Outlook 2002

DELETE OLD E-MAIL ACCOUNTS

If you move to a different company or switch Internet service providers, your old e-mail account may no longer be valid. Rather than keep this obsolete information lodged in Outlook, delete it to keep Outlook from trying to send and retrieve e-mail from a dead e-mail account.

To delete an e-mail account from Outlook:

Choose Tools, Services. The Services dialog box appears.
Click the Internet e-mail account that you want to delete and then click the Remove button. A dialog box appears asking whether you're sure you want to delete your e-mail account.
Click Yes.
Click OK.

REMOVING OLD ACCOUNTS

If you switch Internet service providers, your old e-mail account is probably no longer valid. Rather than keep this obsolete information lodged in Outlook, delete it to keep Outlook from trying to send and retrieve e-mail from a dead e-mail account. To delete an e-mail account from Outlook:

Choose Tools, Services. The Services dialog box appears.
Click the Internet e-mail account that you want to delete and then click the Remove button. A dialog box appears asking whether you're sure you want to delete your e-mail account.
Click Yes.
Click OK.

ADDING THE OUTLOOK ADDRESS BOOK TO THE WORD TOOLBAR

You can insert an address from your Outlook Contact list into a Word document, such as an invitation to your holiday soiree, by clicking a single button. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't put that button on the Word toolbar, so you have to add it.

To add the Address Book button to the Word toolbar, follow these steps:

Open Word and choose Tools, Customize to open the Customize dialog box.
Click the Commands tab to view the list of available commands.
Click Insert in the Categories box to reveal the list of Insert commands on the Commands list on the right side of the screen.
Scroll down to the words Address Book near the end of the Commands list box.
Drag the Address Book icon up to the Word toolbar. The Address Book icon joins the other icons on the toolbar!

DECIDING BETWEEN ADDRESS BOOK AND CONTACTS IN OUTLOOK

If you faithfully enter basic contact information in your Outlook Address Book, you already have Contacts as well. Clicking on the Contacts icon on the left side of the Outlook window provides you the opportunity of inputting the same kind of information and viewing it at will, but the format of your data appears differently. You can switch back and forth between using the Address Book version and the Contacts version whenever you want. The same information appears in both views; it's a matter of which you find more pleasing. But you can only do fancy schmantzy stuff like Mail Merge with the Contacts list.

SAVING INTERNET E-MAIL ADDRESSES IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK

A great deal of mail is flying around the Internet, some of it useful and lots of it junk. You'll want to ignore the junk, but now and then, you'll want to save an address for future use. The easiest way to save an address is to drag the message to the Contacts icon and have Outlook 98 create a new contact.

Sometimes, though, you don't want to clutter your Contact list with addresses that you got from Internet junk mail. If you open the message and right-click the From line, a menu appears. To save just the address, choose Enter in Personal Address Book. That way, the address of the person who sent you the message is saved without adding anything to your Contact list.

PRIVATE ADDRESSES

No doubt about it, sending a message to a distribution list is a handy way to manage frequent group e-mails. All you have to do is address the message to the group once and you can rest assured that it will be sent to each member. However, keep in mind that although you see only the name of the distribution list in the To field, the recipients will be shown the e-mail addresses of each person on the list when they get the message in their inboxes.

So, what if some of the message recipients do not wish their e-mail address to be known to the other message recipients? In that case, it would be better for you to remove those people from the distribution list. Either send the message to those recipients privately or to use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) address box for their e-mail addresses. Outlook does not provide a method of suppressing the recipient list directly.

ADDING SPECIALIZED APPLICATIONS WITH CARE IN OUTLOOK

Clever programmers come up with new special applications to expand Outlook's capabilities every day, and you can download some for free from the Microsoft Web site. But beware: Many of the sample applications you find on the Microsoft Web site are useful only if you're using Outlook on a network that is also running Microsoft Exchange Server. Microsoft sometimes doesn't tell you which applications are useful for stand-alone (non-network) users, so, unfortunately, you're on your own. If you are on a network with Exchange Server, check with your network administrator before adding any new applications.

Likewise, some Outlook applications are version-specific. For example, an application built for Outlook 97 may not work with Outlook 2000. Be sure to read any information supplied about the application to ensure that it works on your version of Outlook.

MEETING SOMEONE FOR AN EVENT APPOINTMENT?

What do you want to schedule? Here's a quick run-down of the three basic items you can add to your Calendar:

Appointments are activities that you plan that do not involve inviting other people (or reserving resources if you use Exchange Server).
Meetings are appointments that do involve inviting other people (or reserving resources).
Events are activities that last a full day or longer.

Events allow you to add things to your calendar, such as business trips or conferences that last several days, while still letting you enter routine appointments that may take place at the event. For example, you can create an event called "Annual Auto Show" and then add appointments to see General Motors at 9 a.m. and Ford at 3 p.m.

RECURRING APPOINTMENT PATTERNS

Ever notice how some appointments recur more regularly than others? For example, your spouse's birthday comes on the same date every year, but the family summer reunion is always the last weekend of August, no matter what the date is. Some meetings you have every other Wednesday, while other meetings occur on the 1st and 3rd Thursdays of the month. Unlike some scheduling programs, Outlook can handle a pretty big range of recurring patterns. Create an appointment from whichever Calendar view you prefer, open it by double-clicking, and then click the Recurrence button to open the Appointment Recurrence dialog box and survey your options.

