Pasting links to network paths in emails

Pasting links to network paths in Outlook emails is something that people constantly get wrong. The links often have spaces embedded in them, or newline characters meaning that they don't work. I often also get email with links to network paths that they have mapped to local drives on their computer (e.g. G:\My Folder). Your recipients are unlikely to have the same locally mapped network drives as you so emailing links like this isn't very helpfull.

Here are some steps to help email links to network paths successfully:

1. Navigate to the network folder in explorer, then copy and paste the address







2. In the Outlook email you want to paste the link, enter an angled bracket










3. Paste the contents of the clipboard into the email (right click->paste or press ctrl+v)








4. Finally, enter a closing angled bracket and press enter

Photo montage from Fuerteventura

Complete synchronisation

I’ve managed to keep my work outlook calendar, home outlook calendar, and mobile phone calendar all in sync using Google calendar.

Once I’d checked that my Google calendar existed (you should find that it created automatically if you have a gmail or google login), I installed the Google calendar sync application on both my home and work computers (guide here: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955). This runs automatically at startup, and compares your calendars every couple of hours (the frequency is configurable).

The next step was to set up an account with GooSync http://www.goosync.com/. They use the data synchronization feature on your mobile phone (Sony W850i in my case) combined with the Google Calendar API to keep the two synchronized. There is a free basic account which I’ve used, which limits you to calendar use up to a month ahead. For a yearly fee you can also synchronise tasks and contact details. During the sign up process they send the settings automatically to your mobile phone. I then tweaked these so that the phone syncs automatically a couple of times a day.