Tag Archives: Outlook 2007

Menu Bar Shortcut Glitch in Outlook 2007

Technical Tips, , ,

For those who like to use keyboard shortcuts in general, you might find an oddity in Outlook 2007. When pressing Alt+e, instead of dropping down the edit menu, it only highlights “Edit”. If you have installed Business Contact Manager as well, keep reading.

One of the shortcuts in the Business Contact Manager toolbar is “E-mail Auto-link”, and it uses the same keyboard shortcut than “Edit” in the Menu bar. So Alt+E can be used for either. That is the reason why the keyboard shortcut doesn’t pull down the menu. If you press Alt-E several times, it will switch between highlighting “Edit” in the menu bar and highlighting “E-mail Auto-link” in the BCM toolbar.

So that’s the reason. What is the handling? Stop using Outlook 🙂 . The next simplest is: uninstall BCM. Right next to it is just disable the add-in through the tools menu. If you do use BCM and getting rid of it is not an option, you can change what letter activates the “Edit” menu. Notice that as of this writing I have not found a way to hide the toolbar or change what letter activates the “E-mail Auto-link” button in the BCM toolbar – that seems to me like the real glitch!

Feel free to get in touch if you need instructions or help on how to change the shortut in the “Edit” menu or anything related to this.

Copying Contacts to Business Contacts in Outlook 2007 with BCM

Technical Tips, ,

While talking to a friend I got his contact information in my smartphone running Windows Mobile 6.1, including a picture I took of him on the spot. When I got to my computer, I proceeded to synchronize to my Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager. Since it was business related, after I got it in my contacts, I proceeded to do the usual copying to “business contacts”. Right click, drag to business contacts… got an error message “cannot copy the items. The folders you are trying to change do not support this operation”.

That’s new. I have done the same operation before without any error message so what was different this time? googled the error, found one match, and the issue was not resolved in that reference. Ok. So I’m on my own. So what was different? I realized that I seldom included a picture in my phone contact before I synced, so I tried that. Deleted the picture in the Outlook contact in my computer, tried to then copy to business contacts… success! then I imported the picture from my phone and added it to the contact.

Then I deleted the business contact I had just copied when it had no picture, tried to copy the contact with the picture now included manually and… success! it is safe to conclude there was a problem with importing a contact with a picture attached to it and try to copy it to business contacts that way. I repeated the process twice to test it. Same result.

Hope this helps anyone with a similar problem. If you have any questions or need help with this issue, contact me.

Duplicate e-mails in Outlook 2007

Technical Tips,

I had this problem with a computer running under Vista. When Outlook 2007 was restarted, it would download duplicated emails. The following is not the only reason this may happen, but in this particular case it was, and you might want to try it if you have tried everything else and hasn’t worked.

The reason in this particular case was the file outlook.srs –  a file that Outlook uses to keep track of received e-mails amongst other things -fails to flag downloaded emails as received. So when Outlook re-opens and looks for new email in the web server, it finds the old emails but thinks they are new, and downloads them again. For this to be true Outlook must have been set to leave a copy of the downloaded emails in the server.

To solve the problem, the following file needs to be deleted:

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.srs

Where username is your user name. Another way to access this file is to copy and paste the following string in the Windows Explorer address bar:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Outlook

That will open the folder that contains the outlook.srs file.

If you need help getting this done or have other problems with your Outlook program, feel free to contact me.

SQL Server 2005 for Outlook 2007 with BCM using too much memory

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As most people know, Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager requires an instance of SQL Server 2005 to be installed.

Unfortunately, when unchecked, SQL Server 2005 tends to hug immense amounts of memory, and even though I had installed the maximum amount of memory that could be used by my computer, I still found myself low on physical memory resources. Using task manager to identify the main culprit, I found SQL Server was using several hundred Mb of memory! I set out to research the problem but found no way to regulate the amount of memory using  SQL Server Configuration Manager.

Also found that a number of people had the same problem, and no solution in sight. Until I finally found a tool that allowed me to set the amount of memory SQL Server uses! After applying it, looked at the task manager again – SQL Server was using less than 100 Mb of memory, with the same or better perfomance than before!

For more information or to get help with issue, contact me.