Madd0's Tech Blog

Do you know the Sysinternals tools?

You probably do if you're an IT pro or a developer. For those who don't, it's a series of free utilities written by Mark Russinovich that are essential to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows systems and applications. I even need one of the Sysinternals tools for my classes: ZoomIt allows you to zoom and draw on the screen.

Microsoft acquired Sysinternals some time ago and since then the tools have been available, always for free of course, from the TechNet website. I, like many others, downloaded the whole suite and keep it in USB drives and my "Utils" folder. Even though the website's fine to learn more about each of the individual tools, it's not very practical when it comes to downloading and keeping them up to date.

Fortunately, the Sysinternals Team had the brilliant idea of actually sharing these files like you probably share your files on your home or office network, allowing you to run the tools from any computer connected to the Internet without having to navigate to a webpage, download and extract them. All you have to do is visit http://live.sysinternals.com/, which is simply a website with "Directory browsing" on or, even better, use the direct UNC link (\\live.sysinternals.com\Tools\) and run the tools directly. You'll probably want PowerShell installed for command line tools then, but those are the exception and all of the Windows apps will execute fine.

If you cannot seem to find your way around Office 2007 after working with the previous versions of the Microsoft suite, you're probably not the only one. Luckily, a few developers at Microsoft figured out that, as good as the new ribbon may be (believe me, it is!) a few improvements wouldn't hurt and came up with an add-on that they called Search Commands. Unfortunately, they only released this internally.

These days, however, keeping tools like this internal is not a very good idea, even if they're not perfect; especially when the news of their existence has leaked into the general public. The official version is probably a little different, but I'll say that it's for this reason that Microsoft opened the new Microsoft Office Labs.

Sure, Live Labs, Office Labs, it could all get pretty confusing, like figuring out the difference between the MSN and the Live brands, except that with the "Office" keyword we can be pretty sure that what we will see here are applications and/or features related to the Office suite and, who knows, maybe even previews of what's coming next. The first application coming out of the new Labs is the Search Commands add-on that I mentioned above.

It installs on Word, PowerPoint and Excel and appears as a tab in the Office ribbon. The tab has a Guided Help button that will get you started.

In short, what the add-on does is provide a search field, which, by the way, is accessible with the keyboard shortcut . When you start typing a name, the ribbon will show you a list of matching commands. You can click on the one you're looking for, or use the numerical keyboard shortcut next to each icon.

A couple of nice features are also available, such as spelling suggestions:

And if you're interested in locating the command that you just found in the ribbon, the very informative tooltips will help you with that:

It's also possible that the command is not located in the ribbon at all, like the Copy As Picture command above, in which case the tooltip will say so, but I don't think that deserves a screenshot.

That's it! It maybe doesn't sound as much, but it's actually a pretty useful tool for the power user, who can access all commands without ever leaving the keyboard, as well as for the beginner, who will find commands "hidden" in the new ribbon.

More importantly, the fact that this tool is publicly available and that an Office Labs web site was set up shows that Microsoft wants to be closer to the user (notice the big Feedback button in the screenshots above) and isn't afraid of following other companies such as Google, in releasing products and features in a "Lab" environment. This is how Gmail was born after all, and nobody can deny Gmail's success today, even though it still hasn't left the beta stage.

That's right! Not everything that reaches your inbox is actually for you and, therefore, it doesn't deserve your full, and especially not your immediate, attention.

So, what is all this mail doing in your inbox in the first place? There are different types of e-mails:

• there's the e-mail that someone sent you expecting action and/or a reply from you;
• there's the e-mail that you receive because someone wants to keep you in the loop either by sending you the e-mail directly (i.e. your name is in the To field) or by putting you in Cc;
• and finally there's all the other e-mail that reaches your inbox and that doesn't really concern you directly. I'm mostly talking about mailing lists here: either lists you subscribe to in order to be informed of stuff or lists you're added to within your company.

This, of course, is only one of many ways of categorizing e-mail.

Nevertheless, notice how each one of these categories inherently needs less time from your part. You may want to check e-mail from the first category several times a day and act upon it; the second category deserves maybe 3 or 4 checks, just to keep up; and the last category can be easily handled by taking a look at it once or twice a day. Can't you feel the performance gain already?

Of course, this gain only comes if your e-mail client can sort your mail for you. I'm using Outlook 2007 to sort my e-mail into these three categories using two simple rules:

1. Apply this rule after the message arrives
   where my name is in the Cc box
   move it to the @CC folder
     and stop processing more rules
2. Apply this rule after the message arrives
   where my name is not in the To box
   move it to the @Not for me folder
   except where my name is in the Cc box
      or except if sent to Important List 1; Important List 2

@CC and @Not for me are folders that I created under my Inbox. They represent the last two choices within my three categories of e-mail. Messages from the first category, my e-mail, will stay in the Inbox. Notice that I added a couple of exceptions to the catch-all "Not for me" rule, because I know that e-mail sent to certain distribution lists is as important as if I was a recipient in the To list.

By using this automatic sorting method, e-mail became suddenly a lot less stressful for me, simply because, even if I see unread mail in my Outlook, I can quickly check whether it's e-mail that deserves my immediate attention (e-mail that stays in the Inbox) of whether it's something I might not even care about (Not for me folder).

This system obviously works better if your friends and coworkers know how to address an e-mail (or a letter for that matter). I can attest to good results, even without colleague training, though.

Have fun sorting your e-mails ;)

Photo by I am I.A.M.