If you have ever done any system administration you will quickly find that many users think Outlooks auto complete feature is a fully fledged address book, but it’s not.

A feature I thought Microsoft would look at in Office 2007 is a more robust auto complete feature set, sadly this is not the case.  However it is still a nice feature to have in your arsenal.

The brains of auto complete lies in the Outlook.NK2 file.  This is the place that stores all the auto complete entries, you can get to this file by navigating through explorer to…

C:\Documents and Settings\user.name\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2

user.name should be subsituted for the user name of the account you are using.

Basic method

You can simply copy this file to the same location on any computer, the usernames do not need to match.  Then they will have the same autocomplete entries as the source computer.

Advanced method

A great utility for managing your NK2 files is NK2View from the guys at Nirsoft.  This will let you import/export enteries and easily backup your NK2 files amongst other things.

What did you do before you knew about format painter?  Well my guess is a shed full of repetitive formatting.

Format Painter is one of those time saving shortcuts that once you have found it, life using Word and Excel is a much more pleasant experience.

MS Word 2003	MS Word 2003

Basic usage

• Simply place your cursor within your document text that has your desired format
• Click the Format Painter icon (I have included screen shots of MS word 2003 & 2007)
• You will notice your cursor will change to , you can now highlight the text you want to change and hey presto it takes on a new format!

Power usage

As of MS Office 2007 format painter gets a natty advertisement of this power tweak (see the screenshot on the right, above) but it also applies to previous version and for all of you that do not know about it all you need to do is shut your eyes and…..

Double click (the tool bar icon)

Now the Format Painter icon will not revert to the standard cursor and you can format till your heart content.  To revert to your normal cursor simply press the ESCAPE key or click the tool bar icon again.

What are you waiting for, get formatting!