Outlook 2007: Record journal entries

                One of the more overlooked features in Outlook is the ability to use it as a journal.  You can customize how the journal records information on contacts and it also has the ability to put the actions in a timeline view.

Here is an easy to follow guide to begin using the journal option by recording a manual entry for a meeting and recording the time.

First, go to File \ New \ Journal Entry
 

 

Now in the journal entry window we can enter in pertinent information about the meeting such as time, date, notes, etc. 

Starting the timer comes in handy!  For instance if you’re on a conference call with a customer who pays by the hour.  When the meeting starts just hit “Start Timer” and you will see the stopwatch icon start ticking.  When the meeting is over you can “save and close” or Save As…
 

 
Finally when we go into the Journal we will see a timeline of the entries for the week.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to flag mails as irrelevant after specific time in Outlook 2010

How can I mark a message, similar to flagging a message, as “irrelevant” after a certain date?

For this Outlook has the “Expires after” message option. When the set date is reached, the message will appear in a Grey strike through font for easy recognition.

Setting the expiration date

You can set an expiration date on a message, in the Message Options dialog. For this you’ll first have to open the message by double clicking it. You can then find the Message Options dialog in the following way;


Outlook 2010

Open the mail you want flag and then click on "File" tab and then select "Properties" option.

In this dialog you can select the “Expires after” option and set the date and time after which the message would be no longer relevant to you.

These steps can be followed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Outlook Add-in's: Send Shield

Outlook Add-in's:

Send Shield: This is an interesting little Add-in: it basically eliminates the problem of sending Office files with too much information on Outlook. Apparently, people send tracked changes and other comments in document attachments (and that can be quite embarrassing.) The plug-in strips out all that extra metadata when sending files like documents and spreadsheets. It is still in beta and available for download here.

These software is compatible to install on Windows Xp and Windows 7

Click here to Download

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Outlook 2010: Quick step feature

Outlook 2010: Quick step feature

What are Quick Steps:

     Quick Steps are easy-to-use one-click buttons which perform multiple actions at once. If you file your mail, they can be a life saver – one click and that conversation is filed away and marked as read. If you send e-mail to the same people over and over – one click and you have a new email to your team. As your work style in Outlook changes, you can configure Quick Steps to work the way you do.





How to create Quick step in Outlook 2010:

Let’s take a example of “To Manager” from the available Quick Steps, in order to start using it you will need to enter the email address of your manager, you can also change the label and title of the quick step.

If you’re using Microsoft office Outlook 2010 you’ll notice the new Quick Steps section in the Ribbon. There are some included by default and they can be customized. To configure or change Quick Steps, on the Home Tab, use the dropdown arrow in the Quick Steps box, then select Manage Quick Steps.

A new window will open up displaying the list of you can move the order of the quick steps by clicking on the arrow, this will rearrange them.

In addition to that you can also modify, duplicate or delete the quick step, to modify the quick step click on the modify button.

Now we can edit the step. For example, we want to always forward certain emails to our boss. Enter in your managers email address and you can also select to flag it, select the type of importance, and add extra text for it. We also added an action to move the email to a specific folder in Outlook.

People who like Keyboard also like the fact that you can create a shortcut key for the step too. When you’re done making adjustments to the step make sure to save it.

Once you have made the changes click on the Save button to apply them, finally click on the Ok button in the Quick steps window.After saving your Quick Step, open an email you want to send to your boss and click To Manager from the Quick Steps box.

The email will be opened so you can forward it, and add more recipients as well if you want.

These steps can be followed on Windows Xp and Windows 7

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Outlook 2010: Conversation management tool

Outlook 2010: Conversation management tool

                  Manage large amounts of e-mail with ease. Condense, categorize, or even ignore entire conversations with a few clicks. With new conversation management tools and the improved Conversation View

If you are in conversation with your friend regarding some sort of business deal for the past couple of months, you will need to go through a bundle of emails to track down the history of your conversation. Microsoft Outlook 2010 offers an easy conversation management feature, so that all of your emails are now grouped into conversations based on the subject of the mail.





Microsoft office Outlook 2010 groups emails with the same subjects together and you will see a drop down button along with such emails, simply hit it and you will find all the older emails linked here. Click any email to view it.

