Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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Like many of you I spend a great deal of my time in Outlook. Besides the obvious time spent processing email, I also use the calendar extensively to coordinate my schedule, and if I need to locate a person he or she is usually (hopefully) in my contact list or address book (I hope). Without Outlook I'd be quite lost and I depend upon it to stay organized.

When I returned from last year's PowerPoint Live conference I wrote up a review of a book by Peggy Duncan on getting organized with Outlook 2007. She provided some excellent ideas for cleaning up your inbox, putting in organizational filters, and streamlining your work in Outlook 2003.

Outlook 2007 has a number of additional features that you can use to organize your messages and contacts more efficiently.

The three main organizational tools have new buttons directly on the Outlook toolbar. These are Categories, Flags and Send to OneNote.

Figure 1372

If you click on the Categories button, you open the category organizer which is now color coded in Outlook 2007.

Figure 1373

Here you can select any of the pre-color coded categories and maintain a color but rename it to suit your purposes. For example, let's say you want to organize your email in a way that filters messages pertaining to technology.

You simply select a color in the organizer (green) and click Rename, and give it a new name. Check its option box, assign a keystroke shortcut if you like, and click OK.

Figure 1374

Now you can use the color categories button to assign this color category to any email.

Figure 1375

As you might expect, these color categories also are available in the Contacts list, where we had categories previously but not color coded.

Figure 1376

While color coding of events in the Calendar has been an Outlook feature since 2002/XP, now you can use the same color categories to organize your events in your calendar to have them correspond to categories in email and contacts.

In email or contacts you can click categories at the top of the window to instantly filter the email or contacts by the categories you've color coded and created.

Figure 1377

Another aspect of the color coded categories is that they can also be the basis for Search Folders. We covered the original search folders in a previous update but with color coding it makes them even easier to implement and use.

If you click the Categories button in the Email part of Outlook, you get an option to Create a Category Search Folder.

In the section Categorized Email, click Choose to open the Categories dialog box, select a Category to use for a Search Folder and click OK.

Figure 1378

Click OK again to set the category in the Search Folders organizer.

Figure 1379

Now any mail which you assign to a category is automatically copied to a new folder in your Personal Folders for that category.

Figure 1380

There is also a feature in Categories (and Flags) to Set a Quick Click — this enables you to designate one category or flag that you can assign a quick click to immediately put in that category or assign that specific flag.

Flags have also gotten a lot cooler in 2007. Right-click any message to bring up the standard Flag options. By default follow up today is the Quick Click, but you can change that.

You can also create your own flags by clicking Custom.

Figure 1381

By flagging an email you automatically can add its parameters to your Task List — for example, by flagging the email for follow up today, you create the task immediately in your task list, and you can also click to add a reminder.

Figure 1382

Another cool thing you can do with an email is to drag it onto the Calendar button in the Navigation Pane to immediately schedule a meeting with the text of the email as part of the notes for the potential meeting.

Of course, then you can also use the scheduled appointment to generate an email message to the potential attendees, inviting them individually or with a distribution list.

The search panel within email has also been expanded significantly in Outlook 2007. While search will first take place in the current email folder, it will automatically expand to other folders. You can also use the drop down arrow to expand the search to your desktop or other parts of your system. (If you have Vista, its search indexing will also expand the search).

You can also quickly (re)search previous searches by their parameters.

Figure 1383

Finally, clicking the Send to OneNote button, as you might imagine, opens a new Unfiled note in OneNote with the substance of the email in the note. You can then drag the note to the appropriate OneNote section to organize or categorize it.

There's no doubt that Outlook 2007 is a powerful organizational tool and with the new features, they're worth learning, to streamline your work flow and optimize your efficiency.

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