Sometimes I don’t want a signature in Outlook. I’m tired of highlighting and erasing my corporate mandated signature with all the legal jargon on it on internal facing emails. Is there a quick way to do that?

I have three signatures in my Outlook; 1) External Signature, 2) Internal Signature and 3) Blank.

For the external signature, I put all the fancy logos, legal jargon and phone numbers and emails.

For my internal, it literally says, "Thanks, Curt, Phone#".

My last one is named Blank and has nothing in the signature body. The advantage to having that last one is that when I select it, Outlook is smart enough to remove the previous signature.

So, I can leave my external signature as the default and select the Blank signature to quickly kill the previous signature when I’m just replying to people or creating a really informal email. This saves a few seconds of selecting and deleting and keeps me from accidentally keeping the small font formatting in my email from the legal jargon at the bottom.

Let me know if this helps you out!

I just upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007 from 2003 and everything is moved. I can’t find anything! My productivity has shot through the floor. I’m so frustrated!

Join the club.

You can buy back most of the menus for $29.95 if you want it bad enough.

Here’s a page for finding out where things have moved to for Word and one for Excel.

Of course, you can always try F1.

Can I customize the Ribbon? Short answer, "No". Of course not. Why on earth would you ever want to do that?

I’ll update this page as I suffer learn more.

When I accept a meeting in Microsoft Outlook, the meeting request is deleted but I want to keep it in my inbox. How do I do that?

I recently upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2007. I had figured this out in 2003 and was really happy the way things were working. But, after the upgrade, it got set back to the default of deleting when you respond to the meeting request. So, I had to hunt it down again and change it. I thought I would write it up in case there was anyone out there that might need it.

Here’s how you keep your meeting requests in Outlook after you’ve responded to it by accepted or declining the meeting:

1. From the Outlook menu, choose "Tools | Options".
2. On the Preferences tab, click E-mail Options….
3. On the "E-mail Options" window, click Advanced E-mail Options….
4. On the "Advanced E-mail Options" window, uncheck Delete meeting request from Inbox when responding.
5. Click all of the OK buttons to save the changes and close the windows.

Now, all of your meeting requests will stay in your inbox. Yeah!

How do I turn off the really loud beep when I change my volume and do other things in XP?

The beep can be pretty loud when you are trying to adjust your volume.  So loud that it can annoy your cube mates–especially if you are trying to get the volume just right :).

I finally discovered how to turn off that beep and all other beeps that aren’t really tied in to the Windows sound interface. There is a "device" named "Beep" that you must disable.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Right click on My Computer.
2. Go to the Hardware tab.
3. Click Device Manager. The Device Manager window will open. If you know how to get to this window some other way, that’s fine.
4. Here’s the trick. From the View menu, choose Show hidden devices.
5. Under the Non-Plug and Play Drivers, find the Beep driver.
6. Right-click on it and chose Disable from the menu.

You may have to reboot after doing this. After you’re done, check it out. Go to the volume control and adjust away without bothering your cube mates (or your sleeping wife who’s been asleep since 10:00 and it’s now 2:00 am 🙂 ).