Month: August 2021

Have you ever sent a work email that you instantly regretted or wondered how to recall an email that you sent? Sometimes it’s an embarrassing typo or an accidental early send, but often it’s worse than that. Maybe you realized — only after sending — that something came across negatively, not in the way you intended. Or, even worse, perhaps you sent a sensitive email to the wrong person entirely!

We’ve all experienced email regret. But if you’re working at a company that uses Microsoft Outlook as its email platform, you need to know about a feature that may save you from the embarrassment of email regret: how to recall an email with message recall and resend.

This week’s tech tip will teach you exactly how to recall an email in Outlook, plus the limitations you need to be aware of when you want to recall Outlook email.

What Is Message Recall in Outlook?

Message Recall is a feature built into Microsoft Outlook that does exactly what it sounds like: it allows you to retract or recall an email that you’ve sent on the platform. There’s another feature, called Message Resend, which enables you to rework the message and send it again, replacing it in the recipients’ inboxes (at least some of the time — see the limitations below).

Limitations of Message Recall

Message Recall is a powerful feature that can save you embarrassment, awkward apologies and more. That said, there are some limitations you need to know about. First, the feature only works if recipients have not yet opened your email.

This is a frustrating limitation, but it makes sense. No one wants to end up in a situation where they know they read an email, but the other person insists it said something different. Unfortunately, that’s what could happen if message recall worked even after the message had been opened.

Also, if you’re emailing somebody else outside your organization or someone who does not use the Outlook desktop client, Message Recall won’t work. You also can’t do this feature from the Outlook mobile app at this time.

Last, if your email gets automatically moved to a subfolder on the recipient’s end, Message Recall will not be successful.

How to Recall an Email in Outlook

So, now that you know the limitations and the risks, here’s how to recall an email in Outlook.

Find the message in your “Sent” folder.

Double-click the email to open it in a separate window.

Click “More Actions” in the top right-hand corner.

Select “Recall the message.”

Choose whether to recall (retract entirely) the message or resend it (replace it with a corrected/amended version).

Once you click the final button to recall or resend the message, the dialog box will go away, and the process is done. At this point, many users wonder whether the function worked or not. And it’s a good question: unfortunately, you won’t know immediately whether your message was recalled successfully.

When you use the feature and it works successfully, there’s a successful recall message Outlook will display for you. Similarly, when the feature doesn’t succeed, you’ll get a recall message failure notification. Both of these message types come through like an email, so you’ll see them in your inbox like any other message.

That’s it for this week’s tech tip. Be sure to follow Data Magic for more tips like these, and for help with anything related to your IT needs, Data Magic is your partner for comprehensive managed IT services. If there’s something you need — from IT advice to fully managed IT services — feel free to reach out below!

Are you trying to figure out how to password protect a Word Document? No worries, we’ve got the solution in just a few simple steps.

When you password-protect your Word document, you will be encrypting it.  This requires anyone wanting to access the Word doc (including you) to de-encrypt it to access. That is where the password comes in.  Without the password, nobody will be able to open the document.

One word of warning (no pun intended), though, it’s up to you to remember the password you use to encrypt it. If you forget your password, you’re out of luck.  Microsoft does not provide a way to recover a lost password on a Word document.

How to Password Protect a Word Document on a PC

1. Open: Open the document on your computer.
2. File> Info: Select File in the upper left corner or and look for Info, which is usually the fourth item down under Home, New, and Open.
3. Info > Protect Document: When you click Info, click on Protect Document.
4. Encrypt with Password: For basic password protection, select Encrypt with Password from the pull-down menu.
5. Enter your password. You can use anything you like, although it is case-sensitive.
6. Verify your password a second time to make sure you didn’t make a mistake in typing it in and  then hit OK to finalize.
7. When you save your document, it is password protected.

That’s how to protect a word document on a PC.  Next time you want to open the document, you will be prompted to enter the password before getting access.  If you share the document with someone else, they will need the password to open it.

