memoQ filter for MS Outlook e-mail

A few days ago I was preparing screenshots in memoQ for lecture slides. As I tried to select a PDF file to import, the defective trackpad on my laptop caused a file farther down in the list to be selected, and I got a surprise. Not believing my eyes, I tried again and saw that, yes, what I saw was indeed possible...

... saved Microsoft Outlook MSG files (e-mail) are imported to memoQ with all their graphics and attachments! Kilgray created a filter some time ago and simply forgot to document its existence publicly. As of the current versions of memoQ you won't see this in the documentation or the filter lists of the interface, but memoQ can "see" MSG files, and if they are selected, this hidden filter will appear in the import dialog.

And this also works for LiveDocs.

At the time of this discovery, I was working on a little job for a friend's agency, and her project manager had sent me a list of abbreviations in an e-mail. I was too lazy to make the entries in my termbase, so I simply imported the mail to the LiveDocs corpus I maintain for her shop so that it would show up in concordance searches:

So when people tell you memoQ is good, don't believe them. It's actually better than that, but the truth is a well-kept secret :-)

Back to 2003!

Like many people, I am deeply unhappy with the changes that Microsoft made to its Office Suite in the 2007 and 2010 versions. Since I upgraded from Office 2003 about a year ago, I have been unable to find many functions I used for decades. I find the "ribbon" paradigm used in the current interface appalling. Icons have been carried much too far in interfaces. We need words to figure out where things are in most cases. Or I do at least.

This topic has been raised several times on the private translators' forum Stridonium in which I participate, but until recently I managed to overlook the solution suggested there. One colleague suggested the commercial solution from Addintools. When I mention this at last night's translators' social evening in Hohen Neuendorf near Berlin, one person there thought I was referring to a macro solution from Switzerland, which I was not. This morning he sent me a link to UBit's pages with their interesting solution:

The macro from UBit adds a "Menu" menu to the MS Office 2007 or 2010 menu bar (how's that for redundancy in wording?). When selected, it displays a strip of dropdown menus corresponding to the structure of the MS Word 2003 menus. The product was developed to make the transition to the awful new interface less painful. So far it looks promising. There's a little info video, which is short on information but has a nice music track:

Resending mail from Outlook 2010 vs. 2003

In a previous post, I described how to forward e-mail in a different way, using the "resend" function in Microsoft Outlook. The main point of doing this was that the e-mail arrives at the account to which it is forwarded with the original sender in the corresponding field (as opposed to the account which forwarded the message). This is important to me, because the Online Translation Manager that I use for administering my translation workflows and billing has a number of useful sorting and assignment functions that use e-mail addresses in that field. The function is found in the menus for the actual mail message (not the general MS Outlook menus). In MS Outlook 2003, it is at the bottom of the Action menu:

 

Since upgrading to a new system at the end of last week, I have been discovering that many familiar functions in MS Office applications are no longer so easy to find (or when found, their details often work quite differently). Outlook's menus in the 2010 version are utterly different. Here's a screenshot to show where to find the resend function in the menus of a message in MS Outlook 2010:

 

Not only do I use this function when working with OTM, I have also begun to use it to forward inquiries that I don't have time to handle to a few colleagues. This may also be a useful function for cases where lines get crossed between personal and business e-mail accounts and you want to move a message from one to the other without losing track of where it came from in the first place.