Bells & Whistles
A while ago, Marc posted a nice review of the Bells & Whistles addin for Outlook over at the Office Weblog. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to use it myself, and I’ve got to say, I really like it.
My impression of Marc is that he’s a total Outlook power user. I’m not so much. For me, Outlook does my corporate email, synchronizes my calendar with my Palm, and offers some public folders for internal communcation. That’s pretty much it. I used to use Outlook in a more novel way (see here), but it took a while to set up and then I got a new PC at work, and entropy set in. Prior to trying Bells & Whistles, the only geegaws I had with my Outlook were Lookout and SpamBayes. I’ve been happy with both of those.
Though I generally have a "’satiable curtiosity" about new software stuff, I have an equally enthusiastic reluctance to embark upon a new learning curve–especially when it involves two pieces of software interacting with each other. Outlook can be pretty complex and I definitely don’t understand all of it’s intracacies, so I’m always a bit uneasy with Outlook addins. Fortunately for me, Bells & Whistles is just pure simplicity to understand. It’s a breeze to install and you don’t really need to read the manual to understand what it offers.
Because my Outlook runs on an Exchange server at work, which is configured in a way that is beyond my ability to grasp, some of the functionality of Bells & Whistles is unavailable to me. Mainly, this is the ability of Bells & Whistles to access nicknames for your contacts. Seems simple enough, but apparently it’s not in the cards for me. No matter. There is plenty of other stuff that makes the program compelling.
My favorite bit is the ability to customize your reply messages. I’ve got Bells & Whistles set up so that all my replies are sent in plain-text format, and the first name of the person I’m replying to is auto-populated at the top of my reply. I can even customize the characters that follow the name. Lots of folks use a simple comma or colon after the name, but I prefer two dashes and Bells & Whistles can accomodate me. As Marc notes, this little thing alone saves me dozens of keystrokes per day.
Another option that I’ve really appreciated, and never really thought about before, is Bells & Whistles’ ability to convert bcc recipients to single ‘to’ recipients. This is a little funky, so let me explain further. You know how sometimes you have a mailing list of people that you want to send a note to, but you either don’t want to clutter the message with all the addresses, or you don’t want them all to know who else is on the list? Well, Bells & Whistles will let you stick all your recipients into the ‘bcc’ field, and when you send your message, it automagically converts each bcc into it’s own single message, addressed only to each recipient. It’s a super cool trick and a huge timesaver!
Another really cool trick is that it warns you when you’ve noted in the body of your message that you’re including an attachment, but haven’t actually attached anything. How many times have you done that? That alone is worth the price of admission, in my book.
It does much, much more, but the only other thing I have it do for me is add a number to each reply in a given thread. So if I reply to a particular message, it’ll add a ‘[1]’ to the subject line. If I get an answer back and reply again, it’ll replace the ‘1′ with a ‘2′ and so on. Very nice when visually scanning message threads.
Marc also notes that Bells & Whistles will allow you to build custom text templates. I haven’t done this yet, but plan to. The idea is that you create a template with text that you often find yourself writing. Then you just assign a keystroke sequence to that particular template. When you’re composing a message, you do the keystroke and the text is inserted into the message. Huge timesaver.
So, I’ll be keeping Bells & Whistles as a permanent part of my Outlook setup…next time I get a new PC, it’ll be one of the first things I replace!
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POSTED IN: tips and tricks
4 opinions for Bells & Whistles
Marc Orchant
Jan 10, 2005 at 12:33 pm
Bren: Great review. You touched on features I did not discuss in my review that I have really come to appreciate (like the BCC: trick) as I use this tool more. Just to let your readers know, my buddies at OfficeZealot.com have a promotion going with the developers of Bells & Whistles and are offering a 10% discount for a limited time.
R. M. Koske
Jan 11, 2005 at 7:59 am
I must not be understanding the BCC trick, because I thought that was what BCC did all the time, on all email programs, with or without Bells and Whistles.
My impression was that “BCC” stood for “Blind Carbon Copy” and that no one saw anyone else’s address when you used it. Maybe I’ve misunderstood.
Can you elaborate?
Bren
Jan 11, 2005 at 8:29 am
Sure…
B&W takes all the names in the bcc field and creates a new email addressed to them alone. So, let’s say you have three names in the bcc field: joe, emily, pat. Instead of sending one email that went to each of them, with no name, or your name in the ‘to’ field, B&W will send *three* emails, one with joe in the ‘to’ field (and no bcc), one with emily in the ‘to’ field (and no bcc), one with pat in the ‘to’ field (and no bcc).
Hope that makes more sense…
R.M. Koske
Jan 11, 2005 at 8:45 am
So a savvy person can normally tell that something is a BCC by the To field. Huh. I didn’t realize that.
Thanks for the explanation.