Outlook 2013 For Dummies E-Book

Bill Dyszel

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 428

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The fun and friendly way to manage your busy life with the new Outlook 2013

As the number one e-mail client and personal information manager, Microsoft Outlook offers a set of uncomplicated features that maximize the management of your e-mail, schedule, and general daily activities, with the least amount of hassle possible. This easy-to-understand guide walks you through Outlook 2013 and introduces you to the latest features. You'll learn how to find information quickly, handle e-mail, coordinate schedules, keep current with contacts and social networks, and much more.

• Walks you through getting started with Outlook 2013 and then provides you with complete coverage on e-mail basics, advanced e-mail features, working with the calendar, managing contacts, and integrating Outlook with other applications
• Shows you how to track tasks, take notes, and record items in the journal, as well as filter out junk e-mail, activate Outlook's privacy and security features, and more
• Explains how to customize your Outlook, manage all the information within Outlook, and take Outlook on the road

Outlook 2013 For Dummies offers you a whole new outlook on Outlook 2013!

Leseprobe

Outlook® 2013 For Dummies®

Published byJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030-5774www.wiley.com

Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012956417

ISBN: 978-1-118-49046-4 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-49048-8 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-49148-5 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-49136-2 (ebk)

Manufactured in the United States of America

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About the Author

Bill Dyszel is the author of 20 books, a regular contributor to national publications including PC Magazine, and a popular keynote speaker. Bill is also an award-winning filmmaker and an accomplished entertainer. He sang with the New York City Opera for 14 years and still appears regularly on the New York stage. He has produced scores of short films and currently ranks as the most prolific contributor to the 48-Hour Film Project, an international filmmaking competition. Many of his short, comedic films can be seen on YouTube.

About the Contributor

Michael Zulich is an IT professional with over 25 years of experience implementing, managing, and supporting high technology including Windows Server and MS Exchange. A former contributing editor to Computer Shopper and frequent technical editor to the Outlook For Dummies series, Mike is also the coauthor of Mastering Palm Organizers.

Dedication

This book is dedicated to everyone with a love for lifelong learning.

Author’s Acknowledgments

Thanks so much to the extraordinary team at Wiley that made this edition a reality — to Katie Mohr for her persistent focus on the project’s outcome, and to Tonya Cupp and Rebecca Senninger for steady editorial guidance.

Very special thanks to my longtime friend, Navy shipmate, and esteemed colleague Michael Zulich for taking on the lion’s share of the work of revising this book. His rock-solid technology experience, superior editorial sensibility and boundless common sense helped make this book readable, accurate, and enjoyable. Through countless obstacles, including hurricanes, floods, snowstorms, and turbulent deadlines, Mike kept the project moving forward smoothly at top-notch quality. And of course, he’s a fabulous colleague and a regular mensch, as they say in his native Brooklyn, which made the whole process a pleasure. Thanks, Mike!

Publisher's Acknowledgments

We’re proud of this book; please send us your comments at http://dummies.custhelp.com. For other comments, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 877-762-2974, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax [phone].

Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

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Project Editor: Tonya Maddox Cupp

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Publishing and Editorial for Technology Dummies

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Outlook 2013 For Dummies®

Visit www.dummies.com/cheatsheet/outlook2013 to view this book's cheat sheet.

Table of Contents

Introduction

About This Book

Foolish Assumptions

How This Book Is Organized

Part I: Getting Started with Outlook 2013

Part II: Taming the E-Mail Beast

Part III: Managing Contacts, Dates, Tasks, and More

Part IV: Beyond the Basics: Tips and Tricks You Won’t Want to Miss

Part V: Outlook at Work

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Conventions Used in This Book

