Digital Streets

Outlook is Microsoft’s popular personal information manager and part of Microsoft Office.  It has email, calendar, contact management, task and note taking functionality.  I've been a long-time user of Outlook and really enjoy the latest version of the application. Here's the first part of the list of the tutorials on Outlook 2007 at Tech-Recipes:

• Download Pictures Automatically - Outlook prevents the automatic download of pictures in email messages as a security measure to help prevent possible spamming. It permits images from sites in your Trusted Zone to show but blocks all others. You can override this feature and see the images from all emails in your Inbox.

• How To Copy Global Addresses to Your Contacts Folder - An address from the Global Address List (GAL) can easily be copied to your Contacts folder.

• Making the To-Do Bar Show Tasks from PST File - By default, Outlook 2007 only shows the tasks that are located in the main mailbox on the To-Do Bar. If you have tasks located in a PST file and you can make them to show up as well.

• How To Create a New Data File (PST) - As in previous versions of Outlook, the new version allows you to create data files (PST’s) to store your messages and such. However, the new interface requires some different steps than the older versions.

• Easily Locate Large Items in Your Mailstore - If your mailstore is getting full and you need to find what is taking up so much room, Outlook 2007 makes it easy.

• Enable Contact Linking - By default, Outlook 2007 has contact linking disabled. In previous versions, it was enabled by default giving you a field on most forms that you could use to link a contact to an item which would then show up on the Activities tab.

• Use Google Reader for RSS Feeds link - Just upgraded to Office 2007 tonight and realized I didn’t want the silly MS RSS Feeds in Outlook, so i thought i’d share my quick recipe on changing this link to your Google Reader.

• Disabling/Enabling Add-ins - This describes how to re-enable/enable and disable add-ins in outlook. This is how to correct a program that installs an outlook plugin that you don’t use or want.

• How To Put Your Calendar into a Message - Trying to set up a meeting with someone who doesn’t have access to your shared calendar can be challenging. Outlook 2007 makes it much easier by allowing you to easily include your calendar in your email message. You can show availability only, availability and subjects of calendar items, or availability and full details of calendar items. You can even choose whether to include the details of items marked private.

• Resend a Message - Sometimes you need to resend a message either because the recipient never received it or because they accidentally deleted it.

• Remove the Instant Search Prompt - This recipe shows how to remove that annoying instant search prompt from Outlook 2007.

• Use Rules to Add Categories to New and Old Emails - i’ve just recently started to use categories in my Outlook 2007 (mainly because of using a blackberry at work) however going back through 11 years worth of emails would take months to flag manually and doing it manually each send/receive is still too much work. Lets make a rule in outlook to do this for us!

• Clean Up Using Command-line Switches - There are times when maintaining Outlook can be an overwhelming experience. Not only do you have to manage the massive amounts of email that can accumulate in your inbox, you also have to manage Search Folders, reminders, subscriptions, outdated rules etc. You can utilize Outlook’s command-line switches to help clean things up and get things running the way you want them to.

• Direct Replies to a New Message - There are times that it is useful for replies to a mail message to be directed to another email address or person. This makes it easier to delegate responses to someone else. To direct the replies to your message, follow these steps.

• Show Calendar or Tasks when Application Starts - By default, Outlook shows the Inbox when the application is launched. You may want to have it open up to your Calendar or Tasks (or possibly Contacts, Notes, Journal, or other folder). You can change the default opening folder and have the information you need when you open Outlook.

• Enable Blind Carbon Copy (BCC) - If you are sending an email out to a few people or a mailing list, you probably are wanting to hide the list of addresses from each recipient. You do this by using the blind carbon copy field in the message you are creating. Outlook has this field hidden by default, to unhide the field, follow these steps.

• Prevent Forwarding of a Message - Sending a message to someone and you would prefer that they not forward it to someone else? You can prevent the forwarding of your message by following these steps.

• How To Prevent the New Mail Desktop Alert from Appearing - By default, Outlook 2007 automatically pops up a Desktop Alert to show part of a new message that has just been received. To prevent others from viewing your incoming e-mail, you can disable it.

Outlook 2007 Tutorial Round-up Part 2