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| Warning: You are viewing this page with an unsupported Web browser. This Web site works best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later, Firefox 1.5, or Netscape Navigator 8.0 or later. Learn more about supported browsers. 11 ways to get ready for Outlook 2007
Applies to: Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
 Microsoft Office 2007 Step by Step Joan Preppernau is the author of more than a dozen books about Windows and Office as well as numerous online training programs, and a contributor to the development of the certification exams for the 2007 Office system and Windows Vista. Joan is the President of Online Training Solutions, Inc. (OTSI). Joyce Cox has over 20 years' experience in the development of training materials about technical subjects for non-technical audiences, and is the author of dozens of books about Office and Windows technologies. Joyce is the Vice President of Online Training Solutions, Inc. (OTSI). She was President of and principle author for Online Press, where she developed the Quick Course series of computer training books for beginning and intermediate adult learners. She was also the first managing editor of Press, an editor for Sybex, and an editor for the University of California. To learn more about other books on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, visit Microsoft Press. In this article
For people who spend much of the day at a computer and are dependent on electronic messages as a means of communicating with colleagues, clients, friends, and family members, Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 offers an ideal solution. This feature-rich tool integrates e-mail, address books, calendars, task lists, note pads, and more into one place, and more importantly, makes this information immediately available to you when you need it. This article introduces you to some of the new and improved features in Office Outlook 2007 that help you organize your work more easily and in a more intuitive way. The basic concepts of Outlook remain the same in the 2007 release as in earlier versions, but the functionality has been greatly expanded. The biggest improvement in this version is the way that the various functions and tools have been linked and organized, making it much easier to use all the tools from one place. The biggest change is in the way tools and commands are available in the Outlook item windows, which utilize the new Microsoft Office Fluent user interface. Instead of the traditional menus and toolbars (which are still present in the program window), commands in the message, contact, appointment, and task windows are organized in groups by function. The groups are organized on tabs by process, to make them easily accessible in the specific context in which you’re working, and all the tabs are organized on the Ribbon, which is a part of the Office Fluent user interface. The Office Fluent user interface is available in several programs in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. It has been carefully designed to more closely reflect the way people generally work within the item windows. The new command structure might take some getting used to, but you’ll find that you can come up to speed pretty quickly. 1 Personalizing your Outlook workspaceThe Outlook program window includes six areas or elements in which you work with Outlook or with your Outlook items (e-mail messages, contact records, calendar entries, tasks, or notes). You might find that this is an ideal arrangement for the way you work. But if you’re viewing the program window on a low-resolution screen, don’t need all the available tools, or would like more space for the main work area, you can easily change the appearance and layout of the workspace in the following ways:
2 Personalizing an Electronic Business CardA new feature in Outlook 2007 is the presentation of contact record information in the form of a graphic that resembles a business card. When you enter a person’s contact information in a contact record, basic information including the person’s name, company, and job title; work, mobile, and home telephone numbers; and e-mail, postal, Web page, and instant messaging addresses appear in the business card shown in the upper-right corner of the contact window. (Only the first ten lines of information fit on the card.) If the contact record includes an image (such as a logo or photograph), the image appears on the left side of the card. You can change the types of information that appear, rearrange the information fields, format the text and background, and add, change, move, or remove images. Personalizing a business card for yourself provides you with an attractive or meaningful way of presenting your contact information to people you correspond with in e-mail. You can attach your business card to an outgoing e-mail message or include it as part (or all) of your e-mail signature. The recipient of your business card can easily create a contact record for you by saving the business card to his or her Outlook address book.
3 Working in the contact and message windowsOutlook displays contact records in the Contacts module and e-mail messages in the Mail module. When you create or open a contact record, it opens in a contact window. When you create or respond to an e-mail message, it opens in a message window. The contact window and message window incorporate the Office Fluent user interface elements and display item-specific commands separate from those in the Outlook program window. You can create, insert, and format information in a contact record by using the contact window commands. You can format and modify outgoing e-mail messages by using the message window commands. All item windows include the following elements:
Important Adding a command to the Quick Access Toolbar in one type of Outlook item window (for example, the contact window) does not add it to the Quick Access Toolbar of any other Outlook item window or any other 2007 Microsoft Office system program window.
