Thursday, May 23, 2013

Attachment Reminder feature in Outlook 2013

I recently setup a new desktop machine and decided to try Office 2013.

In general, I find Office 2013 to be a disappointment.  I'm not a fan of the new user interface, the applications seem slightly slower all around than Office 2010 on my prior desktop machine, and the small changes they made in the Office applications make it consistently less usable and less efficient for me.  I tend to use a lot of features in the Office applications, so perhaps I am an exception to their use cases.

I spend a lot of time in Outlook, and Outlook 2013 is particularly annoying.  The new limited contact window that pops up when you right click on an e-mail to add a new contact is horribly crippled, and the "Search People" field that used to open a contact when you typed a name and pressed enter, now requires you to type a name, press enter, then click a contact, even though there is only one contact in the search results!  It all seems like a half-baked design.

While I would not recommend upgrading from Office 2010 to Office 2013, I stumbled upon ONE very small new feature in Outlook 2013 that actually provides some real value.

Today I tried to send an e-mail to a customer, and the following dialog box appeared.






Sure enough, I had forgotten to attach a Word document.

Apparently Outlook 2013 scans the message contents and tries to determine if you intended to attach a file.

Based on a few tests, I haven't been able to determine the specific words or phrases that trigger this feature.  It worked for some test e-mails, but not others, so I don't know that it will catch my absentmindedness all of the time, but if it reminds me a few times, it will be a handy feature.

Steve Endow is a Dynamics GP Certified Trainer and Dynamics GP Certified IT Professional in Los Angeles.  He is also the owner of Precipio Services, which provides Dynamics GP integrations, customizations, and automation solutions.

http://www.precipioservices.com

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