You may have noticed other options under the Protect Document menu.  You can also choose to grant access in read-only mode, restrict editing or access, add a digital signature, or mark it as a final document from the same pull-down menu.

How to Password Protect a Word Document in Office 365

If you are using the online version of Word as part of the Office 365 suite, the process will look the same except you will be saving your document to the cloud rather than locally on your computer.

How to Password Protect a Word Document on a Mac

If you are using a Mac for Word documents, the process is nearly identical but things are in slightly different places.  Here are the steps for how to protect a Word document on a Mac.

1. Open: Open the document on your computer.
2. Review > Protect: Select Review from the top menu and then Protect.
3. Protect > Protect Document: Click on Protect Document.
4. Encrypt with Password: Select Encrypt with Password.
5. Enter your password. You can use anything you like, although it is case-sensitive.
6. Verify your password a second time to make sure you didn’t make a mistake in typing it in and  then hit OK to finalize.
7. When you save your document, it is now password protected.

We hope that this information helps you to improve the privacy of any documents you have within Microsoft Word. Any lingering questions? Reach out below!

Have you ever wanted a quicker way to input information into your documents, emails, and presentations within Microsoft 365? Microsoft Dictate is an excellent speech to text solution that’s built into your favorite Microsoft apps. Here’s how to use it, plus a review of its functionality.

Finding Microsoft Dictate

If you’re using the latest version of Microsoft 365, Dictate is already present inside many of the most popular standalone apps, including Outlook, Word, and PowerPoint. To find it, simply open one of those programs and look for a dictate button in the home section of the menu. (It will probably look like a microphone with a record button.)

Using Microsoft Dictate for speech to text

To use Microsoft Dictate, click the button in the menu to get started. You’ll probably see a small popup with a microphone button. Click that, and you’ll hear a sound that indicates Microsoft is now listening to your speech.

Once you see the “Listening…” text, simply start speaking, and what you say will be transcribed into your program.

Microsoft Dictate is intelligent, analyzing what you say and correcting itself as it goes. You’ll sometimes see it replace a mistake after the fact with what you actually said.

Microsoft has been hard at work and developing speech recognition for Cortana and Microsoft Translator, and the company has even made recent acquisitions in this space. All the same computational power and machine learning powers this dictation function within Microsoft 365.

You can add basic punctuation as you talk by saying words like “period,” “comma,” or “open parentheses.” Or you can let Microsoft try to get it right by clicking on the settings on the Dictate widget and choosing “Auto punctuation.”

There are a variety of commands that Microsoft suggests to use to get the most out of the Dictate tool.

Use Cases for Dictate

Microsoft Dictate has several use cases. The most obvious one is as an assistive speech to text tool for anyone who’s not particularly comfortable typing. This could include people who haven’t formally learned to touch-type as well as those with physical limitations or even certain reading disorders like dyslexia.

Dictate can also be a boon to anyone with repetitive stress injury, where long periods of typing can exacerbate an injury. By composing the bulk of a newsletter or email by voice dictation, an employee can avoid 85 to 90% of the keyboard and mouse usage normally required to do so.

Limitations of Microsoft Dictate as a speech to text tool

As impressive as the tool is, there are some limitations in Microsoft Dictate. The tool is intelligent but not omniscient. In other words, it won’t get everything right.

We wrote this entire blog post using the tool, but we had to make several manual corrections after the fact. For example, back in that second paragraph: the software correctly capitalized PowerPoint but did not capitalize Outlook or Word (since those words could either be brand names or regular ol’ nouns).

You might find yourself stumbling when looking for less common punctuation or symbols as well. Often, it’s easier to just put those types of characters in manually.

And then there are the words that Microsoft can’t possibly know. There are plenty of obscure brand names and acronyms in the tech industry, and it can be tough to get these right in any dictation program, including Dictate.

That said, Microsoft’s offering is far better than some others, and you don’t even have to pay anything extra for functional speech to text software.

That’s it for this week’s tech tip, but stay tuned for more technology tips and tricks in the coming weeks!