Outlook initially assumes that the appointment occurs every week on the same day and time. You can change the pattern to recur daily, monthly, or yearly instead. After you set the frequency option, a new set of controls appears in the Recurrence Pattern area of the Appointment Recurrence dialog box, enabling you to specify the exact schedule for the recurring appointment.

You can also tell Outlook when this pattern starts and when you expect to break the habit in the Range of Recurrence area of the dialog box. Even here you have choices: You can tell Outlook, for example, to stop putting this recurring appointment in the Calendar after a certain date, or you can tell it to stop after the 12th meeting, or you can tell it there's "no end" to this meeting, so it should keep this recurring meeting in the Calendar till the end of time (or the end of Outlook's Calendar, whichever comes first). When you click OK and then click the Save and Close button, Outlook adds a special icon to the appointment in the calendar to indicate that the appointment is recurring. Clicking this icon any time opens up the dialog box again so that you can change the pattern as needed.

APPOINTMENT POINTERS

Here are a couple of good-to-know features of Outlook's Calendar to keep in mind as you schedule appointments:

If you want to schedule two appointments at the same time, Outlook subtly warns you with a banner at the top of the form that says Conflicts with another appointment, although nothing stops you from scheduling yourself to be in two places at one time.
If you're on a network (where others can view your calendar) and don't want others to know about your appointment, click the Private box in the lower-right corner of the Appointment dialog box.

DELETING APPOINTMENTS FROM THE OUTLOOK CALENDAR

Sometimes things just don't work out and you have to call and break an appointment. But it's still sitting in your Outlook Calendar. Deleting items in Outlook is intuitive, which means that you probably can figure out how to do it without reading this tip. Of course, you want to know the simplest method anyway:

Click the appointment you want to delete.
Click the Delete button on the toolbar (or press Delete).
Or you can use the Ctrl+D combination to delete the appointment in just one keystroke. How cold.

If you want to delete several appointments at one time, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking each appointment that you want to delete. Then press Delete.

Warning: If you delete an appointment, you can never recover it again, so make sure you really want to delete an appointment before you do so.

DISPLAYING YOUR APPOINTMENTS IN OUTLOOK 2002

In addition to helping you create, send, receive, and sort through your e-mail, Outlook also organizes your appointments, tasks, and important contacts. Outlook offers five ways to display your appointments:

Day: Shows a single day, hour by hour, so you can see what appointments you may have already missed today. Choose View, Day or click the Day button on the Standard toolbar.
Outlook Today: Shows all appointments and tasks scheduled for today. Click the Outlook Shortcuts button in the Outlook Bar and then click the Today icon.
Work Week: Shows all appointments for a single week except Sundays and Saturdays. Choose View, Work Week or click the Work Week button on the Standard toolbar.
Week: Shows all appointments for a single week, including weekends so you won't forget that Saturday golf game. Choose View, Week or click the Week button on the Standard toolbar.
Month: Shows all appointments for a calendar month so you can keep track of really crucial pending appointments for several weeks. Choose View, Month or click the Month button on the Standard toolbar.

HOW TIME DRAGS WITH OUTLOOK APPOINTMENTS

Despite your best efforts at planning ahead, you may need to edit your appointments in the Outlook Calendar. If you're in Day, Week, or Work Week view, you can change the time an appointment begins or ends by following these steps (you can't change the date for the appointment with this method):

Click the appointment for which you want to change the start or end time.
Move the mouse cursor over the bottom of the appointment (if you want to change the end time) or the top of the appointment (if you want to change the start time) until the cursor turns into a two-headed arrow.
Hold down the left mouse button and drag the appointment to a new end or start time.

Note: You can only change an appointment's length by dragging in multiples of 30 minutes.

KEEPING APPOINTMENTS TO LESS THAN 30 MINUTES WITH OUTLOOK

When you use the drag-and-drop method to change the length of appointments in the Outlook Calendar, you can make appointments begin and end only on the hour and at 30 minutes after the hour. When you have appointments that you need to begin and end at other times, you have to open the appointment and enter the times you want, just as you did when you first created the appointment, like this:

Double-click the appointment.
To change the time the appointment begins, click the Start Time box and type the time you want.
To change the time the appointment ends, click the End Time box and type the time you want.
You also can change any other details about the appointment while the Appointment form is open.
Click the Save and Close button (or press Alt+S).

PRINTING YOU APPOINTMENTS

Plain old paper is still everybody's favorite medium for reading. No matter how slick your computer organizer is, you may still need old-fashioned ink-on-paper to make it useful. You use the same basic steps to print from any module in Outlook.

Here's how to print your appointments:

Click a date within the range of dates you want to print.
If you want to print a single day, click just one day. If you want to print a range of dates, click the first date and then hold the Shift key and click the last date in the range. The whole range is then highlighted to show which dates you've selected.
Choose File, Print (or press Ctrl+P).
The Print dialog box appears.
In the Print Style group, choose Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Trifold, Memo, or any other style you want that may be available in your Style box.
You can define your own print styles in Outlook, so you may eventually have quite a collection of choices here.
In the Print Range box, set the range of dates you want to print.
Because you began by clicking a date in that range, it should already be correct. If it's not correct, you can change the range in the Print dialog box to the print range you want.
Click OK.
Your dates are sent to the printer.

Clicking the Print icon on the toolbar is another handy way to start the print process. The icon looks like a tiny printer.