Dialog boxes

Ribbons and tabs

Keyboard shortcuts

Icons Used in This Book

Part I: Getting Started with Outlook 2013

Chapter 1: The Outlook Features You Really Need to Know

Explaining Why So Many People Use Outlook

Doing Anything in Outlook the Easy Way

E-Mail: Basic Delivery

Reading e-mail

Answering e-mail

Creating new e-mail messages

Sending a File

Quick Calendar Keeping

Entering an appointment

Managing your schedule

Adding a Contact

Entering a Task

Taking Notes

Chapter 2: Inside Outlook: Getting More Done with Less Effort

Outlook and Other Programs

There’s No Place Like Home: Outlook’s Main Screen

Looking at modules

Using the Folder pane

The Information Viewer: Outlook’s hotspot

Navigating folders

Tying It All Together: The Ribbon

Viewing ScreenTips

Using the New Items button

Finding Things in a Flash with Instant Search

Taking Peeks

Getting Help in Outlook

Chapter 3: On the Fast Track: Drag ‘til You Drop

Dragging

Dispatching Tasks in a Flash

Making Time Stand Still with Calendar Wizardry

Keeping Friends Close and Enemies Closer

Creating Instant E-Mail Messages

Creating from a name in your Contacts list

Creating from an appointment

Expanding Your Outlook Workspace

Zen of the Right Button

Part II: Taming the E-Mail Beast

Chapter 4: The Essential Secrets of E-Mail

Front Ends and Back Ends

Creating Messages

The quick-and-dirty way

The slow, complete way

Setting priorities

Setting sensitivity

Setting other message options

Adding an Internet link to an e-mail message

Reading and Replying to E-Mail Messages

Previewing message text

Sending a reply

Resending messages

Using a web link from your e-mail

Don’t get caught by phishing

That’s Not My Department: Forwarding E-Mail

Blind Copying for Privacy

Deleting Messages

Saving Interrupted Messages

Saving a Message as a File

Chapter 5: E-Mail Tools You Can’t Do Without

Nagging by Flagging

One-click flagging

Setting flags for different days

Changing the default flag date

Adding a flag with a customized reminder

Changing the date on a reminder

Saving Copies of Your Messages

Setting Your Reply and Forward Options

Adding Comments to a Reply or Forward

Sending Attachments

E-Mailing Screenshots

Creating Signatures for Your Messages

Chapter 6: Conquering Your Mountain of Messages

Organizing Folders

Creating a new mail folder

Moving messages to another folder

Organizing Your E-Mail with Search Folders

Setting up a search folder

Using a search folder

Deleting a search folder

Using the Reading Pane

Playing by the Rules

Creating a rule

Running a rule

Filtering Junk E-Mail

Fine-tuning the filter’s sensitivity

Filtering your e-mail with sender and recipient lists

Filtering domains

Archiving for Posterity

Setting up AutoArchive

Setting AutoArchive for individual folders

Starting the archive process manually

Finding and viewing archived items

Closing the archive data file

Arranging Your Messages

Viewing conversations

Ignoring conversations

Cleaning up conversations

Simplifying Tasks Using Quick Steps

Creating and managing Quick Steps

Creating Quick Parts to save keystrokes

Part III: Managing Contacts, Dates, Tasks, and More

Chapter 7: Your Little Black Book: Creating Contacts Lists

Putting In Your Contacts: Names, Numbers, and Other Stuff

The quick-and-dirty way to enter contacts

The slow, complete way to enter contacts

Viewing Your Contacts

Sorting a view

Rearranging views

Using grouped views

Flagging Your Friends

Using Contact Information

Searching contacts in the Contacts module

Finding a contact from any Outlook module

Forwarding a business card

Gathering People into Groups

Creating a Contact group

Editing a Contact group

Using a Contact group

Adding pictures to contacts

Chapter 8: Unleashing the Calendar’s Power

Getting around the Outlook Calendar

Meetings Galore: Scheduling Appointments

The quick-and-dirty way to enter an appointment

The complete way to enter an appointment

Not this time: Changing dates

Not ever: Breaking dates

We’ve got to keep seeing each other: Recurring dates

Getting a Good View of Your Calendar

Printing Your Appointments

Adding Holidays

Handling Multiple Calendars

Creating multiple calendars

Managing multiple calendars

Chapter 9: Task Mastery: Discovering All the Bells and Whistles

Frequenting the To-Do Bar

Adding a new item to the To-Do bar

Minimizing the To-Do bar

Entering New Tasks in the Tasks Module

Adding an Internet link to a task

Editing Your Tasks

The quick-and-dirty way to change a task

The regular way to change a task

Deleting a task

Managing Recurring Tasks

Creating a regenerating task

Skipping a recurring task once

Marking Tasks Complete

Marking it off

Picking a color for completed or overdue tasks

Viewing Your Tasks

Tasks in the Calendar

Chapter 10: For the Record: Notes and Journal Entries

Writing a Note

Finding a Note

Reading a Note

Deleting a Note

Categorizing a Note

Changing a Note’s Size

Viewing Your Notes

Icon view

Notes List view

Last 7 Days view

Printing Your Notes

Forwarding a Note

Keeping a Journal for Tidy Recordkeeping

Printing Your Journal

Peeking into the Journal

Timeline view

Entry List view

Phone Calls view

Last 7 Days view

It’s All in the Journal

Part IV: Beyond the Basics: Tips and Tricks You Won’t Want to Miss

Chapter 11: Social Media Magic with Outlook RSS

Brushing Up on Social Media Basics

Sending SOS for RSS

Feeling like a social butterfly

Subscribing to a YouTube Channel in Outlook

Subscribing to Blogs in Outlook

Subscribing to Podcasts via Outlook

Reading Feeds

Feed Me, Seymour: Sharing

Using the Outlook Social Connector

Using the People pane

Adding a Facebook or LinkedIn connection to Outlook

Chapter 12: Powering Your Home Office with Outlook

Investigating an ISP

Picking a Provider

Setting Up Internet E-Mail Accounts

Dealing with Multiple E-Mail Accounts

Chapter 13: Merging Mail from Outlook to Microsoft Word

Conjuring Mailing-Label Magic

Urging to merge

