Bill Dyszel
Outlook 2016 For Dummies®
Outlook 2016 For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947552
ISBN 978-1-119-07688-9 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-07690-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-07717-6 (ebk)
Introduction
Microsoft Outlook has become an essential business tool in the years since I covered its first pre-release versions in 1996. If you work in a company that employs more than a dozen people, it’s virtually certain that most of your communications and time planning will take place in Microsoft Outlook. Knowing Outlook well can make you more successful at work. Whether you’re taking directions from your boss, giving directions to your employees, organizing meetings, collaborating on important projects, or just keeping up with business, Outlook is what you’ll use to get it done fast.
Not understanding Outlook is almost like not understanding how to get to work. Because Outlook is so popular, hundreds of millions of people now spend their entire workday using Outlook one way or another. Now that more companies encourage telecommuting and hire employees who work from home, Outlook is the virtual workplace for so many people.
I’ve had the pleasure of training literally thousands of people on all the different ways Outlook can improve their workflows and simplify their lives. People are often surprised to discover how much faster they can work when they know how to use Outlook effectively.
Microsoft Outlook was designed to make organizing your daily work blindingly easy – almost automatic. You already have sophisticated programs for word processing and number crunching, but Outlook pulls together everything you need to know about your daily tasks, appointments, email messages, and other details. More importantly, Outlook enables you to use the same methods to deal with many different kinds of information, so you have to understand only one program to deal with the many kinds of details that fill your life, such as:
✔ Setting up a conference call with colleagues
✔ Sending links to a webinar for a marketing campaign
✔ Exchanging information about important projects
✔ Reminding people to do the things they promised to do
✔ Recording all the work you do so you can find what you did and when you did it
Outlook is a personal information manager that can act as your assistant in dealing with the flurry of small but important details that stand between you and the work you do. You can just as easily keep track of personal information that isn’t business related and also keep business and personal information in the same convenient location.
About This Book
As you read this book and work with Outlook, you discover how useful Outlook is as well as find new ways to make it more useful for the things you do most. If you fit in any of the following categories, this book is for you:
✔ You just got a job with a company that uses Outlook as its email program and you need to find out how to use it in a hurry.
✔ You’ve used Outlook for years just because “it was there,” but you know you’ve only used a tenth of its power. Now you’re overwhelmed with work and want to plow through that mountain of tasks faster by using Outlook better.
✔ You’re planning to buy (or have just bought) Outlook and want to know what you can do with it – as well as how to do your work more efficiently.
✔ You want an easier, faster tool for managing tasks, schedules, email, and other details in your working life.
Even if you don’t fall into one of these groups, this book gives you simple, clear explanations about how Outlook can work for you. It’s hard to imagine any computer user who wouldn’t benefit from understanding Outlook better. If all you want is a quick, guided tour of Outlook, you can skim this book; it covers everything you need to get started. Getting a handle on most major Outlook features is fairly easy – that’s how the program is designed. You can also keep this book handy as a reference for the tricks you may not need every day.
Foolish Assumptions
I assume you know how to turn on your computer and how to use a mouse and keyboard. In case you need a brushup on Windows, I throw in reminders as I go along. If Windows and Microsoft Office are strange to you, I recommend picking up (respectively) Andy Rathbone’s Windows 10 For Dummies or Wallace Wang’s Microsoft Office 2016 For Dummies (both published by Wiley).
If all you have is a copy of this book and a computer running Outlook, you can certainly do basic, useful things right away (such as send and receive email) as well as a few fun things. And after some time, you’ll be able to do many fun and useful things.
How