Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use the Outlook Journal quite a bit. One item that has annoyed me about it is the number of Journal categories that I don’t use and the lack of any capability inside of Outlook to add/remove/change those categories. For example, there are several categories of Journal entries that are suitable for use in an office environment where you use Exchange, but nowhere else. All is not lost, however. You can change the categories (at least a bit) to suit your needs. This involves editing the registry, however, so it is best done with a great deal of caution.

Make a system restore point before proceeding and definitely back up the portion of the registry that you’re going to change before you make any changes. To do this, go to the registry key where you’re going to make changes, right-click on the parent folder and select “Export”. Save the resulting .reg file somewhere easy to locate (it’s only going to be a few kilobytes of data). You can reimport the old data by double-clicking it.

Unless you really feel like messing up everyone else who uses your computer, make the changes in the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Shared Tools\Outlook\Journaling

The sub-keys are the categories for the Journal. You can rename them as you like, although you’ll may want to tinker a bit with the large and small icon entries to get the icon you want associated with it. I have not really messed with those, but as long as you have a good backup… Whatever you do, DO NOT CHANGE OR DELETE PHONE CALL. This is the default category and Outlook has hissy fits when it can’t find it. You can totally hoze yourself by messing with it, so just leave it alone.

Note that you are making changes in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER hive, so whatever changes you make will only affect the currently logged-on account. Which means, oh great guru, that you can create a dummy user account, log on with that account, mess with those entries all you want, get them looking and behaving the way you want them to, export the changes and then import them with the account that you really want to change. Afterward, you can just delete the dummy account and its profile.

Again, make sure that you create a system restore point before making ANY registry changes and create a backup of the registry keys that you’re going to change BEFORE you change them (after you change them would be a good idea, too, but only if they’re working correctly).

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Sunday, 19 November 2006 by marstinson.

Haven’t written anything in a while, so it’s probably time that I did something just to let folks know that I’m still alive and kicking.

The iPaq saga continues. Thus far I haven’t run into any major issues with the iPaq. I work with Excel files frequently and have run into a couple of annoyances, though. First off, whatever you do, do not transfer files to Windows Mobile until you have unfrozen the panes in any spreasheets you are sharing between desktop and handheld. The silly thing absolutely will not scroll past the freeze point on the handheld. Using the auto-filter feature isn’t quite as bad. On the handheld, it treats everything as hidden rows and columns. Unhiding isn’t that big of a task, but I cannot count the number of times that I have forgotten to unfreeze, sync’d with the handheld and then been unable to work with the sheet on the handheld. So it’s back to the laptop, unfreeze, resync and then I’m good to go.

Oh, yeah. Don’t be surprised when your fonts change. Excel’s default font is Arial, but that’s not what the Excel Mobile uses. Generally not an issue except in those cases where you have changed the background color of a cell. In that case, selecting all and changing the font will not change the font in the colored cells. You’ll have to do those one color at a time.

The handwriting recognition on the iPaq is no good in my book. Of course I’ve often been told that I should apply to a medical school to teach a handwriting course to aspiring doctors, too. So I use the on-screen keyboard a lot. Not a big deal since I’m a decent touch-typist in the first place and don’t have to hunt for keys. The only complaint I have in this department is that I keep missing the spacebar and closing the keyboard by mistake. The autocomplete feature (that’s where you type in the first few letters and it offers you a suggestion for the rest of the word) is sometimes helpful, often not.

Calendar, tasks and notes seem to sync up pretty well in Outlook. I definitely don’t like the fact that you can’t use the Outlook Journal on the handheld, though. I keep track of a lot of conversations, meetings, phone calls, letters, email and whatnot through the Journal on my laptop (very convenient). But there is no Journal feature on the handheld. Anything that I want to do in that department either has to be entered as a note or as an appointment. After I sync, I have to open up whatever I created on the handheld and then copy/paste it into a new Journal entry. Major pain in the patootie.

I had a serious issue with battery life for a while after starting to use the iPaq. Silly thing drained down to nothing in the course of a few hours to a day, so I was constantly having to plug it into the charger. A bit of digging around in HP’s support site and a couple of chats with the techs eventually got me to a firmware update that resolved that issue. My battery now lasts for the better part of a week. At the same time, I upgraded the ActiveSync software to the latest version (4.2 as of this writing) and haven’t had a lick of troube since.

One caution on upgrading the ActiveSync and firmware, though. Make sure that all of your synchronized files are current and backed up before you do any upgrade. Once you upgrade, your desktop will see your handheld as being a new device and it will no longer see your previous synchronization settings or files.

The WMP has been an absolute god-send from my perspective. Once I resolved the issue of synching the music files, I just plugged my speakers into the headphone jack and hit “Play”. Oh, yeah. We be jammin’.

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