REARRANGING APPOINTMENTS

If you only need to change an appointment's start and end time (but not its duration), move the mouse pointer over the left border of the appointment. The mouse pointer turns into a four-way pointing arrow. Hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse to move the appointment to a new start and end time. Then release the mouse button.

SETTING APPOINTMENTS OUTSIDE THE OUTLOOK CALENDAR

To define a new appointment in Calendar view, you could choose File, New, Appointment from the menu bar. But Outlook offers a couple of nifty keyboard shortcuts to making appointments:

If you press Ctrl + N in any section of Outlook, a dialog box appears to let you create a new item in that section. If you're in the Inbox, Ctrl + N creates a new e-mail message. But if you're in the Calendar module, Ctrl + N creates a new appointment.
If you don't want to switch to the Calendar view, press Ctrl + Shift + A from any section of Outlook to create a new appointment. The catch is that you won't see the appointment on the calendar until you switch to Calendar view.

Always fill in the Subject box to help you remember what the appointment is about. Adjust the Start time and End time to make sure they're what you want. Everything else is optional, though you may want to be sure you can live with the defaults.

FINDING ARCHIVED ITEMS IN OUTLOOK

To determine the name of an archive file you need to open in Outlook 2002, choose File, Archive and look in the box labeled "Archive File." Be very careful not to change anything about the information in that box; otherwise, Outlook may start sending your archived items someplace else.

The information in the Archive File box is usually complex gobbledygook with colons and slashes and all sorts of stuff that normal people can't remember. One good trick for capturing a long name in a dialog box is to copy the information. Do this by clicking the name once, pressing Tab, pressing Shift+Tab, and pressing Ctrl+C. Next, click Cancel. After you copy the file name, you can follow the previous steps, except that you can paste the name you want into the File Name box by pressing Ctrl+V, and you don't have to remember that long, crazy file name.

ARCHIVING ITEMS

You don't have to do anything to make Outlook archive your items; the program is set up to archive items automatically. If you want to see how Outlook is set up to archive your old items, or change the way Outlook does the job, follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options. The Options dialog box appears.
Click the Other tab. The Other options page appears.
Click the AutoArchive button. The AutoArchive dialog box appears.

Don't go barging ahead and changing things in the AutoArchive dialog box until you look to see what's set up already. The AutoArchive dialog box tells you four important things:

How often Outlook archives items
How old items have to be for Outlook to send them to the archive
The name and location of the archive file
Whether or not the AutoArchive feature is turned on

FORMING ATTACHMENTS TO OUTLOOK MESSAGES

Attaching a file -- such as a picture file, spreadsheet, word-processing document, and so on -- to an e-mail message is no sweat in Outlook. Just follow these steps:

Click the New Message button (or press Ctrl + Shift + M) to open the New Message form.
Address the message and write the body of the e-mail message just as you normally would for an e-mail without any attachments.
Click the Paper Clip button on the New Message toolbar. The Insert File dialog box appears.
In the Insert File dialog box, browse your hard drive to find the file that you want to send.
Double-click the name of the file to insert it as an attachment to your message. You see the attachment as an icon at the bottom of your new message.
Click the Send button to send the message with the file attached.

Be careful when sending large files because they can take a long time to transfer, especially if you or the recipient rely on a dial-up connection to the Internet. Also, many mail servers will reject messages with files over 3MB. A good rule to follow is to keep attachments under 1MB.

PIECEMEALING LARGE ATTACHMENTS IN OUTLOOK

Be aware that sending large attachments can sometimes cause e-mail troubles, especially for attachments that approach a megabyte or more in size. Take smaller bytes: If possible, mail several smaller attachments instead of one large one.

If the large attachment can't be divided into smaller sections, consider shrinking it with a file compression program.

DEAR AUTONAME

One neat feature of Outlook is that you can avoid memorizing long, confusing e-mail addresses of people to whom you send mail frequently. If the intended recipient is entered in your Contacts list and you've included an e-mail address in the Contact record, all you have to type in the To box of your e-mail form is the person's name -- or even just a part of the person's name. Outlook helps you fill in the rest of the person's name and figures out the e-mail address. You know that you've got it right when Outlook underlines the name with a solid black line after you press the Tab key or click outside the To box.

If Outlook underlines the name with a red wavy line, Outlook thinks that it knows the name you're entering, but the name isn't spelled quite right, so you need to correct the spelling.
If Outlook underlines the name with a dotted green line, Outlook has more than one possible match to the name you're entering. Right-click the name and choose the correct person from a list of suggestions.
If Outlook doesn't put any underline below the name, it's telling you that it has no idea to whom you're sending the message but that it will use the name that you typed as the literal e-mail address. So you have to be doubly sure that the name is correct.

WHAT'S IN A NAME? AUTONAME!

If Outlook underlines the name with a red wavy line, Outlook thinks that it knows the name you're entering, but the name isn't spelled quite right, so you need to correct the spelling.

If Outlook underlines the name with a dotted green line, Outlook has more than one possible match to the name you're entering. Right-click the name and choose the correct person from a list of suggestions.

If Outlook doesn't put any underline below the name, it's telling you that it has no idea to whom you're sending the message but that it will use the name that you typed as the literal e-mail address. So you have to be doubly sure that the name is correct.

CHOOSING OUTLOOK BAR VERSUS FOLDER LIST IN OUTLOOK

This tip applies to Outlook 98, Outlook 2000, and Outlook 2002. The only times you must use the Folder List in Outlook are when you want to add a new icon to the Outlook Bar or to create a new folder for a separate type of item (such as a special Contact list or a folder for saving e-mails on a particular subject you want to keep separate). Of course, using the Folder List is also a faster way to move, copy, or delete files when using Outlook, but you can do that lots of other ways.

