Getting to Know Office 2007

Q: I reinstalled Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and I no longer see names “autofilling” when I type them in the To field of an email message. What’s up?

A: The feature you’re asking about is called AutoComplete. It proposes names as you type in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields of email messages, meeting requests, assigned tasks, and share requests, as well as in the email field of contacts.

A common misconception about this feature is that it “pulls” names from your contacts. It should pull names—but it doesn’t. Microsoft, are you listening? Hello—Office 14 feature request!

What it does do is suggest names based on email addresses you have typed before, whether those names are in your address book or not. If you reinstall Outlook, you lose that history (although upgrading preserves it). Here are a couple pointers about using AutoComplete:

• If a name appears in the AutoComplete list that you don’t want to appear, scroll down to it and press Delete. This helps to prevent you from accidentally sending an email message to someone you emailed once before.
• The AutoComplete list is stored in a file named Outlook_profile_name.nk2. So, for example, if my Outlook profile name is Dan, my AutoComplete list is dan.nk2. You can find the list stored in the Outlook folder in the local settings folder of your user profile, which is %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook on Windows Vista and %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook on Windows XP. You simply copy and paste this file to transfer it between systems. You can rename the file if the profile name has changed (e.g., rename Dan.nk2 as DanHolme.nk2). Logically, this file ought to be in the roaming portion of your user profile, though it’s not.

Q: I have a SharePoint site with forms-based authentication. When I try to do fill in the blank> using an Office application, it doesn’t connect correctly. How can I make it work?

A: I’m asked variations of this question frequently, hence . It could be that you’re trying to open a library in Windows Explorer, connect to a SharePoint site with Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007, export to Microsoft Excel, connect to a list with Microsoft Access, or complete another task. Whatever it is you’re trying to do, when you use forms-based authentication, you must select the Sign me in automatically checkbox, and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) must remain open. Your Office application (i.e., SharePoint, Access, Excel) will ride on the authentication you’ve created.

Technically, what happens is that your forms-based authentication creates a persistent cookie, which client applications can use. If you don’t select Sign me in automatically, or if persistent cookies aren’t allowed in your environment, client integration will fail.

Here are two other important tips regarding forms-based authentication:

• The persistent cookie expires. So “sign me in automatically” is a bit of a misnomer—by default, it signs you in for 30 minutes. To change the timeout value, you must change or add a timeout attribute with a timeout value expressed in minutes. You add this to the forms element in the Web.config file for the application. For example, to change the timeout to two hours, type

name=”.ASPXFORMSAUTH”
timeout=”120” />

where “120” is the timeout value of two hours, expressed in minutes. (The previous entry wraps to several lines because of space constraints here; you should type it on one line in the file.)

• You must have client integration enabled for the SharePoint application. In Share- Point Central Administration, open the settings for the application’s authentication provider and select Yes in the Enable client integration section.

Q: How can I remove duplicates from an Excel database?

A: Luckily, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 made it significantly easier to remove duplicates from a database. Simply select any cell in your data table and click the Remove Duplicates button on the Data tab of the Ribbon. You’ll be prompted to choose the columns to analyze for duplicates. If two or more rows contain the exact same data in the selected column or columns, the duplicate rows will be deleted, leaving only one row with that data. Easy, huh?

Keep in mind that Excel can open many common data file formats, such as .csv and .txt files, for delimited data. So if you have duplicate data in another application that doesn’t support duplicate purging, you can export to Excel, remove duplicates in Excel, then export back to the original database.

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