How To: Cancel an Outlook Meeting w/o Notifying the Attendees

One of the things I like about my job (besides the free Methadone) is that every day my clients ask me for instructions on how to perform the oddest tasks…ways to use software that said software’s authors perhaps never imagined. So today’s question was:

How do I cancel an Outlook calendar meeting without notifying the attendees?

Honestly, I never thought anyone would want to do this! Unless you want people to show up for a canceled meeting. Anyway, it’s easy:

1. Open your Outlook calendar and select the meeting item.
2. Delete or cancel the meeting anyway you like.
3. The meeting dialog will open and ask you if you want to send the notification. The attendees’ names are conveniently already entered in the To: field.
4. Delete all the attendees’ email addresses and enter your own (or any other) email address.
5. Mouse-click the Send Cancellation button.

And that’s it. I mean, if you really want to do this. For real.

Joining PDF Files in Adobe Acrobat Professional

Reproduced from a continuing series of short ‘how-to’ articles I write for my colleagues.

Hi Gang! Today’s literary masterpiece concerns the manipulation of PDF files, which are becoming more and more prevalent in this era of the electronic liberry library.

How to join PDF files

This also will cover inserting pages into pdf files. There are several programs that will do this, but since we all have Adobe Acrobat Professional:

1. Start Adobe Acrobat Professional.

2. Open the document to which you wish to add pages. To reach the Open dialog, either use the File…Open menu option, or type ctrl-o.

3. When you have your ‘base document’ open (the document to which you will be adding pages), use the Document…Insert Pages… menu option to display the Select File To Insert dialog box. Use that dialog, which is just like the Open command to find the PDF file you want to add to the current open document. Select that file and press the Select button.

4. Now, you will see the Insert Pages dialog box (See fig. 1). It only has 2 options:

a. Location: This means, where do you want this page to appear in the combined document. Your choices are After and Before. After and before what? Move on to b.

b. Page: You have 3 options. Choose button First to add the new page(s) before or after the first page in the base document. Choose Last to add the new page(s) before or after the last page in the base document. Finally, using the Page radio button, you can specify the page number before or after where you want the new page(s) to be added. The before or after part, of course, you chose in step a.

5. Click the OK button. Be sure to save the new document under a new name using the File…Save As… menu option. Otherwise, by using the save command, you will over-write the original base document.

That’s all there is. Notice if you want to add a single page into the middle of a document, you would use the Page text box to enter the page number. Note: The page number is not the page number of the actual page, but the number of the page from the first page of the document. At the bottom of each page, Adobe Acrobat Professional helpfully tells you the total number of pages, and the number of the current page, of the current document.

figure 1. The Insert Pages dialog.

Cranky early morning opinion on Microsoft Office 2007

Slow, over-featured, non-intuitive, massively modified because of product developers constantly whining that management is ’stifling their creativity’ until management gives in and lets them rearrange everything.