If you’re like me, Outlook is your method of communication with the rest of the world. It’s not always an easy program to deal with, though. From a little confusion over here to a lot of overwhelming ideas of there, it’s easy to get lost. These tips, though, can make your Outlook experience a little better each day.
- Advanced Find is easily one of the single greatest tools in productivity. For example, you message one of your employees about the project they have due today, but your employee says they have no project due today. Advanced Find can help you quickly locate the message in which they accepted the project, even if it occurred four months ago. Don’t worry, no sorting on your part is required. Simply go to the “Tools” menu. Hit “Find,” then “Advanced Find.” Alternately, pressing control, shift, and “f” together will get you there very quickly. That done, choose which folders you want to search, what the message may contain, who you sent it to, whether it has an attachment, or a myriad of other factors to help you save that message quickly. Clicking on the file menu will even let you save the search in case you need to run it again.
- Ever found yourself in the unfortunate situation of having to reboot your computer from scratch? It not only means losing the files and programs on your hard drive, in the case of Outlook, it also means losing your messages that you’ve stored. Backing those messages up, though, is pretty easy. In Windows Explorer, navigate to your Outlook folder. If you see anything ending in “.pst”, highlight it. Copy those files, and paste them into your backup folder. If your machine ever crashes, you’ve got a copy of the files you need.
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For the second Outlook email tip “Ever found yourself in the unfortunate situation of having to reboot your computer from scratch?”, I think you meant to use, “reformat” not “reboot”. =)
I got a suggestion, albeit it’s not connected with any of Outlook’s built-in functions. Rather, it has something to do with the approach of using Outlook itself, or with any e-mail account for that matter.
Tim (a friend of mine and he actually has his own website at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com) recommends checking twice a day only, once before lunch time and another before clocking out. It actually enables me to focus on my to-do list instead of losing time trawling thru my inbox and responding to e-mails.
But coupled with that Find function, it certainly makes work easier. I learned about the Find button by watching my boss and it never ceases to amaze me how many application functions I don’t know about because I don’t have a user’s manual I can read.
What are the differences between Outlook and Outlook Express? I’ve got OE and seem to have all sorts of gremlins with email on an on-going basis. Is one better than the other? Joy – selfdevelopmentsecrets dot com/howtogetrich.pdf
You’re right about the gremlins. According to Wikipedia, there’s lots of them in OE. If I understand it correctly, Outlook and OE look alike but they use different codes. Analogy would be two similar looking houses with different materials used in their construction.
OE seems to have a lot of weaknesses that requires back-ups and patches. I could be wrong but feel free to correct me. Thankfully we use Outlook in the office and so far it seems to work just fine.
Stick to Outlook Express. It is so much simpler and friendlier to use if you are at home or in a small business. Not so many functions but as with most programs you rarely use more than 40-50% of the features and functions. thesecretsofvisualization dot com/rights
For me, both are good to use. There are just some features on the other that the other don’t have. Anyways, the important is you know how to use it and it satisfies you.
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