So you may quite possibly never use the Folder List at all. The Outlook Bar includes the folder choices that most people use most of the time. Fortunately, you can leave the Folder List turned off except when you really need it, if at all. Simply choose View, Folder List and click to uncheck Folder List.

On the other hand, some people prefer to leave Folder List on all the time and turn off the Outlook Bar instead to save space (again, that's View, Outlook Bar, and make sure that Outlook Bar is unchecked). It's purely a matter of taste, so take your pick.

Note: Most of the time, we assume that you have both the Outlook Bar and the Folder List visible. So if you're ever told to click an icon on the Outlook Bar and you can't find it, remember to make the Outlook Bar (or Folder List) appear from the View menu.

ADD A GROUP TO THE OUTLOOK BAR

The Outlook Bar starts with three groups, but it doesn't have to stay that way. You can add groups, rename groups, or delete the existing groups.

To add a group to the Outlook Bar, follow these steps:

Right-click any of the group dividers.
A menu appears.
Choose Add New Group.
A New Group divider appears at the bottom of the Outlook Bar. The name (New Group) is highlighted.
Type a new name for the group.
You can leave the name New Group, if you want. You can even have several groups of the same name in the Outlook Bar.
Press Enter.

STACKING ICONS ON THE OUTLOOK BAR

The Outlook Bar comes set up with the icons that Microsoft thinks you'll use most often, grouped into groups it finds logical. You may disagree with Microsoft and add, remove, or move around icons to your heart's content. You can add nearly anything to the Outlook Bar -- folders, documents, network drives, and even icons that launch other programs.

To add an icon to the Outlook Bar:

Choose File, New, Outlook Bar Shortcut so that the Add to Outlook Bar dialog box appears.
Click the folder or drive in the box on the bottom that you want to add to the Outlook Bar.
Click OK.

The Look In text box lets you choose between two different types of folders that you can add: Outlook folders that contain only Outlook items, or Windows file system folders that contain all the other types of files you create in Windows as well as disk drives. You will need to install Integrated File Management tools before you can install an icon for a floppy drive or for any folder from the Windows file system.

ADD A WEB PAGE TO THE OUTLOOK BAR

Most people keep Outlook running all day in order to keep track of incoming e-mail, so the Outlook Bar is a good place to keep a link to the Web pages you look at most often. To add a Web page that you're viewing to the Outlook Bar, choose Actions, Add Web Page to Outlook Bar.

BREAKING UP IS EASY WITH OUTLOOK 2002

Some news servers for discussion groups may impose a size limit of, say, 1 MB on posted messages so that you can't send huge files that clog up the works. However, you can sneak in a longer message with the help of Outlook 2002. This advanced technique breaks up a large message into smaller pieces while they flit over the Internet and then reassembles the fragments into one message again upon arrival. Here's how to enable this feature:

In the main Outlook view, choose Tools, Accounts.
Click the News tab, and click the Properties button.
Click the Advanced tab.
In the Posting section of the Advanced dialog box, select Break apart messages larger than, and fill in the appropriate size in kilobytes.
Click Apply.

Of course, you should still make an effort to post only messages of a considerate length for the sake of your fellow newsgroup participants.

COLORING YOUR CALENDAR

Outlook users have long enjoyed customizing the colors of their tasks, both done and overdue; now with Outlook 2002, you can color-code appointments in your calendar as well! Each color has a label that you can customize to mean different things, and you can even create rules to automatically color appointments according to your color scheme. Here are some ways to get started colorizing your calendar:

To apply color to an individual appointment, create the new appointment (press Ctrl + N) and click the Label drop-down list to choose a color.
To create rules that automatically color appointments how you like them, click the Calendar Coloring button (the most colorful button you see) on the standard toolbar and select Automatic Formatting.
To change what labels go with what colors, click the Calendar Coloring button on the standard toolbar and select Edit Labels.

KEEPING AN OUTLOOK CALENDAR IN YOUR WALLET

Now here's a unique Father's Day gift: Show Pop this nifty trick in Outlook! One handy calendar style is a tiny billfold-sized calendar that contains your schedule, a convenience calendar, and a list of your tasks. Follow these steps to create a billfold calendar you can use every day:

Click the Calendar icon in the Outlook bar, if you're not already in the Calendar module.
Choose View, Current View, Day/Week/Month.
Click either the Day, Work Week, or Week button on the toolbar.
Click the Print button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl + P) to open the Print dialog box.
In the Print dialog box, choose Trifold from the Print Style list.
Click the Page Setup button to open the Page Setup dialog box.
Click the Paper tab in the Page Setup dialog box.
Click Billfold from the Size list.
Click OK to close the Page Setup dialog box.
Click OK to print your schedule.

Note: The Billfold style prints your schedule in an area about the size of a dollar bill, so if you print on normal-size paper, you have to take a pair of scissors and cut off the excess.

KEEPING A CALL LOG

If you need to track your telephone calls -- perhaps for billing purposes -- you can use Outlook to automatically log calls made by using the AutoDialer. Outlook logs calls by using the Outlook Journal.

