Elevate Your Workflow - Day-to-day Game Changers

In this edition of NEWS YOU CAN USE, we are rethinking the routine activities we all do. Sometimes the tools and workflows we use daily are left to the default options. We may even treat them as “necessary evils” because we aren’t aware of any other way. Well, we are here to change that by introducing five ways to elevate your workflow. These five tips may be just the game changer you need.

1.???Automatic Daily (and/or Weekend) Out-of-Office Messages in Outlook

Many of us are familiar with the typical out-of-office message we might set up if we are on vacation or attending a conference. Remote work has introduced many flexible benefits. However, it can feel like you must be “on” at all times. The simple answer people might suggest is to not look at emails at other hours, or not having an email app on a phone. While that does sound nice in theory, that can be much harder for some of us to do in practice when projects need to keep moving.

A neat hack that could get you the best of both worlds involves Microsoft Power Automate. This brings us to our first day-to-day game changer.

With Power Automate, you can set up an automated “Flow” that will trigger your out-of-office messages in Outlook at the time of your choosing on a recurring basis, or at any time you want with the click of a button. The great part about this is that it acknowledges to the sender that the message was received, and your mind is put at ease because the automation took care of your initial response – not you. This leaves you time to truly disconnect and then get back to the person in a more meaningful way during your actual working hours.

Here is one of multiple ways that you can set this up

1. Sign up/Sign in to your Power Automate Account using your organization login
2. Search for “automatic replies” in the search field along the top of the main page
3. Select the template “Setup automatic replies in Office 365 Outlook on a recurring basis”
4. Set the recurrence, frequency, start time, end time, audience, and the actual messages you want to send
5. Once you save it, you can then “run” the "Flow"

Note: You may need to expand the prompts to gain access to the advanced options to fill out the additional information for the configuration

In one personal experience, this took a bit of testing to make sure the automation worked at the times it was supposed to. In this case, UTC was used with six added hours, meaning the automation would run for six hours the moment it is triggered (utcNow). It also considered Central Time across all hours of any given weekend. It was set at multiple hours in testing to be sure the out-of-office messages would not randomly turn off in the middle of the weekend.

This configuration can run for multiple hours at the click of a button whenever you choose to end your workday, and then it automatically turns on during the weekends without you personally triggering it. When it is triggered, it reflects your out-of-office status on MS Teams and in Outlook. Keep in mind that this is just one way of going about frequencies, starting times, and ending times.

One thing to note during testing is that utcNow will want to trigger the flow immediately. That probably isn’t ideal if you’re testing an out out-of-office message “Flow” in the middle of the day and then move on to something else. To stop this “Flow”, you can go to “My Flows” along the left side and select “Turn off” and then “Turn on” again. From there, you can try out different scenarios to see what will work for you.

2.???Automatic 2-Minute Delay on All Outgoing Emails in Outlook

The next day-to-day game changer focuses on email. It is an *unofficial* scientific fact that we only catch some things in our emails only after spell check and only after the messages are sent. Maybe an attachment was forgotten, or you forgot to add some pertinent information to your message. Maybe you forgot to add some people to the message, or there was a typo on the meeting time and date you suggested.

Rather than start up a whole new email with the correction or try to accept the annoying minor error, you can set up an automatic 2-minute delay on all outgoing emails in Outlook. This gives you ONE LAST CHANCE to correct anything the first time before it goes out.

Here is how you can do that:

1. Within Outlook mail, Go to Manage Rules & Alerts
2. Select New Rule
3. Select “Apply rule on messages I send”
4. Select Next in the next prompt without selecting conditions. Note: You will get a popup saying: “This rule will be applied to every message you send. Is this correct?” Select Yes to continue.
5. Select “defer delivery by a number of minutes.” Specify the number of minutes. Click Next.
6. You can specify an exception. In this case, if you mark your outgoing message as “high importance,” it will send the message immediately as opposed to sending it with a delay. This can come in handy if you need to send a message right away in real time on occasion.
7. Name the rule and turn on the rule!?

3.???Quick Parts in Outlook

Are you writing the same things over and over in your emails or meeting invites? With this next day-to-day game changer, you can save a fully formatted snippet into Quick Parts in Outlook. This works for formatted text, links, charts, tables, and more, as shown below.

Here is how you can create Quick Parts:?

1. Have the text, table, chart, etc. that you would like to use in a blank email, meeting invite, or appointment
2. Select all of it
3. Go to the Insert Tab> Quick Parts flyout
4. Select “Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery…”
5. Name your Building Block and Save it under Quick Parts

Now the fully formatted snippet will be available with just one click. Quick Parts also offers a quick preview of your saved snippet, so you can see immediately what you are inserting into your message, meeting invite, or appointment.

