We ask favors of other people at work every day. Be it sending us a document, a reminder about a meeting, or even reserving a conference room. This is something that happens all the time. However, how often do we send a “Thank You” back after these favors are performed? Not very often, as many people take this for granted. This is especially true with so much communication sent through email today. If someone does a favor for you, take a second and write a “Thank You” email back, that’s all it even has to say. Better yet, say it in person. It doesn’t have to be lengthy, just a quick word to let them know you appreciate their help. A simple “Thank You” will make them much more willing to help you out in the future.

With the prominence of email in the workplace today as a major means of communication, more and more important correspondence is sent strictly through email. What does this mean? This means that an email that sits in your inbox for two days because you are on vacation could potentially have disastrous consequences. This is why the Out of Office Assistant is more important than ever.

*Note: For this article, I will be dealing with the Out of Office Assistant in Microsoft Outlook 2003. If you don’t use Microsoft Outlook for your email, you should investigate what a similar function would be on your email client.

The Out of Office Assistant works very much like an Away Message in AOL Instant Messenger (IM) if you are familiar with that tool. Basically, you write a few lines of text that is automatically sent to anybody who emails you.

There is a very simple process to do this. First, go to Tools - Out of Office Assistant…. The following pop-up window should be displayed:

As shown above, there are two radio buttons at the top of the window. This toggles the Out of Office Assistant on and off. Important note: Make sure to turn this OFF when you are back in the office. You don’t want to leave this on for a week after you get back.

The “AutoReply” text box is where you type the message you want sent to people when they send you email. In the above screenshot, I have a basic message that I use and modify for each time I’m going to be away from the office. The critical pieces of information you need to provide in this message are the following:

1. The date range for which you will not be in the office.
2. The person to contact in your absence.
3. The subject matter that this contact person can answer questions on.

You should have more than one contact person if you need multiple people to cover multiple different subjects while you are away.

Once this message is crafted, all you have to do is click the “OK” button and your Out of Office Assistant will be turned on. You can also perform more complex functions using the “Add Rule…” button, where you can add rules for when you are away. This works just like creating normal rules in Microsoft Outlook. I don’t use this functionality, but it might come in handy if, for instance, you want all messages from a certain person to be auto-forwarded to one of your contacts.

The Out Of Office Assistant is an extremely valuable tool that you should make sure to take advantage of. Don’t get in trouble because an important email rotted in your inbox while you were at the beach; Take the time to turn on the Out of Office Assistant.

I wrote an article today about zipping files that you attach to an email for a number of reasons, one of which was to keep the size of both your mailbox and your audience’s mailbox low. Along these lines, if you find that you are having a mailbox size problem, one trick that can help is to go back to your sent mail and delete any large attachments that you don’t need anymore from those messages. All you have to do is open the message, remove the attachment, and then save the message. You keep the message text, but lose the attachment.

This works really well for me using Microsoft Outlook, you should take a look on your local email application to see if there is a way to do this as well.

Today, email is one of the prime means of communication at the workplace. Consequently, it can be disastrous if you don’t have access to it. How could this happen? The answer is simple: you go over the size limit on your account. This usually leads to you not being able to receive or send email until the size of your account goes back under the limit. What could cause this? The usual culprit here is large file attachments. This is why it is so essential to Zip your attachments before sending out your email.

Zip refers to a process by which you can compress files into a smaller archive, sometimes cutting the size of contents of the Zip File in half. For example, if I had two Microsoft Word documents and a Microsoft Excel document that I was going to send out to my team, I would add all three to a Zip File then attach this file to the email instead of attaching the three documents separately.

This has the following advantages:

• As stated above, this will usually drastically decrease the size of the email. This is especially true in documents that may contain a lot of pictures, charts, or process flows (such as process flows from Microsoft Visio). As a rule of thumb, I Zip any document that is half a Megabyte or more (this might show as 500kb as the file size, which is the size in Kilobytes).

• This will also keep groups of documents better organized. In the above example, this would allow the audience to keep track of one file instead of three. Also, if you were to have multiple groups of documents in an email, you could Zip each group.

• A smaller email will obviously download faster, so if you Zip your attachments your audience will appreciate the fact that didn’t have to sit there staring at their Inbox for 10 minutes while your message downloaded. You don’t always know the connection speeds of your clients, so this can be a big deal for those on dial-up connections.

