Paul Bradshaw's blog

Turning Off Smart-Quotes in Outlook 2007

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 15:28:23 -0500

I typically find myself typing actual code into many emails, and get annoyed when Outlook replaces my single and double quotes with the curley "smart-quotes"... as this makes cutting/pasting without syntax errors painful. So after a little digging, I found out how to turn smart-quotes off in Outlook 2007:

In the main Outlook window, on the Tools menu, click Options.
In the Options dialog box, click the Mail Format tab, and then click Editor Options.

Handy utility for Windows XP users: Taskbar Shuffle

Paul Bradshaw — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:24:32 -0400

If you’ve ever wished you could change the order of your application buttons in the task bar, or have ever wanted to just drag and drop your taskbar buttons around so you could have them in the order you want, this utility is for you.

Also, if you’ve ever wished you could have control over taskbar button grouping and when/if they ever collapse into one button, this utility is for you.

Tip of the Day: Refresh Rates and ClearType

Paul Bradshaw — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:10:07 -0400

Staring at a monitor all day, or even part of the day, can be very hard on the eyes.

If you're using a CRT display, one of the easiest things you can do to relieve eye-strain is to up your monitor's refresh rate. By default, your monitor is strobing at you 60 times a second. Pushing that up over 70 times a second will ease the strain on your eyes enormously, even if you can't "see" the flicker. To change this in Windows XP, just do the following: