Tag Archives: MS Outlook add-ins

2014/07/09 (W) vCard Magic And Adult Tonka Toy

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This morning when I turned my computers on there was an update available for Adobe Creative Cloud so I let it download while we had breakfast using our new Corelle dinnerware.  Adobe updates are either very large or their servers are very slow or both.  Whatever the reason, their updates seem to take a very long time to download and install.

A couple of the landscapers arrived at 8:00 AM and resumed work on the front stairs.  It was overcast at dawn but the clouds were forecast to clear by the afternoon with temperatures in the low 70’s and zero chance of rain.  That would normally be a perfect day to work outside, if the ground wasn’t saturated with water from the recent rains.  They worked on the front stairs until lunch time, took a short lunch break, and then worked a little longer.  When they quit for the day they had all nine of the large precast steps installed and the crushed limestone base built for the brick paver sidewalk.  I think they left because there wasn’t anything else for them to do at our site until they either had some additional materials (slag and paver bricks), more crew members (for moving dirt in wheelbarrows or digging trenches by hand), or dry enough conditions to get the excavator around back ( to trench and set boulders in the retaining walls).

Linda decided not open more boxes today and focused instead on deep cleaning the kitchen, including the freezer/refrigerator, stove, and microwave and getting things ready to go to the recycling center and the Salvation Army donation center and resale store.  While all of that was going on I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and got to work on my computer tasks.  I checked my e-mail using my new ASUS laptop computer.  Everything looked OK, so I started reading and replying to e-mails on the new laptop.  That was a major milestone in that I am now committed to using the new machine as my primary computer.

With that transition in mind I spent much of the morning copying files from my old laptop to both the old and new NAS units.  I then copied critical files having to do with my websites and photographs from one of the NAS units to my new laptop.  Getting the new laptop setup with everything I need will take quite a while, but that’s OK as it also affords me the opportunity to move over only those things that I absolutely need when I need them.

I installed the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) add-in without difficulty but the installation of the Duplicate Killer add-in failed.  I checked the 4Team.biz website and then e-mailed their support address.  My ASUS is running Windows 8.1 / 64-bit and apparently my Outlook 2013 is also 64-bit.  According to their website the vCard Wizard add-in supports the 64-bit version of Outlook 2013, but the Duplicate Killer add-in only supports the 32-bit version.  One of my reasons for buying vCard Wizard was that I figured the companion Duplicate Killer program from the same company would work better with it than it would with a vCard converter from another company.  If I had realized it wasn’t compatible with my configuration I could have pursued other options.

I sync’d my Palm Tungsten T3 to my old Dell laptop and then did a vCard export of all my contacts and moved it to the ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units.  From there I was able to import all of my old Palm contacts into the Contacts folder in my Personal Folder, creating duplicates if/as needed.  The Personal Folder is a carryover from my previous conversion from MS Outlook Express to MS Outlook 2007.  I am a bit unclear about the distinction between the “address book” and “contacts” within the context of MS Outlook and I am not sure I have accomplished what I intended to accomplish with vCard Wizard.  I have accomplished something for sure–my Palm contacts are now clearly in my Outlook 2013–but I thought they would be added to my address book, which does not appear to be the case.  Perhaps I chose the wrong destination folder?  More research is needed.

By 4:30 PM it was obvious the landscapers were not coming back today so that gave me the opportunity to practice using the Kobelco 35sr excavator again.  I worked for about 90 minutes digging more junk out of the woods just southwest of our house and adding it to the pile I started on Monday.  Think bricks, cinder blocks, railroad ties, landscape timbers, dimensional lumber, cut up tree trunks and large downed tree limbs and you will have the picture.  In addition to the bucket for digging and transferring material, the excavator has a claw “thumb” that can be closed to hold things in the bucket, like tree limbs, or pick things up, like boulders and cinder blocks.  It turned out that the bucket/claw combination are much stronger than a cinder block; I broke several trying to pick them up.

By the time I parked the machine and turned it off Linda had dinner ready.  She made a salad of dark greens with almonds and grapes and a barley, split pea, lentil risotto with carrot, red onion, celery, garlic, and a few chopped up greens.  We finished the bottle of Merlot we bought at Whole Foods on Saturday.  At $3 per bottle (750 ml) it was competitive with box wines like Franzia, and of comparable quality.  Although slightly dry for my taste, it was a good accompaniment to the somewhat savory dishes Linda has made this week.  I would be tempted to stock up at that price if I liked a bit more than I do.

After dinner I edited photographs on my new computer for the first time.  They will appear in the various blog entries starting with July 1st, which I will also edit and upload using the new machine.  Although the transition to a new computing platform always feels awkward for a while, and there is desire to return to the comfort of the old familiar one, from here on out I will be focused on making the ASUS my primary computing platform.

 

2014/07/08 (T) New Dinnerware

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I did not get all of the debris pulled out of the woods last night with the Kobelco sx35sr-3 excavator.  I was just learning how to use it so I wasn’t very efficient, and even if I had been experienced I could not have moved everything before it got dark.  I was up early this morning to get some more stuff moved before the landscapers showed up and needed it, but they beat me to the punch.

