how to mark tasks as complete – and earn the right to brag about how much you’ve accomplished.
Taking Notes
I have hundreds of little scraps of information I need to keep somewhere, but until Outlook came along, I didn’t have a place to put them. Now all the written flotsam and jetsam go into my Outlook Notes collection – where I can find them all again when I need them.
To create a new note, follow these steps:
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+N.
A blank note opens.
2. Type the text you want to save.
The text you type appears in the note, as shown in Figure 1-6.
3. Press Esc.
The note you created appears in your list of notes.
Figure 1-6: Preserve your prose for posterity in an Outlook note.
After you’re in the habit of using Outlook to organize your life, I’m sure you’ll want to move beyond the basics. That’s what the rest of this book shows you. When you’re ready to share your work with other people, send email like a pro, or just finish your workday by 5 p.m. and get home, you’ll find ways to use Outlook to make your job – and your life – easier to manage.
Chapter 2
Inside Outlook: Getting More Done With Less Effort
In This Chapter
▶ Examining the many faces of Outlook
▶ Choosing menus
▶ Getting the big picture from the Information Viewer
▶ Using the tools of the trade
▶ Fine-tuning with the Folders list
I recently heard that the average office worker now spends 28 percent of each workweek answering email. No wonder times are tough – everybody’s too tied up with email to get anything done! When computers were invented, people thought they’d use them for something much more exciting than email. Oh, well. Welcome to the future – it’s already here and it’s already booked solid.
Fortunately, everyone gets more done now than in the past, partly because of tools like Microsoft Outlook. In fact, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Outlook to get more done every day. But most of those people use a fraction of Outlook’s power, so they work harder than necessary while getting less done. The people I’ve trained find that knowing even a tiny fraction more about what the program can do for them makes their lives easier. Let’s hear it for making your life easier!
Outlook and Other Programs
Outlook is a part of Microsoft Office. It’s called an Office suite, which means it’s a collection of programs that includes everything you need to complete most office tasks. Ideally, the programs in a suite work together, enabling you to create documents you couldn’t create as easily with any of the individual programs. For example, you can copy a chart from a spreadsheet and paste it into a sales letter you’re creating in your word processor.
Microsoft Office includes a group of programs – each of which is designed to address specific sorts of tasks easily but that also work together as a team when you need them to. It’s a little bit like the utensils you use for dining: You can eat your turkey dinner entirely with a fork, but it’s much easier if you have a fork and a knife. And, of course, you want a spoon for the cranberry sauce. Each program in Microsoft Office specializes in something important: Microsoft Word for documents, Microsoft Excel for calculations, and Microsoft Outlook for communications and organization. It’s easy to use them separately and hugely productive to use them all together.
Until now, Microsoft has sold each program as a packaged, store-bought product you could buy and use for years. They’re changing their approach and encouraging everyone to rent Microsoft Office for a monthly or annual fee as part of a program called Office 365. I’ll have more to say about Office 365 in Chapter 12, but at the moment, Microsoft is offering some packages of Office 365 services that are very economical and worthwhile. Time will tell which approach is better; some people prefer a small monthly fee, whereas others prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a permanent copy. Microsoft clearly believes that software rental is the way of the future, so stay tuned.
About Personal Information Management
When it comes to the basic work of managing names, addresses, appointments, and email, the word processing and spreadsheet programs just don’t get it. If you’re planning a meeting, you need to know with whom you’re meeting, what the other person’s phone number is, and when you can find time to meet.
In designing Outlook, Microsoft took advantage of the fact that many people use Microsoft products for most of the work they do. The company created something called a Personal Information Management (PIM) program that speaks a common language with Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft also studied what kind of information people use most often and tried to make sure Outlook could handle most of it. The program also has scads of customizability – a tongue twister of a buzzword that just means you can set it up however you need – after you know what you’re doing.
Whatever the terminology, Outlook is – above all – easy to understand and hard to mess up. If you’ve used any version of Windows, you can just look at the screen and click a few icons to see what Outlook does. You won’t break anything. If you get lost, going back to where you came from is easy. Even if you have no experience with Windows, Outlook is fairly straightforward to use.
There’s No Place Like Home: Outlook’s Main Screen
Outlook’s appearance is very different from other Microsoft Office applications’. Instead of confronting you with a blank screen, Outlook begins by offering you a screen filled with information that’s easy to use and understand. The Outlook layout is pretty similar to most webpages. Just select what you want to see by clicking an icon on the left side of the screen, and the information you selected appears on the right side of the screen.
Feeling at home when you work is nice. (Sometimes, when I’m at work, I’d rather be at home, but that’s something else entirely.) Outlook makes a home for all your different types of information: names, addresses, schedules, to-do lists, and even a list to remind you about all the stuff you have