To log calls you make by using the AutoDialer, follow these steps:

Click the down arrow next to the AutoDialer button (or select Actions, Call Contact) to display the AutoDialer menu.
Select New Call to open the New Call dialog box.
Select the contact to call in the Contact text box. If no contacts are listed in the Contact box, enter the contact name in the box.
Select the "Create new Journal Entry when starting new call" check box. This will cause Outlook to create an entry in the Journal when the call begins.
Click Start Call to dial the contact and begin the call log.
Click End Call to stop the call and record the ending time of the call.

Outlook can only record the date, time, and duration of your phone calls. If you want to add additional notes to the call log, you need to open the call log and add your notes manually.

MULTIPURPOSE BUSINESS CARDS

Outlook enables you to exchange contact information in the form of electronic business cards known as vCards. A vCard file is a standard way of exchanging such information over the Internet. Outlook uses records in the Contacts folder to create vCards. If you want to create a vCard file to send along with your messages, you start by creating a Contact record for yourself.

To create a vCard file from an existing Contact record, follow these steps:

Open the Outlook Contacts folder.
Double-click the Contact record you wish to use.
Select File, Export to vCard file.
Specify a name for the file in the File Name text box
You normally want to use the same name as the Contact record name, but you can use a more descriptive name if necessary so that you can more easily identify the vCard file.
Click the Save button to save the file.
Click the Close button to close the Contact record.

Now you can include the vCard file as part of your signature. You probably won't want to automatically include a vCard with each new message. Not only will this increase the size of your messages, but it's also likely to annoy message recipients who receive multiple copies of the same vCard each time they receive one of your messages. Instead, create a separate signature that includes your vCard file, and then use that signature discretely rather than making it your default signature.

CLOSING AND RESTARTING OUTLOOK WITHOUT CLUTTER

Outlook will start in the state in which it was shut down. So, if you want it to start minimized, close it by minimizing it and then right-clicking its taskbar button and choosing Close. If you want the window to be a certain size the next time Outlook Express starts (full-screen or any size smaller), just be sure to situate the screen to your liking before you close. And if you want to open Outlook in the Calendar view instead of the Inbox view, simply switch to Calendar view before you close. It's just like your mother told you: If you don't make your bed in the morning, it'll still be unmade when you come home at night -- so if you don't tidy up Outlook before you close, you'll open it in the same messy state you left it in.

CONTROL COLUMN WIDTH IN OUTLOOK 2002

If your to-do list has grown longer in recent days, you may need to widen a column in Outlook. On the other hand, if you're on vacation and plan on loafing, you could shrink a column. Table views in Outlook, such as your Task List or the Phone List view of your Contacts, display information in columns. Widening or shrinking a column is as easy as one-two:

Move the mouse pointer to the right edge of the column that you want to widen or shrink until the pointer becomes a two-headed arrow.
Making that mouse pointer turn into a two-headed arrow takes a bit of dexterity; it becomes easier with practice.
Drag the edge of the column until the column is the width that you desire.
What you see is what you get.

Shortcut: If you're not really sure how wide a column needs to be, just double-click the right edge of the column header. When you double-click that spot, Outlook does a trick called size-to-fit, which widens or narrows a column to exactly the size of the widest piece of data in the column.

DO COLUMNS WIDEN AS THE DAYS LENGTHEN?

If your to-do list has grown longer in recent days, you may need to widen a column in Outlook, or if you're on vacation all summer and planning on loafing, you could shrink one. Table views in Outlook, such as your Task List or the Phone List view of your Contacts, display information in columns. Widening or shrinking a column is as easy as one-two:

Move the mouse pointer to the right edge of the column that you want to widen or shrink until the pointer becomes a two-headed arrow.
Making that mouse pointer turn into a two-headed arrow takes a bit of dexterity; it becomes easier with practice.
Drag the edge of the column until the column is the width that you desire.
What you see is what you get.

DECOMMISSIONING AND UPDATING CONTACTS

You can remove a contact or update the information for a contact at any time. To delete a contact in the Contacts module, click the contact you want to delete, and then click the Delete button on the toolbar. The contact disappears from the list.

To update the information on a contact, double-click the contact. The Contact dialog box appears, displaying all the information you currently have on that contact; update whatever you need to and then click the Save and Close button.

SHHH - KEEPING A CONTACT SECRET

If you use Outlook on a network and don't want everyone to know about your Contacts -- perhaps because the sales rep in the next cubicle is always nudging in on your territory -- you can mark a contact as Private, meaning that only you can view that contact's information. When creating a new contact in your Outlook Contacts list, simply click the Private box in the lower-right corner of the New Contact form. After you click the Private box, you should see a check mark to indicate that the security feature is turned on. You can also double-click an existing contact to open the Contact form and check this same minuscule box in the lower-right corner.

ENTERING CONTACTS COMPLETELY

Sometimes you need to specify a number of details about a new contact. Go to the Contact dialog box in Contacts view by pressing Ctrl+N. Then use these features to add more info than you thought you could:

If you click the Full Name button, a Check Full Name dialog box appears. In it, you can specify a title (such as Dr. or Ms.); first, middle, and last name; and a suffix (such as Jr. or III).
If you click the Address button, a Check Address dialog box appears. Here, you can specify a street name, city, state or province, postal code, and country.
If you click the list box that appears directly below the Address button, you can specify two or more addresses for each person, such as a business address and a home address.
The This is the Mailing Address check box lets you specify which address to use when sending postal mail.
The button that looks like an open book that appears to the right of the E-mail list box displays a list of e-mail addresses that you have previously stored for all your contacts (a really handy feature for verifying that this is indeed a new contact).