Steve showed up briefly to get the two-man crew on task and then left.  They worked on preparing and setting the next course of steps in front.  By the time they had one set it had started misting and progressed quickly to a light, steady rain.  They tried taking the excavator around back to do some trenching but the rain intensified and the ground was already very soft.  They almost got it stuck so I waved them off and made them take it back around to the front of the house.  They left shortly thereafter.  The afternoon weather was dry, cool, and breezy–very pleasant working conditions–but no one returned to resume the work.  The forecast for the rest of the week is for drier, cooler conditions, but it will take days for the ground behind the house to dry out enough that they can work efficiently and safely.

We still have a lot of unopened boxes from our move last year and Linda decided yesterday to start opening them and trying to deal with the contents.  She is always eager to get rid of things while I tend to be reluctant to part with stuff, but I am slowly coming around accepting that we have a lot of stuff we do not need, will never use, has no value, and that we have no place to store.

Her target was five boxes today.  I thought that was optimistic, but she dealt with five yesterday and five more today.  One of the boxes today had a collection of stemware with all the pieces individually wrapped in newspapers from circa 1995.  The newspaper was from our previous community, so we are the ones who packed them and obviously had them for some time before that.  We think we got them from my parents but no longer remember when or why.  Some of them may have belonged to my mother’s parents.

The discovery of the stemware led to them being washed and set out to dry followed by a re-thinking of what is stored/displayed in the kitchen/dining area.  That, in turn, led to a reconsideration of our everyday dinnerware.  We bought our Mikasa Studio Nova dinnerware a long time ago, perhaps more than 30 years, and it has served us well.  I still like the pattern; a simple round white plate with a colorful geometric edging that reminds me of the work of the Russian artist Kandinsky.  We have broken or chipped enough pieces over the years that we no longer have a complete service for more than four people, and many of the remaining pieces have developed stress lines and will eventually break.

Mikasa no longer manufactures the Studio Nova pattern and we have been looking for a replacement for the last couple of months.  We found one we liked at Bed, Bath, and Beyond but held off buying it while we continued to look.  We get 20% off coupons from BB&B regularly and when the rain let up Linda decided to go to the store in Brighton and buy the Noritaki set we liked, but came back empty handed.  It turned out that what we thought was a set of four pieces for four place settings (16 pieces) for $40 was just one place setting of four pieces.  We wanted to get 12 place settings plus service pieces, so this was not going to be our new dinnerware.

We spent some time looking at products online and found that the price of Mikasa products was similar to the Noritaki.  This changed our view of the price of Corelle dinnerware which we had also looked at and liked but mistakenly ruled out as too expensive.  We live about 11 miles from an outlet mall that has a Corning store (I know, I know, we live in a rural paradise) so we drove over there to see what they had in stock.  They had a 40% off sale on all open stock items (if you bought 12 or more pieces) and 20% off on boxed sets.

We looked at square designs and modern patterns, but decided to go with their plain Winter Frost White round product.  This is one of their longest running and broadest product lines with all items available as open stock.  They had boxed sets of five pieces for six place settings (30 pieces total) so we bought two of them to have a service for 12, and filled in an extra set of 12 medium plates, some serving bowls, and a couple of serving platters.  The simple white dinnerware makes any food look good and easy to see.  Our walls and appliances are white and our dining room table is a darker oak so the plates will both match and contrast nicely with our decor.

When we got home we opened everything and put it in the dishwasher.  While it ran Linda boxed up all of the old Mikasa pieces that were still serviceable.  She will donate them to the local Salvation Army store tomorrow.

My focus for today was purchasing and installing an add-in that allows Microsoft Outlook to import multiple vCards from a single file.  It’s really galling that I have to spend money to get Outlook to do something that it obviously should be able to do as a standard, built-in function, but there it is.  I researched plug-ins for this a few weeks ago so I revisited what I had previously found.  I finally selected the vCard Wizard (vCard4Outlook) along with Duplicate Killer, both from 4TEAM Corp.  By purchasing them together I got Duplicate Killer for 50% off.  As soon as the purchase was completed I received the downloaded links for both programs and downloaded them but did not install them right away.

Why all the bother?  My old Palm Tungsten T3 PDA can output my contacts in vCard format, but it puts them all in one file.  There are manual ways to import this data to Outlook, but it would take days instead of minutes.  I may be retired but I do not have the patience for that and have better things to do with my time; even a nap would qualify.  The problem with the manual (free) approach is that it requires you to review each contact and decide what to do with it.  I have over 1,000 contacts in my Palm and there was no way I was going to review them one-by-one.

Dr. Michael Greger (NutritionFacts.org) recently did a nice video on the research findings about the health benefits of eating yams.  Linda picked up a nice big yam at Whole Foods on Saturday and baked it for dinner this evening, topping it with black beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, and finished off with vegan sour cream.  Yes, the “sour cream” is added fat calories, but we do not use it very often.

After dinner I copied over the Outlook mailbox (.pst) files from my old Dell laptop (Win XP / Outlook 2007) to my new ASUS laptop via one of the NAS units in preparation for moving to the use of Outlook on the new laptop tomorrow morning.  I spent a while after that selecting and processing images for blog posts going back to July 1st.  I have been keeping up with writing these posts, but not with posting them.