Whenever you will click the drop down button, you will see all the older emails attached. If to ignore the main conversation group, all emails inside it will be ignored, same goes for other actions, such as, delete, move, etc.

Note: Just to let you know, Thunderbird 3 also offers this feature.

This steps are same for windows Xp and Windows 7

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Outlook 2010 New feature: Conversation management tool

New feature in Outlook 2010: conversation management tool

Think about how much e-mail you receive in a typical week today versus a typical week five years ago. We’ve redesigned Outlook 2010 to reflect these changes in your lifestyle and help keep up with the vast amounts of information you receive every day.
 
Manage large amounts of e-mail with ease. Condense, categorize, or even ignore entire conversations with a few clicks. With new conversation management tools and the improved Conversation View


 

Watch this vedio To see how conversations feature works in Outlook 2010:





This steps can be followed in Windows Xp and Windows 7

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New feature Outlook 2010: Quick steps.

New feature Outlook 2010: Quick steps

A very interesting feature in Microsoft Office Outlook 2010 is the introduction of quick steps, this feature allows users to perform several actions quickly and easily.

For example you can send a report you received, create a list of users that you can quickly email to, forward it to someone else, send a meeting reply, move it to another folder and so on.

This is indeed a very useful feature and it will definitely help to increase your productivity. There are several things that this feature has, which are not clearly visible, we will dive into things and help you understand how to use Quick steps, create your own quick steps and customizing quick steps.

To Understand Quick step feature watch this video.

This video guide can be followed on Windows Xp and Windows 7

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How to Import and Export Message rules in Outlook 2007 and 2010

Import and Export Message rules in Outlook 2007 and 2010

      Many of you might be using rules to organize your inbox. Recently due to some corrupt files, you had to re-install Windows Operating system. Due to this when we installed Outlook again and then you have to create the rules starting from scratch. So it is always good to have a back up of your rules. 

To backup Rules, 

click on the "File" tab in Office Outlook 2010 and here you can see "Rules and Alerts" at the bottom under Info tab.

Click on "Tools" in Menu bar in Office outlook 2007 and here you can see "Rules and Alerts"

Now, select "Options" tab in current window.

Export massage rules:

   1. Click Export Rules.

   2. In the File name box, type the path and file name for the set of rules you want 

       to export.

   3. If you want to export a file that contains only rules that are compatible with

       a previous version of Outlook, in the Save as type list, select Outlook 2002 

      Compatible Rules Wizard rules, Outlook 2000 Compatible Rules Wizard rules, 

      or Outlook 98 Compatible Rules Wizard rules.

   4. Click Save.

Importing massage rules:

   1. Click Import Rules.

   2. In the File name box, type the path and file name for the set of rules you want to 

       import.

   3. If you want to import a file that contains rules other than Rules Wizard rules, such

       as rules that are compatible with previous versions of Microsoft Outlook, click the 

       file type in the Files of type list.

   4. Click Open.

Same steps can be followed on windows 7 and Windows Xp

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How to Create email rules in Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003

How to Create email rules in Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2003

 
       Many of your emails follow a somewhat predictable pattern, which make them ideal for automatic mail sorting.

 

Office Outlook 2007 lets you create email rules, or mail filters, to automatically move emails to folders, or delete emails, etc. - following a set of conditions you outline yourself.

Step 1: 

To create an email rule in Outlook 2007, go to Tools > Rules and Alerts, Outlook 2007 will open the Rules Wizard, which will guide you through all the filters you can create for an email rule, how to name it, and when to start running it. 

Step 2: 

choose the type of email rule you want to create The first step is to choose one of 12 email rule types: under "Stay Organized", you will find the most common rule types, like automatically moving an email to a folder, based on sender, recipient, or subject. We will choose "Move messages from someone to a folder".

Notice that as you change the selection at the top (Step 1), the email rule criteria change at the bottom as well (Step 2). In our case, after choosing the first option, we now have to choose the sender, and the destination folder.

Step 3: 

Configure the criteria of your rule

Each blue underlined piece of text is a clickable link: click on the "people or distribution list" to pick a sender

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Then click on "specified [folder]" to choose (or create) the email folder in which matching messages should be moved.