4 Creating and formatting business graphicsThe saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is especially true in business communications, when you need to clearly explain facts or concepts, particularly to an increasingly global audience. Several programs in the 2007 Microsoft Office system include a new feature called SmartArt. This tool is very useful for creating professional business graphics within documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and messages. You can easily create lists and diagrams depicting relationships, processes, cycles, hierarchies, and so on in your e-mail messages. When sending a message, Outlook converts any SmartArt graphics within the message to static graphics.
5 Viewing messages and message attachmentsUnless you have a rule in place to redirect incoming messages to other folders, new messages you receive appear in your Outlook Inbox. Depending on your settings, Outlook downloads either the entire message to your computer or only the message header, which provides basic information about the message. Messages that you haven’t yet read are indicated by closed envelope icons and bold headers. There are several keyboard- and mouse-centric methods of displaying the text of a message.
6 Quickly locating messagesYou can use the new Instant Search feature to filter items based on their content so you can immediately find a specific message, contact, appointment, or task. When locating a message, you can elect to search within one or all of your mail folders. As you define the criteria for a search, Outlook filters out all messages that don’t match, making it easy to find exactly what you’re looking for. And here’s the neat thing: Outlook searches not only the content of the e-mail message header and the message itself, but also the content of message attachments. So if the search term you’re looking for is in an Office Word document attached to a message, the message will appear in the search results even if the term doesn’t appear in the text of the message. Tip You can’t instantly filter content in a Public Folder (if your organization uses these) but you can enter the search criteria and then click the Search button to get the same results as you would in your Inbox. If the search term you enter produces more than 200 results, the Search Results pane displays this information bar: You can display all the results for the current search term by clicking the message bar, or you can narrow the results by expanding the search term or by specifying other search criteria, such as the sender, the recipient (whether the message was addressed or only copied to you), whether the message contains attachments, and so on. Tip Instant Search is based on the same technology that drives the search functionality in . With this very powerful search engine, you can find any file on your computer containing a specified search term—whether in a file or folder name, in document or spreadsheet content, in an e-mail message within Outlook, in a message attachment, in a picture, music, or video file, and so on. As a matter of fact, if you prefer to do so, you can conduct all of your Outlook searches from the Windows Vista Start menu.
7 Organizing contacts and messages by using color categoriesYou can more easily locate information by assigning related items to categories. For example, you might assign contact records for customers to a Customers category. You can sort and filter Outlook items by category. Whereas previous versions of Outlook used simple named categories, Outlook 2007 uses color categories in which category names are linked to colors to provide a visual representation of the category information. You can change the name or color of any category, and create new categories. Twenty-five colors are available, but if that’s not sufficient, you can assign the same color to multiple categories. When you assign an item to one or more categories, the category colors appear at the top of the item window and, in certain views, in the module content pane. You can apply color categories to messages, calendar items, contacts, tasks, and notes. Outlook provides several options for doing so. To quickly view the messages belonging to a category, you can group your messages by category or include the category as a search criterion in the Query Builder. On the To-Do Bar, you can arrange your flagged messages and tasks by category.
8 Sending calendar information in an e-mail messageYou might frequently find it necessary to share information about your schedule with colleagues, friends, or family members. With Outlook 2007, you can easily embed selected calendar information as a static image in an e-mail message that you can send to any person who uses an HTML-capable e-mail program (not only people who use Outlook). You can choose the period of time for which you want to share information (Today, Tomorrow, Next 7 Days, Next 30 Days, or Whole Calendar, or you can specify a custom date range) and the level of detail you want to share. The details of calendar items marked as Private will not be shown unless you specifically choose to do so.