The argument some people make for not zipping their files is that their email accounts have a very large size limit (which is pretty true today across the board). However, when sending attachments, you must also take into account the audience you’re sending it to. Much like their connection speed, you don’t always know how their email is configured, and it probably isn’t a good idea to kill their account because you sent unzipped attachments.

Now that you’re ready to Zip your attachments, how do you do it? This is another easy answer. In order to Zip a file, you can use any number of free programs out there. The program I use is called WinZip. You must purchase this software, but I also believe that windows has a native utility to Zip files, although I have not used it. If you do a search on “free zip programs”, you should get plenty of options.

In the end, it takes very little time to Zip your attachments, and the benefits explained above are well worth it.

Two new articles and a Tip of the Day fresh out of the factory, see details below:

• Having trouble moving your shapes around in Microsoft Visio?  Check out this article on How to Group Your Visio Shapes on tips for creating easy to move shape modules for your project.
• If you’ve ever received an embarrassing email at work (blind links from friends *shudder*), you should pass this article on What does “Work Safe” mean? to the offending parties.
• Our Tip of the Day category has a new Tip Site suggestion that I’ve found to have a ton of useful information on many different topics.

Chances are, you’ve heard the term “Work Safe” thrown around your office when talking about email.  What does this mean? 

To begin, I’ll define the context in which you probably heard it used. “Work Safe” is usually used in the context of personal email received in a work account.  This could be email forwards from your friends (which are usually pretty rampant), or any other email that contain non-work related information.  Most of the time, you are not the only one in the office, so a “Work Safe” email can be defined as an email that is able to be read by you at work without having to scurry to close a browser window, run to turn down the sound, or even shut your laptop down to stop the display on your screen.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that the email doesn’t contain something that could cause these actions; it just means that you knew that there might be problems before you opened the email, so you took the necessary precautions (headphones, etc.).

It is a good rule to follow when sending personal email to label it “Work Safe” or “Non-Work Safe” before you send it out.  This can save your friends a lot of embarrassment and possibly even save their jobs if the wrong person is walking by when they open the email.  You should always place this in the subject of the email, so your audience doesn’t have to actually open the email to find out.  ALWAYS specify if something may not be appropriate for work, I’ve seen people get into a lot of trouble for this kind of thing.  Even if you just send a link, make sure before you forward it on that you know if your friends are safe to open it.

Overall, if your email is not “Work Safe”, you probably should be sending to a personal account instead of a work account anyways.  However, if you are going to send it, make sure to be specific as to what the email contains.  This can save embarrassment, friendships, and even jobs (usually all of the above).

With email swiftly becoming the main means of communication between many of today’s professionals, knowing how to craft a professional email has become essential.  Not only will it make you look good to your prospective clients or peers, but it will also make the contents of your message clearer to your intended audience.

The following is a list of three common professional email do’s and don’ts:

DO

• Always spell-check your email before it goes out.  If you use Outlook, you can set it so that the spell-check always runs before an email is sent.  There’s nothing that irritates me more than when I get an email from a colleague and “the” is misspelled.

• Always include your contact information in your signature when dealing with clients.  This is essential as some clients prefer to talk on the phone or meet face to face than communicate through email.  A good way to remember this is to add it to your signature.

• Always check to make sure that you’ve attached any files you want to send with the email BEFORE you send it out.  Those “Oh, here’s the attachment because I forgot to send it the first seven times” emails are extremely annoying.

DON’T

• Never use internet shorthand or slang in a formal email.  For example, always spell out “You” instead of using “U”.  This may sound like common sense, but you would be surprised how many people let this slip, especially when they are switching between writing personal and professional email.

• Never copy additional clients or peers on the email unless you are absolutely sure that it is ok to do so.  On the client side, you never know what kind of internal politics are going on, so always check with your supervisor first.  Also, internally, sometimes an email should only go to certain people on your team, so once again check with your supervisor before sending it out.

• Never send a lot of personal correspondence through your work email.  An occasional email is fine, but many times companies screen their employees email, and they don’t like to see a lot of personal email taking up much of your time.  They also might object to content sent to you by your friends.

Overall, when you’re writing an email at work, try to pretend that instead of writing you are presenting the contents to your boss.  If your email passes that filter, then it should be fine to send.  Otherwise, it’s probably a good idea to create another draft.