Making and using a merge template

Form Letter Formalities

Merging from Selected Contacts

You’ll Still Have to Lick It: Printing Envelopes

Merging to E-Mail

Part V: Outlook at Work

Chapter 14: Big-Time Collaboration with Outlook

Collaborating with Outlook’s Help

Organizing a meeting

Responding to a meeting request

Checking responses to your meeting request

Taking a vote

Tallying votes

Assigning tasks

Sending a status report

Collaborating with Outlook and Exchange

Giving delegate permissions

Opening someone else’s folder

Viewing Two Calendars Side by Side

Setting access permissions

Viewing two accounts

About Address Books

Using SharePoint Team Services

Joining a SharePoint team

Linking Outlook to SharePoint data

Accessing SharePoint data from Outlook

Chapter 15: Keeping Secrets Safe with Outlook Security

Getting a Digital ID

Sending Digitally Signed Messages

Sending a single message

Sending multiple messages

Getting Digitally Signed Messages

Encrypting Messages

Getting Vaccinated: Antivirus Software

Chapter 16: Seeing It Your Way: Customizing Outlook

Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

Customizing the Ribbon

Enjoying the Views

Table/List view

Icon view

Card view

Calendar views

Playing with Columns in Table/List View

Adding a column

Moving a column

Widening or narrowing a column

Removing a column

Sorting Items

Sorting from Table view

Sorting from the Sort dialog box

Grouping Items

Viewing grouped items

Viewing headings only

Saving Custom Views

Using Categories

Assigning a category

Renaming a category

Changing a category color

Assigning a category shortcut key

Chapter 17: Telecommuting with Outlook.com and Outlook Web Access

Exploring Outlook.com

Getting Caught Up on Web E-Mail Basics

Reading messages

Sending a message

Flagging messages

Setting individual message options

Organizing Contacts

Viewing your contacts

Adding contacts

Using Your Calendar

Entering an appointment

Moving an appointment

Viewing the calendar

Mobile Collaboration

Inviting attendees to a meeting

Responding to a meeting request

Exploring Your Options

Automated vacation replies/out of office message

Creating a signature

Understanding Outlook Web Access

Knowing when it’s handy

Logging on and off

Part VI : The Part of Tens

Chapter 18: Ten Accessories for Outlook

Smartphones

Microsoft Office

A Business-Card Scanner

Mozy Backup

Xobni

Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft Exchange

SkyDrive

Text Messaging Services

Dymo LabelWriter

Chapter 19: Ten Things You Can’t Do with Outlook

Custom-Sort Folders

Go Back to the Old Menus

Insert a Phone Number into Your Calendar

Open a Message from the Reading Pane

Perform Two-Sided Printing

Search and Replace Area Codes

Embed Pictures in Notes

Calculate Expenses with Journal Phone Call Entries

Create Contact Records for all Recipients of an E-Mail

Back Up Outlook Data

Ten More Things Outlook Can’t Do for You

Chapter 20: Ten Things You Can Do after You’re Comfy

Customizing the Quick Access Toolbar

Wising Up Your Messages with Smart Art

Translating Your E-Mail Messages

Adding Charts for Impact

Using Symbols in E-Mail

Opening Multiple Calendars

Superimposing Calendars

Viewing Unusual Numbers of Days

Selecting Dates as a Group

Pinning a Contact Card

Chapter 21: Ten Shortcuts Worth Taking

Using the New Items Tool

Sending a File to an E-Mail Recipient

Sending a File from a Microsoft Office Application

Taking a Note

Finding Something

Undoing Your Mistakes

Using the Go to Date Command

Adding Items to List Views

Sending Repeat Messages

Resending a Message

Cheat Sheet

Introduction

Microsoft Outlook has become an essential business tool in the years since I covered its first prerelease versions in 1996. If you work in a company that employs more than a dozen people, it’s virtually certain that most of your communications and time planning will take place in Microsoft Outlook. Knowing Outlook well can make you more successful at work. Whether you’re taking directions from your boss, giving directions to your employees, organizing meetings, collaborating on important projects, or just keeping up with business, Outlook is what you’ll use to get it done fast.

Not understanding Outlook is almost like not understanding how to get to work. Because Outlook is so popular, hundreds of millions of people now spend their entire workday using Outlook one way or another. Now that more companies encourage telecommuting and hire employees who work from home, Outlook is the virtual workplace of so many people.

I’ve had the pleasure of training literally thousands of people on all the different ways Outlook can improve their workflow and simplify their life. People are often surprised to discover how much faster they can work when they know to use Outlook effectively.

Microsoft Outlook was designed to make organizing your daily work blindingly easy — almost automatic. You already have sophisticated programs for word processing and number crunching, but Outlook pulls together everything you need to know about your daily tasks, appointments, e-mail messages, and other details. More important, Outlook enables you to use the same methods to deal with many different kinds of information, so you have to understand only one program to deal with the many kinds of details that fill your life, such as

Setting up a conference call with colleagues

Sending links to a webinar for a marketing campaign

Exchanging information about important projects

Reminding people to do the things they promised to do

Recording all the work you do so that you can find what you did and when you did it

Outlook is a personal information manager that can act as your assistant in dealing with the flurry of small but important details that stand between you and the work you do. You can just as easily keep track of personal information that isn’t business-related and keep both business and personal information in the same convenient location.