9 Subscribing to RSS FeedsMany commercial Web sites offer the option of subscribing to a news feed so you can receive information from the site without actually visiting it. This option is also increasingly offered by personal Web logs, which are commonly referred to as blogs. The technology behind the news feeds is called Really Simple Syndication (RSS). To receive RSS feeds, you need an RSS reader (a program that receives and processes the information), and until now, that meant that you needed to install one of the many standalone RSS readers that are available. However, you can now use a convenient RSS reader that is included in Outlook 2007. You can subscribe to a site’s RSS feeds from within Outlook or from the site itself. You don’t need to provide any personal information when you subscribe to an RSS feed; all you are doing is creating a connection between Outlook and the news server. Tip You can’t respond to blog discussions from within your Outlook RSS Subscriptions folder. Outlook includes RSS subscriptions in your Send/Receive group and updates them along with your e-mail accounts, within the limits set by the content provider. If you prefer to update RSS feeds less frequently than the default—for example, if you subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds and are concerned that the download time will interfere with other Outlook activities—you can create a separate Send/Receive group for your RSS feeds.
10 Working offline with document library contentsYou can create a copy of a SharePoint Server 2007 document library as a folder in Outlook 2007. You can then preview in the Outlook message pane any document, workbook, or presentation that is stored in the document library, or you can work with a local copy of the document, workbook, or presentation on your computer. Outlook creates and displays a folder, named for the site and document library, as a subfolder of the SharePoint Lists folder in your mailbox, and downloads a copy of each of the items stored in the document library as an Outlook item within the folder. An icon indicates the file type (for example, document, workbook, presentation, or database). Tip Outlook creates the SharePoint Lists folder the first time you connect a document library or other SharePoint list to Outlook. You can preview any item by clicking it, or open a read-only version of the item by double-clicking it. When you open an item, a banner at the top informs you that you’re working in an Offline Server Document; if you want to make changes and merge them with the document stored in the document library, click Edit Offline. Tip Opening an offline file does not check out the file to you in the document library. While you work with an offline copy of a file, a local version is stored in the SharePoint Drafts folder (a subfolder of the SharePoint Lists folder). An icon depicting a red arrow on a page indicates that you are currently editing the item. To transfer changes from the offline file to the document library, save your changes, close the file, and then reopen it. In the Edit Offline message box that appears, click Update.
11 Making favorite Outlook commands easily accessibleThe commands you use to control Outlook are available from menus and toolbars within the program window. The basic command structure hasn’t changed substantially from that in previous versions of Outlook: Buttons representing common commands are located on the Standard and Advanced toolbars, and other commands that you probably use less frequently can be found on the File, Edit, View, Go, Tools, Actions, and Help menus. You can also invoke many commands by using keyboard shortcuts. Tip To see a list of the available keyboard shortcuts, click the Office Outlook Help button, type keyboard shortcuts in the Search box, and press Enter. Then click the Keyboard Shortcuts For Outlook topic. The Office Fluent interface represents substantial changes to the way commands are presented within the Outlook item windows. The interface is designed to make all the commands you need at any given time available with only one click. However, you might find that buttons you use frequently are scattered on different tabs. To give you more control over the way you work in the Outlook item windows, the Office Fluent interface includes the Quick Access Toolbar, which is located to the right of the Office Button. You can add a button for any command to the Quick Access Toolbar so that it is always available no matter which tab is currently active. While you are still becoming familiar with the 2007 Office system programs, and in particular with Outlook, you might be quite content to work with the default settings. But as you become more experienced, you might want to adjust some of the settings to tailor the Office environment to the way you work. You can easily add commands to the Quick Access Toolbar, remove commands, or reposition the toolbar for greater convenience. If the commands you need are available from the Quick Access Toolbar, you can hide the Ribbon to provide more working space.
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