Category: How To

  • Start Outlook in Safe Mode

    In last week’s post, I mentioned starting Outlook in Safe Mode. While I didn’t expect it to help, I was at the point where I wanted to ensure I’d tried everything. Simply put, when starting Outlook in Safe Mode, you disable any add-ins that may be installed and causing issues. I’ll leave the question of…

  • Outlook: Calendar illegible in invites

    A little while back, I had an issue with Outlook not properly displaying the calendar in meeting invitations. It looked like this (which I’m sure you’ll agree is less than helpful): The issue was the same whether I was in the viewing pane or opened the invite, and persisted regardless of whether I’d responded or…

  • Use browser profiles for more efficient operations

    One of the complicating factors of my job is that I need to use the same tools, with different user credentials, often at the same time. For example, most of the companies I and my colleagues support use services that have some sort of integration with Microsoft Azure. As a result, I need to log…

  • Hide recipients in Outlook meeting bookings

    Like so many of you, I arrange a fair number of meetings for various purposes. Among these are the ones I arrange for the members of my union local in my capacity as its head. Now, EU – and thus also Norwegian – data protection law clearly categorizes union membership as one of the numerous…

  • Free text search in ADUC

    A critical component to successfully closing a lot of the tickets I handle at work is the ability to search for – and find – Active Directory User, Computer, and Group objects. In about eight of ten instances, I’m able to do so using the standard search types (searching for Users, Contacts, and Groups or…

  • A better way of finding users’ group memberships

    More than six years ago, I wrote a post, detailing how I could identify users’ Active Directory group memberships. While the method I detailed certainly works, it isn’t as simple as it might have been. Having recently found myself needing to perform that very same task again, I decided to revisit this topic, to show…

  • Excel: Calculate percentage

    I need to calculate what percentage one number is of another on a relatively regular basis. Luckily, it is relatively easily done using functions in Excel. Here’s how: For the purposes of this example, let’s assume that the source number (i.e. the one which we are comparing with) is in field A12, and the number…

  • Excel: Combine two columns

    While analysing an Excel sheet the other day, I needed to combine two columns so that I could get names in the format firstname lastname (the list had been provided as lastname,firstname). As it happens, doing so is relatively easy. You do it on a cell by cell basis, by using basic excel commands. If…

  • Improving your Google-fu

    Search engines can be a great way of finding what you’re searching for. Using them to their fullest extrent, however, requires a bit of knowledge about how to structure your searches. These examples are some that I use on a regular basis: Quotation marks searches for everything between them “James Brown” returns results matching James…

  • Deleting site-specific cookies in Chrome

    On occasion, the single sign-on authentication for a few of the systems I work with stops working due to an issue with the cookies stored in my web browser. The solution is simple enough; delete the cookies, and Bob’s your uncle. I don’t, however, want to delete all cookies, as that would mean that all…

  • How to block everyone who likes a tweet on Twitter

    I am a relatively active Twitter user. One of the things I do in order to keep Twitter a fairly enjoyable place, is to actively use the Block feature. I usually leave it at blocking individual users, but some tweets are simply so nasty that I don’t only want to block the user that tweeted…