The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on July 25, 2019.
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Today's Highlights:
- The Help function is disabled in Office apps
- Warn Before Sending: Checking Contact Categories
- Save a step: copy attachments to a new message
- Create an appointment from a message in Outlook on the web
The Help function is disabled in Office apps
Office 365 / 2019 / 2016 has a privacy option that lets you disable “connected services”. Unfortunately, when you do, you lose access to some features, such as Help, online templates, Smart lookup and other features that use online content.
When I click on the help function (? or F1), I get a message that says "This command isn't available: Your organization's administrator turned off the service required to use this feature". Since I am the administrator and only user of this system and have never intentionally disabled this function/"service", how do I turn it back on? What service is this message referring to?
That error message indicates the online services are disabled.
To enable online services, open File > Options > General and click the Privacy Settings button.
You need All connected experiences and Experiences that download online content options enabled for Help to work. These are the last two options on the Privacy Setting page.
Experiences that analyze your content supplies Dictation support, Smart Lookup, and more. This is just above Experiences that download online content on the dialog above. When this option is disabled and you use commands that require connected service, you'll receive a message telling you to enabled Connected services.
For more information and screenshots, see The Help function is disabled in Office apps
Warn Before Sending: Checking Contact Categories
A user wanted to know: Can Outlook warn you when you are sending an email to a Contact who is assigned a specific category?
While it's not a feature built into Outlook, you can use an ItemSend macro to check the contacts and if they are in specific categories, pop up a warning.
To create the macro, I put together two existing macros – one that looked up contacts to get the category color and one of my ItemSend macros.
The macro checks for contacts in one of two categories. Clicking No will cancel the send. If there are two addresses or more addresses, it will check each recipient and pop up the dialog for each contact that matches the criteria or until No is clicked.
The macro can be edited to check any contact field, although it probably makes the most sense to check categories.
Get the macro at Warn Before Sending: Checking Contact Categories
Save a step: Copy attachments to a new message
A user asked how to edit the menu on attachments to add a ‘Add to New Mail’ link so she could quickly add the attachments to a new message instead of opening a new message and dragging the attachments to it.
The menus are not customizable but you don’t have to wait for Microsoft to add it either. You can use one of my favorite features: drag the attachments to the Inbox folder in the Folder pane to create a new message with the attachment. You need to drop the attachment on the Inbox folder; if you drag it to any other folder, Outlook will think you want to save the attachment in the folder.
You aren’t limited to dragging attachments to create new messages. You can select a portion of an email and drag the selection to the Inbox folder to create a new message containing that text. Drag the selected text to the Calendar, Contacts, or Task button at the bottom of the Navigation pane to create a new appointment, contact, or task with the selected text in the Notes field.
Create an appointment from a message in Outlook on the web
A user of Outlook on the web wanted to know if it was possible to create an appointment from an email message.
I want to save an email message in my Outlook on the web calendar so I can set a reminder to answer the email at a later date.
Sure, you can create an appointment from the email: click the 3 dots on the message action bar and choose Reply all by Meeting then delete the address(es) from the Invite attendees field to convert the meeting to an appointment.
If you don't need the message added to your calendar, you can pin the message in Outlook on the web to keep messages at the top of the Inbox, although it is not practical to pin a lot of messages. If you use both Outlook desktop software and Outlook on the web, note that pinning is not supported in Outlook desktop.
Outlook on the web also supports flagging messages, but you can’t set a reminder on the flag, as you can using Outlook desktop software. But flagged messages can be shown in the To-Do app, where you can set a due date.
New & Updated Office 365 KB Articles
'We could not verify your account' message when a new user tries to reset his or her password in Azure, Office 365, or Intune
https://support.microsoft.com/help/2951274
Deprecating TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in O365 GCC High and DoD and preparing for TLS 1.2
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4341731
How to uninstall Office automatically
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4027149
New & Updated Outlook KB Articles
'You do not have permission' error message when you try to open a shared Calendar folder in Outlook for Mac
https://support.microsoft.com/help/2743752
Error occurs when you send or receive an email message in Outlook or Outlook Express
https://support.microsoft.com/help/813514
How to manage .pst files in Microsoft Outlook
https://support.microsoft.com/help/287070
How to troubleshoot performance issues in Outlook
https://support.microsoft.com/help/2695805
Outlook Calendar displays working hours as grey
https://support.microsoft.com/help/4488050
Outlook freezes when composing a new email or replying
https://support.microsoft.com/help/3163997
Update allows administrators to set additional default mail and calendar synchronization windows for new Exchange accounts in Outlook 2016
https://support.microsoft.com/help/3115009
Other Resources
Create an appointment from a message in Outlook on the web
Create an appointment from an email message using Outlook on the web.
Delay sending a message with Outlook closed?
How to delay sending email messages with Outlook closed when you use a Microsoft Exchange or Office 365 mailbox.
Using Outlook’s Send to OneNote button
Use Outlook's Send to OneNote button to send Outlook items to the OneNote app.
Warn Before Sending: Checking Contact Categories
Warn before sending mail macro: Check recipients contacts for specific categories before sending.