About This Book

As you read this book and work with Outlook, you discover how useful Outlook is, as well as find new ways to make it more useful for the things you do most. If you fit in any of the following categories, this book is for you:

You just got a job with a company that uses Outlook as its e-mail program and you need to find out how to use it in a hurry.

You’ve used Outlook for years just because “it was there,” but you know you’ve only used a tenth of its power. Now you’re overwhelmed with work and want to plow through that mountain of tasks faster by using Outlook better.

You’re planning to buy (or have just bought) Outlook and want to know what you can do with it — as well as how to do your work more efficiently.

You want an easier, faster tool for managing tasks, schedules, e-mail, and other details in your working life.

Even if you don’t fall into one of these groups, this book gives you simple, clear explanations of how Outlook can work for you. It’s hard to imagine any computer user who wouldn’t benefit from understanding Outlook better. If all you want is a quick, guided tour of Outlook, you can skim this book; it covers everything you need to get started. Getting a handle on most major Outlook features is fairly easy — that’s how the program is designed. (You can also keep the book handy as a reference for the tricks that you may not need every day.)

Don’t be fooled, though — you can find a great deal of power in Outlook if you want to dig deeply enough. Outlook links with your Microsoft Office applications, and it’s programmable by anyone who wants to tackle some Visual Basic script writing. (I don’t get into that in this book.) You may not want to do the programming yourself, but finding people who can do that for you isn’t hard; just ask around.

Foolish Assumptions

I assume that you know how to turn on your computer and how to use a mouse and keyboard. In case you need a brushup on Windows, I throw in reminders as I go along. If Windows and Microsoft Office are strange to you, I recommend picking up (respectively) Andy Rathbone’s Windows 8 For Dummies or Wally Wang’s Microsoft Office 2013 For Dummies (both published by Wiley).

If all you have is a copy of this book and a computer running Outlook, you can certainly do basic, useful things right away (like send and receive e-mail), as well as a few fun things. And after some time, you’ll be able to do many fun and useful things.

How This Book Is Organized

To make it easier to find out how to do what you want to do, this book is divided into parts. Each part covers a different aspect of using Outlook. Because you can use similar methods to do many different jobs with Outlook, the first parts of the book focus on how to use Outlook. The later parts concentrate on what you can use Outlook to do.

Part I: Getting Started with Outlook 2013

I learn best by doing, so the first chapter is a quick guide to the things that most people do with Outlook on a typical day. You find out how to use Outlook for routine tasks such as handling messages, notes, and appointments. You can get quite a lot of mileage out of Outlook, even if you only check out the things I describe in the first chapter.

Because Outlook allows you to use similar methods to do many things, I go on to show you the things that stay pretty much the same throughout the program: how to create new items from old ones by using drag and drop; ways to view items that make your information easy to understand at a glance; and the features Outlook offers to make it easier to move, copy, and organize your files.

Part II: Taming the E-Mail Beast

E-mail is now the most popular function of computers. Tens of millions of people are hooked up to the Internet or an office network. The problem is that e-mail can still be a little too complicated. As I show you in Part II, however, Outlook makes e-mail easier. Computers are notoriously finicky about the exact spelling of addresses, correctly connecting to the actual mail service, and making sure that the text and formatting of the message fit the software you’re using. Outlook keeps track of the details involved in getting your message to its destination.

Outlook also allows you to receive e-mail from a variety of sources and manage the messages in one place. You can slice and dice your list of incoming and outgoing e-mail messages to help you keep track of what you send, to whom you send it, and the day and time you send it.

Part III: Managing Contacts, Dates, Tasks, and More

Outlook takes advantage of its special relationship with your computer and your office applications (Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Windows — notice a pattern?) to tie your office tasks together more cleanly than other such programs, and to make it easier to deal with all the stuff you have to do. The chapters in Part III show you how to get the job done with Outlook.

In addition to planning and scheduling, you probably spend lots of time working with other people. You need to coordinate your tasks and schedules with theirs (unless you make your living doing something weird and antisocial, such as digging graves or writing computer books). Outlook allows you to share calendar and task information with other people, and also keep detailed information about the people with whom you collaborate. You can also assign tasks to other people if you don’t want to do those tasks yourself. (Now there’s a time-saver.) Be careful, though; other people can assign those tasks right back to you.

If you have yellow sticky notes covering your monitor, refrigerator, desktop, or bathroom door, Outlook’s Notes feature might change your life. Notes are little yellow (or blue or green) squares that look just like those handy paper notes that you stick everywhere as reminders and then lose. About the only thing that you can’t do is set your coffee cup on one and mess up what you wrote.

Part IV: Beyond the Basics: Tips and Tricks You Won’t Want to Miss

Some parts of Outlook are less famous than others, but no less useful. Part IV guides you through the sections of Outlook that the real power users exploit to stay ahead of the pack.