ENTERING CONTACTS CONSISTENTLY

To enter a new contact in Contacts view, choose Actions, New Contact or press Ctrl+N.

When the Contact dialog box appears, you can type the name, address, phone number, and any other information you want to store about the contact in the appropriate boxes.

If you type a company name, make sure you type it consistently. Don't list it as "Wiley Publishing, Inc." one time and just "Wiley" another time, or Outlook won't consider them the same company.

Remember: You don't have to fill in every single box. For example, you may just want to store someone's name and phone number. In that case, you don't need to type the address or any other irrelevant information.

SORTING CONTACTS BY COMPANY IN OUTLOOK

Contact lists can get pretty long after a while. You can view several types of lists in Outlook: A sorted list is like a deck of cards laid out in numerical order, starting with all the deuces, then all the threes, and so on. A grouped view is more like seeing all the hearts in one row, then the clubs, diamonds, and spades. Gathering items into groups is handy for tasks such as finding all the people who work for a certain company when you want to send congratulations on a successful deal. So Outlook makes it easy to sort Contacts by the predefined By Company view.

To use By Company view, follow these steps:

Click the Contacts icon in the Outlook Bar to open the Contacts module.
Choose View, Current View, By Company (or press Alt, V, V, and arrow down to By Company).
Each gray bar labeled Company: (name of company) has a little box at the left with a plus or minus sign on it.
Click the plus icon to see entries for the company listed on the gray bar.
A minus sign indicates that no more entries are available.

SORTING A CONTACTS VIEW QUICKLY

Certain views of your Contact list are more useful when you organize the items according to a single piece of information, such as the contact's last name, company affiliation, city, or state.

You can quickly sort some views, such as Phone List view, by clicking the heading of any column you want to sort. For example, you can sort your phone list according to the company for which each person on your Contact list works. To sort your phone list by the contact's company, follow these steps:

In the Contacts module, choose View, Current View, Phone List to show your phone list.
Click the heading of the Company column to reorder the whole list according to the name of each contact's company.

USING CONTACTS VERSUS THE ADDRESS BOOK

If you faithfully enter basic contact information in your Address Book, you already have Contacts as well. Clicking on the Contacts icon on the left side of the Outlook window provides you the opportunity of inputting the same kind of information and viewing it at will, but the format of your data appears differently. You can switch back and forth between using the Address Book version and the Contacts version whenever you want. The same information appears in both views; it's a matter of which you find more aesthetically pleasing. But you can only do fancy schmantzy stuff like Mail Merge with the Contacts list.

VIEWING A CONTACT'S WEB PAGE IN OUTLOOK

When filling out the form for a new Contact in Outlook (choose File, New, Contact to get the form), you may be wondering what to put in the Web Page text box. Well, these days you may need to keep up with a Contact's personal Web page or her company's Web page so you have the latest info at your fingertips when you're ready to make contact. So you may want to enter the URL (Web address) in the Web Page text box to link directly to that Web page from the Address Card.

The safest way to make sure you get the URL correct is to open the Web page, then copy the Web page address from the browser window's address box and paste it into the Web Page text box of the Contact form.

When you want to view the Web Page from Contact view, choose Actions, Explore Web Page (or press Ctrl + Shift + X); your Web browser opens and loads the contact's Web page.

SHARING DATA BETWEEN YOUR DESKTOP AND LAPTOP

One of the more common questions that Outlook users pose is, "How do I share Outlook information between my desktop and laptop computers?" Outlook doesn't provide a practical method for synchronizing information between two computers, so you're better off using a tool like Laplink to copy the Outlook data file (its filename ends in the letters .PST) between the two computers. Be careful, though -- Laplink has a synchronization tool that can make a mess of your Outlook data. Your best bet is to use Laplink to copy the whole file from one computer to another.

GETTING AROUND WITH THE DATE NAVIGATOR

The Date Navigator is actually the name of this feature, but don't confuse it with Casanova's chauffeur. The Date Navigator is a trick you can use in Outlook to change the part of the Calendar you're seeing or the time period you want to look at.

Believe it or not, that unassuming little two- or three-month calendar scrap is probably the quickest way to change how you look at the Calendar and make your way around in it. All you have to do is click the date you want to see, and it opens in all its glory. It couldn't be simpler.

To use the Date Navigator:

Choose View, Go To, Calendar.
The Calendar appears.
Choose View, Current View, Day/Week/Month. The Date Navigator appears as a small calendar in the upper-right corner.
To see details of a single date, click that day in the Date Navigator. You see the appointments and events scheduled for the day you clicked.
To see a full-month view, click one of the letters (SMTWTFS) at the top of the months.
To see a week's view, move the mouse pointer just to the left of the week you want to see. When the arrow points up and to the right rather than up and to the left, click it.

As time goes by (so to speak), you'll find that you gravitate to the Calendar view that suits you best. The Seven Day view is optimal because it includes both Calendar and Task information in a screen that's pretty easy to read. You can leave Outlook running most of the time in order to keep the information you need handy.

MAKING A DATE WITH YOUR TASKS IN OUTLOOK

You can create a quick electronic to-do list of your New Year's resolutions, personal errands, or work-related tasks by using the Tasks list in Outlook. Click the Tasks icon in the Outlook bar and you get a simple grid to make your list.

Here's a quick way to enter a Due Date for a task: Instead of typing a date in the Due Date column, you can type a brief description of the date, such as "Friday," "tomorrow," "next Thursday," "one month from now," or even "Valentine's Day," and Outlook can translate it into a regular date.

