Crabby Office Lady

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a great way to get all your beloved blogs, articles, or other sorts of content sent directly to your computer. Now, with Outlook 2007, you don't need any special software to have your RSS Feeds ready and waiting for you. It's like your own personal paperboy-valet-delivery service.

Some of you reading this column are already deep into the 2007 Microsoft Office system. And those of you who aren't, well, if you know what's good for you, I'm sure you won't be far behind. Today's column is all about RSS (Really Simple Syndication). But more than that, it's about how Outlook 2007 makes it simple to get everything you need all in one place: your Outlook window. In other words, we're going to go fishing.

What is RSS?

RSS is a way for content publishers of online magazines, Web sites, news agencies, and so on, to make news, blogs, and other content available to subscribers — and that content is usually free. You find what you want, subscribe to it, and then every time the author updates the content or writes something new, it's delivered fresh, right to your door (your computer door, that is).

For example, before I caught the RSS train — so to speak — every morning I would boot up my computer and take a look at my daily dose of favorite Web content: I would open up a browser window and check out the Chatterbox blog (http://www.slate.com/id/2152195/) at Slate.com. Then, when I was too infuriated to read any longer, I'd try to calm my nerves by dashing over to another favorite site, the New York Times Books section (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html). After that, I'd read several 2007 Microsoft Office system blogs to get column ideas. Two of my favorites are Jensen Harris's blog about the new Office user interface (http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/) and Brian Jones's blog about Open XML formats in Office 2007 (http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/). And then of course, if time allowed, I'd read a few more of my favorite blogs (nope, I'm not disclosing what those are).

Now, before I caught on to what RSS was, you can probably guess that all this searching and jumping from one page to another took quite a bit of time. I'd have to open up several browser windows (or use one and keep searching through my Favorites lists) and basically just hop all over the Web. As you can imagine, this took up a lot of my time. Then after I hopped on the RSS train (but before Outlook 2007 came around, with its fantabulous ability to subscribe to an RSS Feed) I used a third party RSS "reader," a piece of software that I downloaded and that kept and updated all of my favorite RSS content together.

But still, something wasn't perfect. Sure, I got what I wanted all in one place, but what I really needed was to be able to get all my RSS content in the same place where I spent most of my work time: Outlook.

Ask and ye shall receive, Crabby. Frankly, I didn't even have to ask: All those folks who think up features for Outlook came up with it all by themselves (and with help from several thousand requests from you Outlook aficionados). See? We do listen.

Outlook 2007: Your one-stop RSS service

When I found out that Outlook 2007 was going to have RSS capabilities, I nearly fell out of my chair. In my opinion, this is one of the best new features that the 2007 Office system had going for it. You can read and write e-mail, deal with your calendar, check on contacts, keep track of (or ignore) your task list....and read up on what's going on in the world and with your favorite bloggers. It's all right there, in the Outlook 2007 window:

  After you have added an RSS Feed to Outlook, a folder is displayed for the RSS Feed in the Navigation Pane. When you open the folder, the latest items downloaded from the RSS Feed are displayed. These items might contain only headlines with links that you can click to read the complete article.

  Outlook checks the RSS publisher's server for new and updated items on a regular schedule.

   The new and updated items are downloaded to Outlook where they are displayed in the folder associated with the RSS Feed. You open, read, and delete these RSS items just as you would any mail message. You can even move, flag, or forward the information to someone else.

 Note   For more information about what RSS is and how it works from within Outlook 2007, read Introduction to RSS.

Get RSS for your favorite Office Online content

So now you know how to set up your RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007. But today I have a special bonus for you: When you subscribe to the Office Online RSS Feed, we'll send you a package every other week. One week it might be a training course, a video demo, and a quiz. Another week it might be two courses and a quiz, or one course and two demos. These are all freebies, mind you. And in case you're not aware, quizzes, demos, and training courses are three of our most popular content types on the site. Did I pique your interest?

• Learn how to get RSS for Training, Demos, and Quizzes from Office Online
• Available RSS Feeds on Microsoft Office Online

These links will give you the skinny on how to subscribe to this special RSS Feed. And then it will all happen immediately. Oh the joy, oh the efficiency, oh the time saved by not having to hop all over the Web, from one favorite site to another...

Now that I've given you a bit of information about how RSS works in Outlook 2007, I'm not going to get too deep into how to set things up for you because there are many articles and other resources that will do that for you right on this very Web site. My job today is to guide you to these resources and encourage you to consider upgrading (if you haven't already) to Outlook 2007. Can you just imagine the pure joy and bliss (OK, if not joy and bliss, then just plain efficiency) of having your mail, your calendar, your contacts, your tasks, and your RSS Feeds all in one place? It's like motor home traveling: You never need to stop what you're doing to get most (if not all) of your work done.

And so, as promised, here are some resources that will tell you a bit more about what RSS is and how to get it going with Outlook 2007:

RSS Links

• Introduction to RSS
• Get RSS for Training, Demos, and Quizzes from Office Online
• Add an RSS Feed
• Add a collection of RSS Feeds
• Change settings for RSS Feeds

Crabby's RSS Feed

And one more thing: You may already know that you can subscribe to my RSS Feed, too. It's been around for a bit and it's a great way to get my columns delivered to your Outlook Inbox, again, hot and fresh on a weekly basis.

• The Crabby Office lady RSS Feed

"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." — Chinese Proverb

About the author

Annik Stahl, the Crabby Office Lady columnist, takes all of your complaints, compliments, and knee-jerk reactions to heart. Therefore, she graciously asks that you let her know whether this column was useful to you — or not — by entering your feedback using the Was this information helpful? tool below. And remember: If you don't vote, you can't complain.