Outlook has parts that many people never discover. Some of those parts are obscure but powerful — others aren’t part of Outlook at all (technically speaking). Maybe you want to know how to do things like create custom forms and set up Outlook to get e-mail from the Internet. If you use Outlook at home or in your own business, or if you just want to soup up your copy of Outlook for high-performance work, you’ll find useful tips in Part IV.

Part V: Outlook at Work

Big organizations have different requirements than small businesses. Many large companies rely heavily on Outlook as a tool for improved teamwork and project management. Part V shows you the parts of Outlook that work best in the big leagues (or for people with big ambitions). You’ll get all the info you need to collaborate using SharePoint and Microsoft Exchange, beef up your security, customize the way Outlook looks and works, and check your Outlook account when you’re not in the office with Outlook Web Access.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

Why ten? Why not! If you must have a reason, ten is the highest number you can count to without taking off your shoes. A program as broad as Outlook leaves a great deal of flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t quite fit into any category, so I sum up the best of that material in groups of ten.

Conventions Used in This Book

Outlook has many unique features, but it also has lots in common with other Windows programs — dialog boxes, pull-down menus, Ribbons, and so on. To be productive with Outlook, you need to understand how these features work and recognize the conventions I use for describing these features throughout this book.

Dialog boxes

You deal with more dialog boxes in Outlook than you do in many other Microsoft Office programs. You can call dialog boxes forms. E-mail message forms, appointments, name and address forms, and plenty of other common functions in Outlook use dialog boxes to ask you what you want to do. The following list summarizes the essential parts of a dialog box:

Title bar: The title bar tells you the name of the dialog box.

Text boxes: Text boxes are blank spaces into which you type information. When you click a text box, you see a blinking I-beam pointer, which means that you can type text there.

Control buttons: In the upper-right corner of most dialog boxes, you find three control buttons:

• The Close button looks like an X and makes the dialog box disappear.

• The Size button toggles between maximizing the dialog box (making it take up the entire screen) and resizing it (making it take up less than the entire screen).

• The Minimize button makes the dialog box seem to go away but really just hides it on the taskbar at the bottom of your screen until you click the taskbar to make the dialog box appear again.

Tabs: Tabs look like little file-folder tabs. If you click one, you see a new page of the dialog box. Tabs are just like the divider tabs in a ring binder; click one to change sections.

The easiest way to move around a dialog box is to click the part that you want to use. If you’re a real whiz on the keyboard, you may prefer to press the Tab key to move around the dialog box; this method is much faster if you’re a touch-typist. Otherwise, you’re fine just mousing around.

Ribbons and tabs

Outlook features a colorful strip across the top called the Ribbon. It’s adorned with festive-looking buttons. Many of those buttons are labeled with the names of the things that happen if you click them with your mouse, such as Save, Follow Up, or Delete. A row of tabs appears just above the Ribbon, each bearing a label such as Home, Send/Receive, or View. Clicking any of those words reveals an entirely different Ribbon full of buttons for a different set of tasks.

This arrangement came about because people frequently call Microsoft and ask the company to add features to Outlook that don’t need to be added because they’ve been there all along. The Ribbon is supposed to make those mysterious, hidden features more obvious. I think a better solution is to get more people to read this book. As a public service, I’m doing what I can to make that happen. I hope you’ll join the cause.

Keyboard shortcuts

Normally, you can choose any Windows command in at least two different ways (and sometimes more):

Click a button in the Ribbon or Navigation pane.

Press a keyboard combination. An example is Ctrl+B, which means holding down the Ctrl key and pressing the letter B. (You use this command to make text bold.)

Press the F10 key to reveal a shortcut key, and then press that key (way too much trouble, but possible for those who love a challenge).

One rather confusing Outlook feature is the way many commands are hidden within the tabs of the Ribbon. If you don’t know which tab has the button you need, you have to click every tab until you find the command you want. That’s fine if you’re a speed-reader, but hunting for rarely used commands slows down most of us. Fortunately, after you’ve done a task once, you can usually find your way back to do it again.

Icons Used in This Book

Sometimes the fastest way to go through a book is to look at the pictures — in this case, icons that draw your attention to specific types of useful information. I use these icons in this book:

The Warning icon points to something that can prevent problems.

The Remember icon points out helpful information. (Everything in this book is helpful, but this stuff is even more helpful.)

The Tip icon points out a hint or trick for saving time and effort, or something that makes Outlook easier to understand.

The Technical Stuff icon marks background information that you can skip, although it may make good conversation at a really dull party.

Part I

Getting Started with Outlook 2013

Visit www.dummies.com for great Dummies content online.

In this part . . .

Working smarter with the tools that Outlook offers, including e-mail and calendar features.

Getting started quickly on the Outlook features that most people use most of the time.

Sending documents to other people by e-mail.

Managing your calendar.

Tracking the tasks you need to finish.