COPYCAT DATES

If you want to create a copy of an appointment for another time on your Outlook Calendar, hold down the Ctrl key while you use the mouse to drag the appointment to another time or date. For example, if you're scheduling a New Employee Orientation from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and another one from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., you can create the 9 a.m. appointment and then copy it to 2 p.m. by holding Ctrl and dragging the appointment. Then you have two appointments with the same subject, location, and date, but different hours.

If you copy an appointment to a different date by dragging the appointment to a date on the Date Navigator calendar, you retain the hour of the appointment but change the date.

DELETING STUFF WITH DRAG AND DROP

If in doubt, throw it out. You know the drill.

Here's how to delete an item using drag-and-drop:

Click the Notes icon in the Outlook Bar.
Your list of notes appears. You can click any icon that has items you want to delete.
Click the down arrow on the Outlook Bar until you see the Deleted Items icon.
The icon looks like a trash can.
Drag a note to the Deleted Items icon in the Outlook Bar.
Kiss it good-bye -- it's gone.

If you change your mind after deleting something, just click the Deleted Items folder. The folder opens and a list of everything that you've deleted is there. It's like being a hit man in the afterlife -- you get another chance to see everyone you've disposed of. Except in this case you can bring items back to life. Just drag them back to where they came from.

ADDING YOUR 2 CENTS TO A DISCUSSION FOLDER

If you use Outlook on a network at work, you may find some interesting info is posted in public folders. Many public folders are organized as open discussions in which anyone can put in his or her two cents' worth. All the messages can be read by anybody, so everybody reads and replies to everybody else. If you view a folder and find it's full of messages from different people all replying to one another, you're looking at a discussion folder.

To add new items to a public folder, follow these steps:

Choose View, Folder List or click the Folder List button in the toolbar.
The Folder List appears.
Click the name of the folder.
The list of messages in the folder appears.
Choose File, New, Post in This Folder.
The New Item form appears.
Type a subject and your message.
Click Post.

Now your message is part of the list of items in the folder.

REPLYING TO ITEMS IN A DISCUSSION FOLDER

When you're participating in public folder discussions at work, assume that everyone in the company -- from the top executives to the newest temp -- will read what you've written. Check your spelling. DON'T WRITE IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (it looks like you're SHOUTING), and use discretion in what you say and how you say it.

To reply to items in a public discussion folder:

Double-click the item to which you want to reply.
The item opens so that you can read it.
Click the Post Reply button in the toolbar.
The Discussion Reply form appears. The text of the message to which you're replying is already posted in the form.
Type your subject and reply.
Your reply appears in a different color than the original text.
4. Click Post.

Your item joins the list of discussion items.

OPENING SOMEONE ELSE'S OUTLOOK FOLDER

Teams that work closely on related projects often share Outlook 2002 calendars or task lists. You can't open another person's Outlook folder, however, unless that person has given you permission. (To do so, that person needs to choose Tools, Options. Click the Delegates tab, and then click Add. Next, double-click the desired name or names and click OK.)

After you have permission, you can open the other person's folder by following these steps:

Choose File-->Open Special Folder-->Other User's Folder.
The Open Other User's Folder dialog box appears.
Click the Name button.
The Select Name dialog box appears. (It's really the Address Book.)
Double-click the name of the person whose folder you want to open.
The Select Name dialog box closes and the name you double-clicked appears in the Open Other User's Folder dialog box.
Click the scroll-down button (triangle) on the Folder box.
A list of the Folders you can choose appears.
Click the name of the folder that you want to view.
The name of the folder you choose appears in the Folder box.
Click OK.

The folder you pick now appears in your folder list.

KEEPING IT BRIEF IN E-MAIL

Here are some abbreviations you can use when sending e-mail:

L8R: Later
LOL: Laughing out loud
ROTFL: Rolling on the floor laughing
SO: Significant other
WRT: With regard to

Just remember, these are all fine abbreviations for your casual e-mailings, but they aren't appropriate for business correspondence.

DEALING WITH FLOODS OF E-MAIL

There's good news and bad news about e-mail. The good news is that e-mail is free; you can send as much as you want for virtually no cost. The bad news is that e-mail is free; anybody can easily send you more e-mail than you can possibly read. Before long, you need help sorting it all out so you can deal with messages that need immediate action.

Outlook has some handy tools for coping with the flood of electronic flotsam and jetsam that finds its way into your Inbox. You can create separate folders for filing your mail, and you can use Outlook's view feature to help you slice and dice your incoming messages into manageable groups.

FILTERING JUNK E-MAIL IN OUTLOOK 2002

The Junk E-mail filter looks over all your incoming mail and automatically moves anything that looks like junk e-mail to a special folder. You can delete everything that gets moved to your Junk E-mail folder after checking to make sure Outlook didn't mistakenly move real e-mail to your Junk E-mail folder. Some junk e-mail still gets through, but Outlook catches more than half of the junk messages you receive.

To turn on Junk E-mail filtering:

Choose Tools, Organize (or click the Organize button on the toolbar). The Organize window appears.
Click the Junk E-mail link in the Organize window. The text in the right portion of the Organize window changes to reveal controls related to Junk E-mail.
Click the scroll-down button next to the word Automatically in each line of the Organize window and choose Move from the list. The word Move appears in the scroll-down menus.
Click the top Turn on button to the right of the scroll-down menu that says Junk E-mail. If you've never created a Junk E-mail folder before, a dialog box appears, asking whether you want to create one.
Click Yes. The Turn on button that you clicked changes to a button called Turn off.
Click the lower Turn on button. Both buttons now say Turn off.
Choose Tools, Organize (or click the Organize button on the toolbar). The Organize window closes.

