Improve Your Outlook Making Office's Organizer Even More Organized Helen Bradley
Fri 2/22/02 -- Whether you use Outlook by choice or because your IT department says you have to, there are plenty of neat tricks you can use to make the integrated e-mail client, appointment calendar, and address book work smarter. Here are seven secrets for customizing and optimizing the hub of the Microsoft Office suite.
A-la-carte e-mails. Want to move e-mail messages from one computer to another, or make a backup copy of a particularly important message? You can turn any Outlook mail message into a separate file by dragging it from the Outlook window and dropping it into a Windows Explorer folder or onto your desktop, where you can double-click the resulting file (which has a .MSG extension) to read it with Outlook. You can also reverse the process, dragging the message back into Outlook.
Managing Notes. Outlook's Notes behave like paper sticky notes, and can be put just about anywhere -- drag one out of Outlook and onto your desktop, and it'll be available even when Outlook is closed. You can also drag Notes onto your Quick Launch bar or the Office Shortcut bar for easy access.
Adding custom items to folders. You can create reminder or information items in any Outlook folder using the tool more commonly used to post items to public folders. For example, to add a new item to your Inbox, choose File/New/Post In This Folder; type the text of the item; and click Post. A new entry will appear in your Inbox, displayed as a push-pin icon so you know it's a posting.
Put your friends on the short list. There are some people you e-mail only occasionally, and others you write a dozen times a day. Why not add the latter to a toolbar menu for quick access? Choose View/Toolbars/Customize and the Commands tab. From the Categories list, choose New Menu; from the Commands list, drag the New Menu option onto the toolbar. Right-click it and name it &Mail... or any other name of your choice; the character after the ampersand will be the menu shortcut key.
With the Customize dialog still open, choose File in the Categories list and, from the Commands list, drag the Mail Message icon onto your new menu and wait as the menu opens. When it does, drop the icon into the empty box. Right-click the Mail Message icon in your new menu and type the person's name in the Name area (use an ampersand again here if you want to create a shortcut key for the person). Click the Assign Hyperlink option; choose Open; and click the E-mail Address button on the left of the dialog. Type the contact's e-mail address and click OK. Repeat the process for each of your regular correspondents.
Adding New Item buttons. You probably know that Outlook's New Appointment button only appears on the toolbar when you're in Calendar view; when you have the Inbox selected, its place is taken by the New Mail Message button. If you'd like to have all these buttons available all the time, whichever module happens to be open, add them to your toolbar.
Choose View/Toolbars/Customize, then click the Commands tab and File category. Click and drag the icons you want onto the toolbar -- you'll find "create a new item" icons for a range of choices including Contact and Task as well as Mail Message and Appointment.
What's in your Journal? Outlook's Journal can record a lot of useful information about your dealings with business contacts and all the files you're working on. In fact, it may already be doing so.
Click the Journal entry in the Folder list to see what's already on file, and customize what will be recorded in the future by choosing Tools/Options/Preferences/Journal Options. Here you can specify what the Journal records -- if you're someone who often loses files, for instance, tell the Journal to keep track of the Office files you use. You can view them later by type: Choose View/Current View/By Type, or get a simple list of documents and their editing times by choosing View/Current View/Entry List.
Changing your View. If you'd prefer to start Outlook with the Calendar or perhaps your Contacts, not your Inbox, as the default selection, it's as simple as specifying a Startup folder. Choose Tools/Options/Other and click the Advanced Options button. From the "Start in this folder" list, choose the folder to use and click OK.
If you'd like to have more than one option open at a time -- both your Calendar and Contacts, say -- open one of them, then right-click the shortcut for the second and choose Open in New Window.
