I learn best by doing, so the first chapter is a quick guide to the things that most people do with Outlook on a typical day. You find out how to use Outlook for such routine tasks as handling messages, notes, and appointments. You can get quite a lot of mileage out of Outlook, even if you only check out the things I describe in the first chapter.
Because Outlook allows you to use similar methods to do many things, I go on to show you the things that stay pretty much the same throughout the program: how to create new items from old ones by using drag and drop; ways to view items that make your information easy to understand at a glance; and the features Outlook offers to make it easier to move, copy, and organize your files.
Email is now the most popular function of computers. Tens of millions of people are hooked up to the Internet or an office network. The problem is that email can still be a little too complicated. As I show you in Part II, however, Outlook makes email easier. Computers are notoriously finicky about the exact spelling of addresses, correctly connecting to the actual mail service, and making sure the text and formatting of the message fit the software you’re using. Outlook keeps track of the details involved in getting your message to its destination.
Outlook also allows you to receive email from a variety of sources and manage those messages in one place. You can slice and dice your list of incoming and outgoing email messages to help you keep track of what you send, to whom you send it, and the day and time you send it.
Outlook takes advantage of its special relationship with your computer and your office applications (Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Windows – notice a pattern?) to tie your office tasks together more cleanly than other such programs and to make it easier to deal with all the stuff you have to do. The chapters in Part III show you how to get the job done with Outlook.
In addition to planning and scheduling, you probably spend lots of time working with other people. You need to coordinate your tasks and schedules with theirs (unless you make your living doing something weird and antisocial, such as digging graves or writing computer books). Outlook allows you to share calendar and task information with other people and also keep detailed information about the people with whom you collaborate. You can also assign tasks to other people if you don’t want to do those tasks yourself. (Now … there’s a time-saver.) Be careful though – other people can assign those tasks right back to you.
Outlook has parts that many people never discover. Some of those parts are obscure but powerful – and others aren’t part of Outlook at all (technically speaking). Maybe you want to know how to do such things as create custom forms and set up Outlook to get email from the Internet. If you use Outlook at home or in your own business or if you just want to soup up your copy of Outlook for high-performance work, you’ll find useful tips in Part III.
Some parts of Outlook are less famous than others but no less useful. Part IV guides you through the sections of Outlook that the real power users exploit to stay ahead of the pack. You may want to understand how to make Outlook connect with social media, set up your home office, or take some first steps in email marketing. You’ll get that in Part IV.
Big organizations have different requirements than small businesses. Many large companies rely heavily on Outlook as a tool for improved teamwork and project management. Part V shows you the parts of Outlook that work best in the big leagues (or for people with big ambitions). You’ll get all the information you need to collaborate using Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange, beef up your security, customize the way Outlook looks and works, and check your Outlook account when you’re not in the office by using Outlook Web Access or your favorite mobile device.
Why ten? Why not! If you must have a reason, ten is the highest number you can count to without taking off your shoes. A program as broad as Outlook leaves a great deal of flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t quite fit into any category, so I sum up the best of that material in groups of ten.
Conventions Used in This Book
Outlook has many unique features, but it also has lots in common with other Windows programs: dialog boxes, pull-down menus, Ribbons, and so on. To be productive with Outlook, you need to understand how these features work and recognize the conventions I use for describing these features throughout this book.
You deal with more dialog boxes in Outlook than you do in many other Microsoft Office programs. You can call dialog boxes forms. Email message forms, appointments, name and address forms, and plenty of other common functions in Outlook use dialog boxes to ask you what you want to do. The following list summarizes the essential parts of a dialog box:
✔ Title bar: The title bar tells you the name of the dialog box.
✔ Text boxes: Text boxes are blank spaces into which you type information. When you click a text box, you see a blinking I-beam pointer, which means you can type text there.
✔ Control buttons: In the upper-right corner of most dialog boxes, you find three control buttons:
● The Close button looks like an X and makes the dialog box disappear.
● The Size button toggles between maximizing the dialog box (making it take up the entire screen) and resizing it (making it take up less than the entire screen).
● The Minimize button makes the dialog box seem to go away but really just hides it on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen until you click the icon on the taskbar to make the dialog box open again.
✔ Tabs: Tabs look like little file folder tabs. If you click one, you see a new page of the dialog box. Tabs are just like the divider tabs in a ring binder; click one to change sections.
The easiest way to move around a dialog box is to click the part you want to use. If you’re a real whiz on the keyboard, you may prefer to press the Tab key to move around the dialog box; this method is much faster if you’re a touch-typist. Otherwise, you’re fine just mousing around.
Outlook features a colorful strip across the top called the Ribbon. It’s adorned with festive-looking buttons. Many of those buttons are labeled with the names of the things that happen if you click them with your mouse, such as Save, Follow Up, or Delete. A row of tabs appears just above the Ribbon, with each bearing a label, such as Home, Send/Receive, or View. Clicking any of those words reveals an entirely different Ribbon full of buttons for a different set of tasks.
This arrangement came about because people frequently call Microsoft and ask the company to add features to Outlook that don’t need to be added because they’ve been there all along. The Ribbon is supposed to make those mysterious, hidden features more obvious. I think a better solution is to get more people to read this book. As a public service, I’m doing what I can to make that happen. I hope you’ll join the cause.
Normally, you can choose any Windows command in at least two different ways (and sometimes more):
✔ Click a button on the Ribbon or in the Navigation pane.
✔ Press a keyboard combination. An example is Ctrl+B, which