These steps can be followed on Windows Xp and Windows 7

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How to secure a Personal Folders File on Outlook 2007

Securing a Personal Folders File

If you’re not using Outlook as a client for Exchange Server or if you aren’t storing your
Outlook items on the Exchange Server computer, you must be using a Personal Folders file.
 

You can secure your Personal Folders file with a password to make it more difficult for othersto open that file without your permission.

 

To create a password for your Personal Folders file, use the following steps:

1. Right-click the top-level folder in your Personal Folders file (usually named Personal
Folders) and choose Properties.

2. Click the Advanced button to display the Personal Folders dialog box

3. Click the Change Password button to display the dialog box

4. If you previously had a password on the Personal Folders file, enter it in the Old
Password text box.

5. Enter your new password in both the New Password and Verify Password text boxes.

6. If you want to save the password so that you don’t have to enter it every time you open
your file, check the box marked Save This Password in Your Password List.

7. Click OK to save your password and click OK again to exit the Personal Folders
dialog box.

8. The next time you start Outlook, you’ll be presented with the Personal Folders
Password dialog box. Enter your password and click OK to access your Personal Folders file.

Note: This steps can be followed for Windows Xp and Windows 7

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Top 10 quick Tips to Manage Outlook 2007 Video

10 Quick tips to manage Outlook 2007

The first time you open Outlook 2007 you might be disappointed to see that, on the face of it, Outlook does not display the new ribbon and new interface that you will see in the other major applications in the Office 2007 suite such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Dig a little deeper under the surface, however, and you'll see that the Ribbon and new interface are there in places, but more than this, Outlook is significantly improved both in terms of both functionality and features.

There's a lot to like about Outlook 2007 and plenty of new tools to help you be more productive. Here are our ten best tips for working with the new Outlook 2007:

This video gives basic tip on managing Email, Calender, reminders and meeting requests etc. this video goes along with outlook 2007 on Windows Xp and Windows 7

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About To - Do Bar in Microsoft Outlook 2007

 New To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007

        

        The new To-Do Bar, which shows you everything on your plate at a glance. There are a lot of features packed into a tiny space, so we’ll go through some of them with you.

 

To-Do Bar Display Options

        To turn on the To-Do bar in Outlook, just click on View \ To-Do Bar, and then choose from Normal or Minimized to open the bar.

 

 

           In Minimized mode, the To-Do Bar docks to the right side of the Inbox, but you can click on the little arrows at the top to expand it.

 

 

          You can also right-click on the To-Do bar to choose which options you want to show. I wanted to show the calendar and task list, but didn’t want to see the appointments.

 

Create Appointments by Dragging to the Calendar

          If you want to create an appointment, all you need to do is drag an email or task item to the calendar, and it will open up a new appointment window already keyed to that day.

 

I find this feature alone incredibly useful.

Adding New Tasks Quickly

To add a new task for today, just type into the task bar and hit the enter key.

 

 

The task will then appear under the Today column.

Marking Tasks Complete

      To mark a task complete, simply left-click the red flag. You could also right-click to quickly change the due date or add a reminder.

 

Organizing with Categories

        Categories are assigned by color so you can visually see the importance of each task at a glance.

 

 

     To customize the category list, you can right-click the categories and then choose All Categories from the menu.

      This will take you to a screen where you can customize the colors and category names, and even better you can assign a shortcut key.

 

    Hovering your mouse over a to-do list entry will show you all the most important information for a task. You can see that the category is “Important” as well as the due date, which is easier than having to open each task.

 

 

You can follow same steps on Windows 7 and Windows XP

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How to Categorize Notes in Outlook 2007

Categorize Notes

       
 
      The easiest way to categorize a note is to right-click it, select "Categorize" and pick the category. If you accidentally selected the wrong category or want to remove a category, pick the category again and Outlook will deselect the category.

         
When you categorize a note, the note receives the color of its category. Any note without a category receives the color selected in the Notes Options. The default color is yellow. Change the default color, size and font by doing the following:

1. Click Options from the Tools menu.

2. Click Note Options.

3. Click the down-arrow next to Color and Size to change each option.

 
   

4. Click Font to open Font options and change the font, font style, size, effects and color, and click OK.

5. Click OK twice to exit Options.

      Existing notes won't change color even if they're the previous default color. New notes, however, reflect the new color you selected from the Notes Options.


You can follow same steps on Windows 7 and Windows XP

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