Chapter 1

The Outlook Features You Really Need to Know

In This Chapter

Reading and creating e-mail

Sending files by e-mail

Checking your calendar

Entering appointments and contacts

Managing tasks

Keeping notes

I’m kicking off this book with Outlook’s Greatest Hits — the things you’ll want to do with Outlook every single day. The list sounds simple enough: sending e-mail, making appointments, and so on. But most people only use about 5 percent of Outlook’s power. Even if you move up to using 10 percent of Outlook’s features, you’ll be amazed at how this little program can streamline your life and spiff up your communications. People get pretty excited about Outlook — even if they take advantage of only a tiny fraction of what the package can do. But there’s more here than meets the eye; Outlook does ordinary things extraordinarily well. I know you want to do the same, so read on.

Explaining Why So Many People Use Outlook

Millions of people use Outlook because millions of people use Outlook. That’s not redundant — Outlook is the standard tool for communicating, collaborating, and organizing for hundreds of millions of people around the world. When so many people use the same tool for organizing the things they do individually, it becomes vastly easier for everyone to organize the things they do together by using that tool. That’s the case with Outlook. It’s a powerful tool even if you work all alone, but that power gets magnified when you use it to collaborate with others.

What’s new in Microsoft Outlook 2013

Outlook gets an upgrade every few years, along with the rest of Microsoft Office, to stay up to date with the way your work habits change. This version of Outlook retains the powerful set of tools the product always had, but changes the way the screens and icons look, for easier understanding. They’ve also changed the way you buy the program, so that more people can take advantage of the power of Outlook.

But the main benefit of using Outlook remains the same — it offers a single tool that unifies your communications with all your daily activities and helps you get more done with less effort.

Doing Anything in Outlook the Easy Way

Well, okay, maybe you can’t use Outlook to decipher hieroglyphics — but if you know a little about basic techniques, you can do a lot in Outlook — click an icon to do something, view something, or complete something.

Using Outlook is so easy, I can sum it up in just a few simple sentences to cover the most common tasks:

Open an item and read it: Double-click the item.

Create a new item: Click an icon in the Folder pane, click a New button in the Ribbon at the top of the screen, and fill out the form that appears. When you’re done, click the Send button — or alternatively, click the Save and Close buttons.

Delete an item: Click the item once to select it, and then click the Delete icon in the Ribbon at the top of the screen. The Delete icon has a black X.

Move an item: Use your mouse to drag the item to where you want it.

Does that seem too simple? No problem. If you have an itch to complicate things, you could try to use Outlook while hopping on a pogo stick or flying a jet plane. But why? These four tricks can take you a long way.

Outlook can also do some sophisticated tricks, such as automatically sorting your e-mail or creating form letters, but you’ll need to understand a few details to take advantage of those tricks. The other 300 pages of this book cover the finer points of Outlook. If you only wanted the basics, I could’ve sent you a postcard.

The figures you see in this book and the instructions you read assume that you’re using Outlook 2013 the way it comes out of the box from Microsoft — with all the standard options installed. If you don’t like the way the program looks (or how things are named) when you install Outlook, you can change many of the things you see. If you change too much, however, some instructions and examples I give you won’t make sense, because then the parts of the program that I talk about may have names you gave them, rather than the ones Microsoft originally assigned. The Microsoft people went to great lengths to make Outlook’s features easy to find. I suggest leaving the general arrangement alone until you’re comfortable using Outlook.

E-Mail: Basic Delivery

E-mail is Outlook’s most popular feature. I’ve run across people who didn’t know Outlook could do anything but exchange e-mail messages. It’s a good thing that Outlook makes it so easy to read your e-mail, although it’s too bad that so many people stop there.

Reading e-mail

When you start Outlook, you normally see a screen with three columns. The leftmost column is the Folder pane, which lets you switch between different modules in Outlook to perform different tasks. The second column from the left is your list of messages; the right column (called the Reading pane) contains the text of one of those messages. If the message is short enough, you may see its entire text in the Reading pane, as shown in Figure 1-1. If the message is longer, you’ll have to open it to see the whole thing.

Here’s how to see the entire message:

1. Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar.

You don’t need this step if you can already see the messages.

2. Double-click the title of the message.

Now you can see the entire message.

3. Press Esc to close the message.

The message form closes.

A quick way to skim the messages in your Inbox is to click a message and then press the up-arrow or down-arrow key. You can move through your message list as you read the text of your messages in the Reading pane.

Figure 1-1: Double-click the message you want to read.

If you feel overwhelmed by the number of e-mail messages you get each day, you’re not alone. Billions and billions of e-mail messages fly around the Internet each day, and lots of people are feeling buried in messages. In Chapter 6 I show you the secrets of sorting and managing your messages, along with the Conversations feature, which makes it easy to deal with extended e-mail discussions.

Answering e-mail

Anytime you’re reading an e-mail message in Outlook, buttons labeled Reply and Reply All appear somewhere near the top of the screen. That’s a hint.