Note: You can also overwrite Quick Parts by simply selecting text again and calling it by the same name in the prompt when you save it.

4.???Elevated Image Capture

You may be familiar with a basic Snip & Sketch or Snipping Tool that might be already installed with Windows 10/11. But did you know there are additional features beyond the default options as well as other image capture tools out there?

Within Snip & Sketch, the default option is a box selection. Sometimes “composing” your screenshot to clearly indicate what you are talking about can take up some time. By selecting Freeform snip, you can cut around certain items right away and have that as your screenshot instead. Here is an example below where it is more apparent that we are drawing attention to only certain parts of a switchback staircase.

Additionally, you can draw straight lines using a ruler, curved lines using the protractor, and stylize the lines themselves in the next prompt if you do not like the default “freeform drawing” option. Alternatively, if you are “freeform” drawing, you can hold down Ctrl while zooming in with your mouse wheel to get in a bit closer and be more precise.

Have you ever carefully snipped a screenshot of a window or entire screen manually with the box selection simply because it was the default option? You can much more quickly do that with the dedicated buttons instead. Beyond the Freeform snip feature, Window Snip can capture a screenshot of just the one window even if it takes up only part of your screen. Also, the Fullscreen Snip can capture the contents of the entire screen.?

If you click the three dots at the top right of Snip & Sketch, you can gain access to the settings. From there, you can set this tool to open when you tap the PrtScn button, automatically save screenshots, and even add an outline to your screenshots. Colored outlines can work well if you are trying to differentiate correspondence back and forth with your screenshots vs. the sender’s screenshots.?

Of course, if you don’t like the “freeform” drawing options with Snip & Sketch, another option you might consider is a different tool altogether called Lightshot. This app allows for a great selection of annotations along the side of the snipped image. This is a great app for those who prefer straight lines, arrows, box shapes, and actual typing text as opposed to the “freeform” options, even though “freeform” is available with the app as well.

A fun fact about both Snip & Sketch and Lightshot is that both have their strengths, and both were used to gather the screenshots of each other for this newsletter edition. The Snip & Sketch allows for a “delayed snip” of up to 10 seconds, which in this case allowed for capturing what Lightshot looked like in action. In addition, Lightshot was configured to launch with the PrtScn button to capture Snip & Sketch in action. Why pick one when you can have the best of both worlds?

5.???Markdown vs. “Traditional” Formatting in your Writing

The last day-to-day game changer on our list is something that takes a little bit of a learning curve but is bound to enhance your productivity if you want to go this route. According to the Markdown Guide, the essence of Markdown is that it’s a certain way of typing formatting options as you’re writing as opposed to finding the right button up in a ribbon in Microsoft Word to visually see the change (Cone). The purpose of Markdown goes a lot deeper than that, but on the surface, it is a great option to consider.

Why would you care to learn Markdown?

Well, if you have ever had to fight your way through formatting in a Word document in the form of tables, headers, and more, you may want to consider learning a very simple “language” to take care of all of that for you.

For instance, instead of highlighting a selection of text and selecting a heading style, you may consider simply typing "# " in front of what you want to be a header.

Another example may be if you want to hyperlink part of your text. Instead of selecting the text and inserting the link, you may consider simply writing a certain syntax with the text and the link URL right after it.

Here is a very brief example of how Markdown language can be used to format your writing. This is by no means an exhaustive example. The below example uses Dillinger. On the left side of the screen is the Markdown text, and on the right side of the screen is the rendered output that can then be exported. This isn't the only option for using Markdown. Google Docs and even MS Teams offers some form of Markdown support. And for those who enjoy coding, VSCode may be a great option because Markdown lets you insert code snippets into your regularly formatted writing.?

The tricky part with Markdown is that there are a lot of “flavors” of it, and the various editors out there may work a little bit differently. For instance, there is a GitHub “flavored” Markdown that may accept slightly different syntax compared to a different editor.

Looking for an alternative to Microsoft Word? One option that we like is called IA Writer. This app seems to have a great selection of Markdown functionality while offering multiple output export formats such as .pdf & .docx. At the time of this writing, IA Writer is about $30. Free options beyond this may require a bit more setup for things to render properly. The most important thing to consider when trying Markdown editors is verifying it will do what you want it to do. The rendered output is especially important to consider since you need it to result in the formatting you want in the end. A table of the Markdown syntax, such as the one on the Markdown Guide website, or the actual guide from the vendor, would be your best reference for confirming the included features meet your expectations.

Conclusion

So there you have it: Five day-to-day game changers you should try... right now! Please feel free to let us know if there are specific topics you would like to see in the next edition of NEWS YOU CAN USE, brought to you by ENGworks Global.

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Sources Cited:

Cone, M. (n.d.). Markdown Guide. Retrieved November 8, 2022, from https://www.markdownguide.org/

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