The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on December 9, 2021.
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Today's Highlights
It's a slow week this week, many Microsoft employees use their vacation time between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
BCC Meeting Invitations
I’m often asked how to BCC meeting invitations.
In Outlook on Windows desktop, the “old” trick is to add the addresses as a resource, then add a meeting location in the Location field.
Typing something in the Location field is important. If you don’t type something in the location field, Outlook will display the resources, aka the attendees, in the location field, defeating your attempt at BCCing the meeting.
While this method still works if you are sending meeting invitations to POP or IMAP accounts, it won’t work if you and any attendees are using Outlook.com or Office 365 Exchange Online as the tracking information will sync with those accounts and they will see the list of “resources”.
If you use Outlook.com or Office 365 Exchange mailbox and send the meeting invitation from Outlook on the web, you will have the option to hide attendees. The only drawback: the meeting invite will say no response required and if the attendees do respond, the meeting organizer will not receive the response. But, unlike the Outlook on Windows, the attendees stay hidden.
At this time, Outlook on Mac does support hiding attendees.
The ribbon is missing
There seems to be a rash of disappearing ribbons this week – the affected users only see the ribbon tabs and when they click the tab, they see the ribbon but it disappears again.
The fix is simple: double click on the tab to keep the ribbon open, or right click on a tab and choose “Collapse the Ribbon” to remove the checkmark. Or click the caret icon on the lower right corner of the ribbon to pin it open. And there is a button on the Title bar, next to the minimize button, with the show and hide option.
In Outlook 365, the caret icon in the right corner of the ribbon has options to switch between the Classic and Simplified ribbons, along with the options to show the ribbon or tabs. You can also hide the Quick Access Toolbar from this menu.
Autocomplete isn't working
When you are addressing a message and start typing a frequent contact’s name or address and nothing comes up, it’s one of two things:
1. Autocomplete was turned off.
2. Your autocomplete list is corrupt and needs reset.
To check the settings, go to File > Options > Mail. In the Send Message section (about halfway down the page) is “Use Auto-Complete List to suggest names when typing in the To, Cc, and Bcc lines” checked? If no, add a checkmark. If it has a checkmark, uncheck it, click Ok then go back in and recheck it.
If that doesn’t fix the problem, go back and click Empty Auto-Complete List button to clear the list. Before you do this, you might want to make a copy of the autocomplete list at C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\RoamCache. It’s named Stream_Autocomplete_0_**. If you have more than one, copy the largest. Depending on how corrupt it is, NK2Edit from Nirsoft might be able to export your autocomplete entries to contacts, a CSV, or into the new autocomplete list.
Other Resources
Don't "Allow my organization to manage my device"
How to stop the "Stay signed in to all your apps" dialog from coming up when signing into Microsoft Office 365 applications and prevent your organization from managing your device.