An Introduction to Outlook 2007

About 300 million people use Microsoft Outlook® every day, making it one of the world’s most popular software programs. Although many people use Outlook only to send and receive email, Outlook includes many other features that can help organize your life, both at home and at work.

Though certain components in Outlook have been overhauled in Outlook 2007, its six main features remain the same: Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Journal.

The main screen of Outlook’s Mail feature is what you’ll see first when you open Outlook. The Mail feature lets you compose, send, receive, organize, and prioritize email for one or more email accounts.

The Calendar feature lets you schedule appointments, events, and meetings. You can then email alerts about your upcoming events to yourself and to others, or share your entire calendar with anyone you choose.

The Contacts feature lets you create and maintain a database of all of your contacts—friends, family members, and coworkers whose contact information you’d like to have on file. You can then use your Contacts database to speed up the process of addressing emails, sending out meeting alerts, and so on.

With the Task feature, you can maintain an ongoing to-do list that works with your Calendar and emails you’ve flagged. You can check off each task as you do it, or assign tasks to others and check their progress.

The Notes feature lets you compose, save, organize, and print out shopping lists, brainstorms, or anything else you’d typically jot down on paper.

Outlook’s Journal lets you record and track the amount of time you spend on a specific project or with a specific client or other contact. For instance, if you’re a lawyer and you need to track how much time you spent writing an email for a client, you can set up your Journal to record how much time elapsed between when you first created the email and when you sent it. You can also track the total time you spend creating documents in any type of Microsoft Office® software, such as Excel® and Word® files.

Microsoft has made all of Outlook’s features work together seamlessly. For instance, if you use Outlook to organize your tasks, you can assign a task to any of your contacts directly from Contacts—Outlook will automatically send out an email to notify your contact of his or her new task and request a response. In addition, Outlook will add the task to both of your Calendars (assuming you’re both using Outlook).

Similarly, you can use Outlook to send emails to any of your contacts from within the Contacts feature. You’ll just need to double-click on your recipient’s name in Contacts and click Email. This way, if you keep your contact list up-to-date, you’ll rarely need to enter email addresses manually. These are just a few examples of how you can boost your productivity by using Outlook’s main features together.

All of the software applications in Microsoft’s revamped Office 2007 suite, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint®, are designed to work with Outlook’s Mail feature. By clicking on the Office button in the top left corner of any Office application (except Outlook), you can email the document you’re currently working on directly to an Outlook contact (or any other recipient). To do so, just click on the Office button, click Send, and then click Email. An Outlook window will pop up in which you can enter your recipient’s email address and send out your message.