note, here’s how to export all group memberships held by a single user:

  • Understanding Active Directory Distinguished Names

    In Active Directory, and I assume any system using LDAP, a Distinguished Name (DN) is a way to identify a given user with confidence. It is a string of Relative Distinguished Names, separated by commas. There are a number of different RDNs in existense, but for our purposes, these are the ones we might need:

  • Outlook: Disable new mail notifications for all but main account

    When adding extra email accounts in the regular way, Outlook will notify you of new emails in each and every account. Though this can be annoying, it is simple enough to do something about. Here’s how:

  • Hiding the scroll bar in Word

    So, you’ve minimized your menu ribbon. Now, let’s get rid of that pesky scroll bar. You’ve got a perfectly good scroll wheel on your mouse, and just don’t need it. It’s simple; here’s how:

  • Hiding the Office Ribbon menu

    For most of my time as a computer user, my main text editing tool has been Microsoft Office. I have grown accustomed to using, and even sort of liking the ribbon menu. However, as I often work on a laptop with its severely limited monitor real estate, I needed to find a way to hide […]

  • Outlook: Delegate sending permissions

    Last week I showed you how to send as a different address. You might also want to allow someone else to send on behalf of you. Here’s how:

  • Outlook: Sending as a different email address

    So, you’ve become responsible for answering questions to your company from the public. Congratulations! You’ve been instructed to use the no-reply address when doing so, and told that you have been given the permissions necessary to do so. Now you need to set that up. Here’s how:

  • How to find who is locking a file on a network share

    Every now and again, a user will call in to find out who has a file open from a network share, effectively locking everyone else out from making edits to that file. Here’s how:

  • Changing the default template in Microsoft Word

    A while back, I had a user ask me how he could change the default template in Word. I realized that it had been so long since I had done anything of the sort myself, that I needed to look it up. Finding that this was something I had not documented, I decided to do […]

  • Exporting a list of all computers from Active Directory

    Last week I covered how you can use the DSQuery command to export members of a given AD Group. This week, on a related note, I will cover how to use the same basic command to export all computer accounts in Active Directoy.

  • Exporting members of an Active Directory group

    A while back, my boss came to me, asking me if I could get him an export of the users that are members of two groups in Active Directory. For the purposes of this blog post, let’s call them “OfflineUsers” and “Software Access”. As it turns out, this is pretty easy to do. Here’s how: