Microsoft Outlook

Manage your email, calendar and contacts in one place

Email has become an enormously popular way to communicate with others, giving us the opportunity to correspond with each other quickly in a highly relevant way.

However as this medium has proliferated, the phenomenon of information overload has followed closely behind, leaving us to deal with vast amounts of data, much of it irrelevant junk.

Microsoft Outlook is the email, diary and contact database tool that can help you manage your time and information more effectively by making it easier to create, share and manage information from a single location.

Outlook is first and foremost an email management programme, allowing you to send and receive email messages.

Outlook uses Microsoft Word as its email compiler, so you can expect all the handy editing tools you may already be familiar with – from spell and grammar checker to AutoComplete, which finishes familiar words, names and addresses for you.

Outlook makes it easy to manage your time more effectively by giving you control over your email. The Preview Pane makes glancing through your mail a cinch, and your ability to set up rules lets your mail organise itself into relevant folders as it arrives. Outlook also offers junk mail filters, so that email recognised as junk is automatically sent to your Deleted Items folder without cluttering up your Inbox.

Outlook provides you with a comprehensive ready to use contact database waiting to be populated. Adding a contact to your database couldn’t be easier. All you do is open an email received from that contact, right click the contact’s email address in the From field, and select Add to Contacts.

Once you’ve compiled your contact database, you’re in a position to put it to work, and you’ll notice that sister applications like Word give you the ability to use your Outlook database for functions like mail merge.

Office 2003 introduces an add-on for Outlook designed specifically for small business. Business Contact Manager helps you manage your business contacts and sales opportunities from a single location, helping you to track business opportunities and providing you with a single area from which to access related documents and data.

Outlook takes the guesswork out of setting up meetings and co-ordinating schedules. Outlook makes it easy to view and manage both personal and team schedules so you can see at a glance who is available, and when.

Outlook lets you save multiple group calendars for quick and easy access to team or meeting room schedules, making it easy to arrange when and where to meet.

And you can manage your appointments and tasks from a single reminder window – an integrated ‘to do’ list that lets you open, dismiss or snooze reminders as you wish.

Outlook comes with reliability features that help make sure that you spend time working rather than worrying about your software. Moreover, and vitally when it comes to any Internet related tool, it comes with security features that are being continually enhanced to help protect your systems against threats like computer viruses.

Microsoft Outlook home page

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