When you want to reply to a message you’re reading, do this:

1. Click the Reply button.

2. Type your response.

3. Click the Send button.

If you’re reading a message sent to several people besides you, you have the option of sending a reply to everyone involved by clicking the Reply All button.

Some people get carried away with the Reply All button and live to regret it. If you get a message addressed to lots of other people and click the Reply All button to fire back a snide response, you could instantly offend dozens of clients, bosses, or other bigwigs. Use Reply All when you need it, but make sure that you really know who’s getting your message before you click the Send button.

When you reply to a message, the text of the message that was sent to you is automatically included. Some people like to include original text in their replies, and some don’t. In Chapter 5, I show you how to change what Outlook automatically includes in replies.

Creating new e-mail messages

At its easiest, the process of creating a new e-mail message in Outlook is ridiculously simple. Even a child can do it. If you can’t get a child to create a new e-mail message for you, you can even do it yourself.

If you see a button labeled New E-Mail in the upper-left corner of the screen, just click it, fill out the form, and click the Send button. How’s that for simple? If you don’t see the New E-Mail button, follow these steps instead:

1. Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar.

Your message list appears.

2. Click the New E-Mail button in the Ribbon.

The New Message form appears.

3. Fill out the New Message form.

Put the recipient’s address in the To box, a subject in the Subject box, and a message in the main message box.

4. Click the Send button.

Your message is on its way.

If you want to send a plain e-mail message, that’s all you have to do. If you prefer to send a fancy e-mail, Outlook provides the bells and whistles — some of which are actually useful. You might (for example) send a High Priority message to impress some big shots, or send a Confidential message about a hush-hush topic. (Discover the mysteries of confidential e-mail in Chapter 4.)

Sending a File

Some people swear that they do nothing but exchange e-mail all day. Swearing is exactly what I’d do if I were in their shoes, believe me. If you’re lucky, you probably do lots of things other than exchange e-mail; you probably do most of your daily work in programs other than Outlook. You might create documents in Microsoft Word or build elaborate spreadsheets with Excel. When you want to send a file by e-mail, Outlook gets involved, although sometimes it works in the background.

To e-mail a file, follow these steps:

1. Open the document in Microsoft Word.

The document appears on-screen.

2. Click the File tab in the upper-left corner of the screen.

The Backstage view appears.

3. Choose Share.

The Share page appears. Yes, I know you learned how to share in kindergarten, but this is different.

4. Choose E-mail.

A list appears, detailing different ways to send your file via e-mail.

5. Click the Send as Attachment button.

The New Message form appears with your document listed on the Attached line (as pictured in Figure 1-2). If you want to type a message in the main part of the screen you can, but it isn’t necessary.

Figure 1-2: You can e-mail a document right from Microsoft Word.

Whew! When you’re just sending one Word file, these steps seem like a long way to go, but they’ll always get your document on its way. For some reason, the folks at Microsoft made this task more laborious as the years have passed. But don’t be discouraged. If you e-mail documents frequently, I describe a more powerful way to attach files in Chapter 5.

Quick Calendar Keeping

Time management is a myth. You can’t get more than 24 hours in a day, no matter how well you manage it. But you can get more done in a 24-hour day if you keep your calendar current. Outlook can help you with that.

Entering an appointment

If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned paper planner, the Outlook Calendar will look familiar to you. When you click the Calendar button and then click the Day tab, you see a grid in the middle of the screen with lines representing each segment of the day. You can adjust the length of the segments from as little as five minutes to as much as an hour (as in Figure 1-3).

Figure 1-3: Track your busy schedule in the Outlook Calendar.

To enter an appointment at a certain time, do this:

1. Click the line next to the time you want your appointment to begin.

2. Type a name for your appointment.

3. Press Enter.

If you want to enter more detailed information about your appointment — such as ending time, location, category, and so on — see Chapter 8 for the nitty-gritty on keeping track of all the details in your calendar.

Managing your schedule

Time management involves more than just entering appointments. If you’re really busy, you want to manage your time by slicing and dicing your list of appointments to see when you’re free to add even more appointments.

You can choose from several different views of your Calendar by clicking a button at the top of the Calendar screen:

Day

Work Week

Week

Month

Schedule

If you need a more elaborate collection of Calendar views, choose one of the views listed under the Change View button in the View tab in the Ribbon. To really master time management, see Chapter 8 to see the different ways you can view your Outlook Calendar.

Adding a Contact

When it’s not what you know but who you know, you need a good tool for keeping track of who’s who. Outlook is a great tool for managing your names and addresses, and it’s just as easy to use as your Little Black Book.

To enter a new contact, do this:

1. Click the Contacts button in the Navigation bar.

2. Click the New Contact icon in the Ribbon.

The New Contact entry form opens.

3. Fill in the blanks on the form.

An example appears in Figure 1-4.

4. Click the Save & Close button.

Presto — you have a Contacts list.

Figure 1-4: Keep detailed information about everyone you know in the Contacts list.