 

2014/05/30 (F) Outlook Contacts

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I have had a Palm PDA for most of the last 13 years, and for most of that time it has been a Palm Tungsten T3.  While I was still working at Wayne RESA it was synced to their GroupWise e-mail and calendar system but also synced to the Palm Desktop software on my laptop for Contacts and Tasks and my Passwords Plus program.  I did not use the Tasks list much, but I did keep all of my personal contacts, and some of my business contacts, on the Palm along with all of my encrypted passwords.  Linda also had a Palm PDA for a while and had it synced to Outlook on her office computer.  Her PDA quit working years ago and never got replaced.  Once she was settled in at the bakery she did not have a need for a PDA.

When I retired I reverted back to using the Palm calendar, which I always liked.  I even installed a new Lithium Ion battery, which was no easy job, to prolong the unit’s life.  But three things have converged to finally spell the end of the Palm era for me: 1) the unrecoverable failure of the Passwords Plus app on the Tungsten T3;  2) the porting of our home Outlook Express information into Outlook 2007 after the loss of our twmi.rr.com e-mail address, and;  3) getting a new laptop computer due to the end of support for Windows XP.

Over the winter we were able to purchase an updated version of Passwords Plus (CS 2.0) that synced through the cloud.  Versions were available that ran on our iPads, Linda’s Samsung laptop, and my then current Win XP Dell laptop.  It is also available for Android (I think) but so far we have not installed it on our phones.  The new PWP apps allowed us to successfully migrate all of our passwords from the old Palm version and make them available on four devices with back-up and synchronization via the DataViz cloud servers.  Just this past week I installed PWP CS 2.0 on my new Win 8.1 machine and got it synced with the other four.  When the passwords are available and secure, life is good.

When we moved from the previous house to the current house last year we lost our long-time home e-mail address.  I took that as an opportunity to export our home address book and all of our personal e-mails from Outlook Express and import them into Outlook 2007 on my Win XP Dell laptop.  Since that time I have continued to build out the address book with contact information, but I still have and use my Palm Contacts.  Yesterday I learned that I could export my Palm contacts in a vCard (.vcf) format.  Further research suggested that I could convert the file to a comma separated value  (.csv) format and then import it into Outlook 2013 on my new laptop.  It would be a lot more work than it sounds as the vcf –> csv conversion would require me to review each entry, but it would still be a lot less work than re-entering everything by hand.

I figured I would need the better part of a long day to accomplish this task, so before rushing into it I decided to do more research.  Today I discovered that there are add-ins available for Outlook that will take my single .vcf Palm output file and import it into Outlook directly, as long as I am willing to pony up the $$.  The idea of spending $20 -$25 for a program I will use once does not sit well with me, but the idea of sitting all day reviewing entries one at a time does not sit well with me either.  If I want to clean up duplicates, I can do that semi-automatically for another $25.  I’m thinking about it.

The calendar is another matter.  The Palm calendar can be “archived” but not exported.  My Palm calendar goes back at least a decade, and this history may just have to remain in the Palm Desktop on the old laptop.  On the upside, once I start using the Outlook calendar I may be able to set it up so I can access the address book and calendar on my Android phone.  That would be nice; I have long enjoyed having my contacts and calendar information “in my pocket,” or “on my belt,” depending on my clothing choices that day.

It was yet another beautiful day today; when Michigan weather is nice, it’s the best.  Linda decided to do some weeding in the front planting beds and I decided to install the new rear-view mirror on the bus.  You just can’t let a day like this go by without doing something outside.  After a little break we decided to work in the back yard.  We had several large pine trees that had large limbs broken over the winter.  I used our pole saw to cut those loose and dragged them over near an old burn pile.  I cut the small branches off, cut up the larger central limbs, and made a pile.  We gathered up some of the dried grass clippings from Tuesday and stuffed them under the limbs and twigs.  We added a few old, large logs to the pile that were laying around in the yard and soaked everything in diesel fuel.  Forget gasoline and charcoal starter fluid; let the diesel fuel soak in (it does not evaporate like gasoline) and put a match to it.  You will get a sustained fire.

After the fire had burned down to a smolder we moved some of the blocks from the rear retaining walls and laid them around the burn pile.  We’ve decided to use some of them to build a fire pit and wanted to see how many it would take to make a circle of the appropriate size.  We plan to build the pit 2 or 3 courses high on the low side.

Kimber, from GM Construction LLC (GM Decks), called to let me know that Gary had taken ill and would not make it out to the house late this afternoon to discuss our pole barn project.  We will try again next week.  Village Landscape Development also did not show up or call today.  I will give Steve a call tomorrow and suggest that we set a firm start date for Monday June 16.

The afternoon mail brought a Jury Summons for Linda for a two week commitment for U. S. District Court in Flint, Michigan starting Monday, June 30.  That interferes with some travel plans we have and will now likely have to adjust.  She won’t be able to find out if she needs to report on the 30th until 5 PM on Friday the 27th.