Tag Archives: Tools

Converting your Outlook Auto-complete email contacts into Address book contacts

Posted on by
3

I got an interesting query yesterday. How do I convert all the email addresses that Outlook caches into Contacts? A bit of probing revealed that Outlook stores the auto-complete cache distinct from the address book and doesn’t provide an easy way to browse the cache or to convert those entries into Contacts. The auto complete cache is stored in %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2 file.

To import the auto-complete entries into a Contacts folder in Outlook 2007:

  1. Run NK2View (download from http://bit.ly/nk2viewer)
  2. Select all the entries and Click on "Save Selected Items"
  3. In the dialog that pops up, select "Comma delimited text file" in the "Save as type" dropdown.
  4. Give a name and save the file. Also, it might be a good idea to run the command "File -> Backup Current NK2 File".
  5. Switch to Outlook and do a File->Import and Export.
  6. Select the following wizard steps:
    1. Import from another program or file
    2. Comma separated values (Windows)
    3. Provide the file name, and select appropriate duplicates Option
    4. Select the Outlook folder to import to.
    5. Select the map
      1. Select First entry on the list on the left i.e. "Name" and drop it onto "+ Name" on the right
      2. Scroll down in the Right Hand side list till "+ Email" is displayed
      3. Select second entry i.e. email address and drop it onto Email
  7. Press Finish and the import process should begin
  8. Verify that the contacts have been imported properly

 

India Holidays Calendar in Windows Live

Posted on by
Reply

 

I was pleasantly surprised to see Indian Holidays listed when I updated my Windows Live Mail to the latest version.

image

The calendars are available at India (Gujarati), India (Hindi), India (Kannada), India (Malayalam), India (Marathi), India (Tamil)

Get Windows Live here.

Switching among network profiles

Posted on by
Reply

If you are on the move, connecting to various networks which have DHCP disabled is a pain. The alternate configuration option in the TCP/IP properties dialog too doesn’t work always as expected. Time to call up our swiss-army knife of network tools in WinXP — netsh [1]

A unique command, netsh is a veritable goldmine of settings and one of the options allows setting the TCP/IP properties. To set a static IP address, subnet mask, default gateway I used

netsh interface ip set address name="Wireless Network Connection" static 10.1.2.40 255.255.255.0 10.1.2.1 1

Where "Wireless Network Connection" is the name of the connection as per "Network Connections" in Control Panel. (Shortcut: Start-> Run "ncpa.cpl"), 10.1.2.40 is the IP address that I want to set it to, 255.255.255.0 is the subnet mask, 10.1.2.1 is the default gateway and the last one sets the gwmetric (the metric for the default gateway.)

To set the dns servers; netsh interface ip set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" static 10.1.2.10 primary

To set the interface back to dhcp I used

netsh interface ip set address name="Wireless Network Connection" dhcp
netsh interface ip set dns name="Wireless Network Connection" dhcp primary

I created cmd files with the network settings and have placed them on my desktop. This way, I can simply double-click on them to set the Network Profile that I need to use.

It is a pleasure to work with a command that lends itself to easy learning.

 

[1] The TCP/IP Swiss Army Knife is a tool called netcat.