Outlook’s Contacts feature can be a lot more than your Little Black Book — if you know the ropes. Chapter 7 reveals the secrets of searching, sorting, and grouping the names in your list — and of using e-mail to keep in touch with all the important people in your life.

Entering a Task

Knowing what you need to do isn’t enough: You need to know what to do next. When you’re juggling 1,000 competing demands all at once, you need a tool that shows you, at a glance, what’s up next so you can keep your work moving forward.

Outlook has several task-management tools that help you organize your lengthy To-Do list for peak performance. Those tools include the Tasks module, the To-Do list, and the To-Do bar. Chapter 9 describes all of them, but here’s the quick way to get started in a jiffy.

To enter a new task, follow these steps:

1. Click the text that says Type a New Task.

The words disappear, and you see the insertion point (a blinking line).

2. Type the name of your task.

The task you typed appears.

3. Press Enter.

Your new task moves down to the Task list with your other tasks (see Figure 1-5).

Outlook can help you manage anything from a simple shopping list to a complex business project. In Chapter 9, I show you how to deal with recurring tasks, how to regenerate tasks, and how to mark tasks as complete (and earn the right to brag about how much you’ve accomplished).

Figure 1-5: Entering your task in the Task list.

Taking Notes

I have hundreds of little scraps of information that I need to keep somewhere, but until Outlook came along, I didn’t have a place to put them. Now all the written flotsam and jetsam go into my Outlook Notes collection — where I can find it all again when I need it.

To create a new note, follow these steps:

1. Click the Notes button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+5).

Your list of notes appears.

2. Click the New Note button in the Ribbon.

A blank note appears.

3. Type the text you want to save.

The text you type appears in the note (see Figure 1-6).

4. Press Esc.

The note you created appears in your list of notes.

Figure 1-6: Preserve your prose for posterity in an Outlook note.

You can see how easy it is to amass a large collection of small notes. Chapter 10 tells you everything you need to know about notes, including how to find the notes you’ve saved as well as how to sort and organize your collection and even how to delete the ones you don’t need anymore.

After you’re in the habit of using Outlook to organize your life, I’m sure that you’ll want to move beyond the basics. That’s what the rest of this book shows you. When you’re ready to share your work with other people, send e-mail like a pro, or just finish your workday by 5:00 p.m. and get home, you’ll find ways to use Outlook to make your job — and your life — easier to manage.

Chapter 2

Inside Outlook: Getting More Done with Less Effort

In This Chapter

Examining the many faces of Outlook

Choosing menus

Getting the big picture from the Information Viewer

Using the tools of the trade

Fine-tuning with the Folder list

I heard recently that the average office worker now spends 28 hours each week answering e-mail. No wonder times are tough — everybody’s too tied up with e-mail to get anything done! When computers were invented, people thought they’d use them for something much more exciting than e-mail. Oh, well. Welcome to the future — it’s already here and it’s already booked solid.

Fortunately, everyone gets more done now than in the past, partly because of tools like Microsoft Outlook. In fact, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Outlook to get more done every day. But most of those people use a fraction of Outlook’s power, so they work harder than necessary while getting less done. The people I’ve trained find that knowing even a tiny fraction more about what the program can do for them makes their lives easier. Let’s hear it for making your life easier!

Outlook and Other Programs

Outlook is a part of Microsoft Office. It’s called an Office suite, which means it’s a collection of programs that includes everything you need to complete most office tasks. Ideally, the programs in a suite work together, enabling you to create documents that you couldn’t create as easily with any of the individual programs. For example, you can copy a chart from a spreadsheet and paste it into a sales letter that you’re creating in your word processor.

About Personal Information Management

When it comes to the basic work of managing names, addresses, appointments, and e-mail, the word processing and spreadsheet programs just don’t get it. If you’re planning a meeting, you need to know with whom you’re meeting, what the other person’s phone number is, and when you can find time to meet.

In designing Outlook, Microsoft took advantage of the fact that many people use Microsoft products for most of the work they do. The company created something called a Personal Information Management(PIM) program that speaks a common language with Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft also studied what kind of information people use most often, and tried to make sure that Outlook could handle most of it. The program also has scads of customizability (a tongue-twister of a buzzword that just means you can set it up however you need, after you know what you’re doing).

Whatever the terminology, Outlook is — above all — easy to understand and hard to mess up. If you’ve used any version of Windows, you can just look at the screen and click a few icons to see what Outlook does. You won’t break anything. If you get lost, going back to where you came from is easy. Even if you have no experience with Windows, Outlook is fairly straightforward to use.

Microsoft Office includes a group of programs, each of which are designed to address specific sorts of tasks easily, but that also work together as a team when you need them to. It’s a little bit like the utensils you use for dining — you can eat your turkey dinner entirely with a fork, but it’s much easier if you have a fork and a knife. And, of course, you want a spoon for the cranberry sauce. Each program in Microsoft Office specializes in something important — Microsoft Word for documents, Microsoft Excel for calculations, and Microsoft Outlook for communications and organization. It’s easy to use them separately, and hugely productive to use them all together.