Focus on 14 May, 2010
When Hell Freezes Over – Outlook Style!
For all you MS Office enthusiasts who have discovered the flexibility of adding follow-up flags to appointments in Outlook, here are some hot tips.
First of all, when entering a date in the Due by field, stop being boring. Using the drop-down calendar to select dates takes forever. Simply type in your date thus: dd/mm/yy (unless your computer is set for American dates, in which case you enter mm/dd/yy). Outlook knows what to do with these dates and converts them into something aesthetic and palatable (August 14, 2006, for example).
More amazingly, Outlook will look up dates based on rather irregular text.
Consider the following:
You can enter…
- * tomorrow
* next Saturday
* the day after tomorrow
* +5 (in five days)
* last Wednesday in November
* halloween
* two days hence
* Washington’s birthday
* last week
* Independence Day (American, of course)
But before you get too carried away with yourself, don’t make Outlook look stupid by falling for these obvious pitfalls:
You can’t enter…
- * Saturday next
* Canada Day
* in a fortnight
* at the next full moon
* the Ides of March
* All Hallows’ Eve
* Gurtrude Stein’s Birthday
* when the moon is in the Seventh House And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Likewise, I managed to produce this dismal failure for Outlook’s Follow-up flags…
Try it out and send me your suggestions.
May Mandala
I just finished my May mandala. In 2010, I completed one mandala image a month for 12 months as a way to improve my Adobe Illustrator skills and just for sheer diversion. May’s mandala is based on the himalayan poppy, also known as Meconopsis betonicifolia. There’s a sky-blue simplicity about these poppies that I find inspiring.
See all my Mandalas in (one per month for 2010).
Style and Tone
Discussing Style and Tone in technical documentation in the technical writing field is usually a one-minute conversation that really doesn’t even address core issues. Usually, the conversation is about style guides or templates (which has nothing to do with style) and tone hardly even enters into it.
Here are some quick definitions:
Style
Style is the cumulative effect of choices about words, their forms, and their arrangement in sentences. Style is not just a decoration but rather is a atter of substance. Style affects comprehesnion and a reader’s attitude toward the document.
Tone
Tone is the writer’s attitude toward the reader as well as the subject matter. It describes the writer’s relationship to the reader—colleague to colleague or teacher to student. Tone also describes one’s own persona. Persona is the mask you wear as a writer. Do you see yourself as an authority on a given subject or an explorer sharing your findings. That’s tone.