Tag: outlook

Taglocity 2 – Migration frustration

I installed version 2 of Taglocity on Friday. As I wrote a while ago, the older version of Taglocity has saved my bacon many times, and I was excited about the new features. I still am, but I’m a little more cautious about the new version today.

Why? Migration.

I installed the new version in the morning and was astonished when I went to tag the first message: my tags were gone. More precisely, there were no auto-filling tags happening at all. I went back to the Taglocity welcome screen, and somehow found an option to import existing categories as tags. Which turned all my tags into [tags], because the old version of Taglocity entered the tag values into Outlook categories with brackets around them. Grr.

I checked the website and there was no online migration guidance for users of 1.1 Grr. So I fired off an email to Taglocity support to ask what I was missing. I waited an hour (while I was in a meeting) and didn’t get a response. Grrrrrr.

So I started manually fixing the old tags. What a pain. I got partway through and threw in the towel for the day. When I got in on Monday, there was an email from Taglocity support telling me that there was an option to convert the tags to version 2:

All you have to do is ‘Import V1 tags’ and then convert them into version 2.

You can access these tools by clicking on the ‘Taglocity’ main menu and then clicking on ‘Configuration’ -> ‘Tools& Support’.

Which I’m doing now.

So, Taglocity, here’s what you could have done differently:

  1. Put the migration option front and center in your welcome screen–or detect that I already had Taglocity installed, and offered to migrate everything for me.
  2. Failing that, put the migration how-to on your web site. A no-brainer, really.
  3. Put an auto-responder on your support email to let me know you got my message and set my expectations about wait times. I hate them too, but they’re better than waiting six hours to find out if my email went through.
  4. Pat Vanessa in support on the back, because her answer was spot on.

Ok. Other than the migration issues, I like a few things about the update. The UI is cleaner, I love that I don’t have to use a tag cloud to filter by tags. I’m not super thrilled about the additional sidebar, mostly because I had Xobni installed, and it doesn’t seem to give me anything Xobni doesn’t. On the other hand, the stuff that Xobni gives me that Taglocity doesn’t is stuff I don’t use very much anyway–except for the phone number. If Taglocity added options to get me to the tags I use most often in conversation with people, that would be great, and I might start hiding Xobni’s sidebar instead of the other way around.

Outlook 2007 annoyances: keyboard shortcuts

Things you can’t do with Outlook 2007: assign custom keyboard shortcuts to Ribbon items.

This is annoying if you have certain keyboard shortcuts hardwired. For instance, in Outlook 2003 (and Word) one could access the “Paste Special” command (which gives a number of optional formats in which content can be pasted into a document, including unstyled text) with the keyboard shortcut alt+E, then S. Alt+E is an old Windows keyboard shortcut that allows accessing menus using their accelerator key, and for several Outlook releases, “Paste Special” has had S as its accelerator command.

Fast forward to Outlook 2007. The editing window uses the Ribbon, rather than menus, and so alt+E doesn’t do anything. However, alt+S does. So if you happen to hold down the alt key and type E S, thinking you’re going to paste something in the message, Outlook will merrily send it, minus whatever you were going to paste, instead.

Is there a solution? The only way around the issue that I’ve found requires writing a macro to invoke the functionality, assigning the macro to a custom toolbar button, and then mapping that button to a keyboard shortcut (say, alt+E). Convenient? No. Quick? No. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make it work consistently in Outlook at all.

Sigh. Hope we can get this fixed at some point.