CLEANING UP YOUR E-MAIL MESS

Ready to do some spring cleaning on your Inbox? Outlook 2002 makes it easy. Choose Tools, Mailbox Cleanup. This organizing tool enables you to determine the size of your mailbox and search for files by size or by age. You can then archive, move, or delete outdated or oversized files altogether. If you use Outlook with Microsoft Exchange Server, Outlook can also notify you when your mailbox approaches a chosen size limit so that you know when it's time to sweep out a few more.

FLAG YOUR E-MAIL AS REMINDERS

Some people use their incoming e-mail messages as an informal task list. Flagging is designed to make it easier to use your Inbox as a task list by adding individual reminders to each message you get (or even to messages you send).

Follow these steps to flag a message:

Switch to the Inbox by clicking the Inbox icon on the Outlook bar.
Double-click the message you want to flag, and the message reopens.
Choose Actions, Flag for Follow Up (or press Ctrl+Shift+G).
The Flag for Follow Up dialog box appears.
Click the Flag To text box and enter your reminder, such as "Call headquarters."
You can also click the scroll-down button at the end of the Flag To text box and choose a reminder, such as Follow Up.
Click the Due By box (in Outlook 98, click the Reminder box) and type the date on which you want the reminder flag to appear.
Remember that you can enter dates in plain English by entering something like Next Wednesday or In three weeks and let Outlook figure out the actual date.
Click OK.
A little red flag appears next to your message in the Inbox.

FAXING WITH FLAIR

To receive incoming faxes successfully, remember the following important points:

Outlook must be running to receive a fax.
The fax service must be configured correctly to receive an incoming fax. Select Tools, Services to display the Services dialog box. Double-click the fax service to display its Properties dialog box. Click the Modem tab and choose Properties to set the answer mode options.
If you need to share the fax line with voice calls, don't set the fax service to automatically answer incoming calls. Use the manual option to display a dialog box so that you can choose to answer the call as a fax or as a voice call.
If you want to be able to receive faxes when you aren't at your computer, set the fax service to automatically answer incoming calls.

MANAGING FILES AND FOLDERS WITH OUTLOOK

One file-management trick you can do in Outlook that you can't readily do otherwise in Office is to copy a list of filenames and details and then paste the list into another program, such as Microsoft Word or Excel. Using this technique helps you keep track of the progress of projects that involve the creation of many files.

Follow these steps to copy a list of filenames to use in another program:

Open the folder in which you stored the files whose names you want to copy.
Select the files whose names you want to copy.
Choose Edit, Copy or press Ctrl + C.
If the other program isn't open, click the Start button and open that program.
Choose Edit, Paste (or press Ctrl + V) where you want the list to appear. The list of file details appears in the new document.

By pasting a list of file details into a spreadsheet such as Excel, you can calculate total file size, sort the files, or perform any calculation on the information you pasted. For example, you can follow when you received all the parts of a long report from each of your coworkers in order to explain to your boss why it was late.

SENDING A FILE TO AN E-MAIL RECIPIENT

You can send a file by Outlook 2002 e-mail with only a few mouse clicks, even if Outlook isn't running. When you're viewing files in Windows Explorer, you can mark any file to be sent to any e-mail recipient. Here's how:

Right-click the file that you want to send after finding the file with Windows Explorer.
A menu appears.
Choose Send To.
Another menu appears.
Choose Mail Recipient.
A New Message form appears. An icon representing the attached file is in the text box.
Type the subject of the file and the name of the person to whom you're sending the file.
If you want to add comments to your message, type them in the text box, where the icon for the file is.
Click Send.
Your message goes to the Outbox. Press F5 to send it on its way. If you send your files by modem, you also have to press F5 to dial your e-mail service.

FINDING STUFF IN OUTLOOK

Outlook can search for information you want in two main ways: the easy way, and the powerful way. For the easy way, click Tools, Find or click the Find button on the Standard toolbar. A special pane appears at the top of the folder window offering one simple Look For box in which you type your search request. The text on the left side of the Find panel tells you which fields Outlook searches, but you also can check or clear a box that determines whether the search also covers the body of an item.

When Outlook completes the find operation, matching items appear in the folder window. When you're finished working with the search results, click Clear Search below the Look For box to return to the original view.

FINDING STUFF WITH OUTLOOK ANYWHERE

When you want more control over your search operations in Outlook, choose Tools, Advanced Find. The Advanced Find dialog appears. Although there isn't room here to describe all the bells and whistles available, you can figure out most of these options with a few trial searches. Type or select search criteria in the controls of any of the three tabs and then click Find Now to begin the search. The dialog box expands downward with a list of the items found by the search. You can double-click an item to open it in its own window.

Here's the real beauty of getting to know this feature: Outlook's Advanced Find dialog box offers an alternative to the search tools available in other Office programs for locating files on your disk or network -- and you don't have to run Outlook to use it. To activate Advanced Find when Outlook isn't open, click the Windows Start button and choose Search, Using Microsoft Outlook. To search for files according to any combination of hordes of different characteristics, select Files in the Look For box.

CHANGING THE DATE ON A FLAG

Procrastination used to be an art; Outlook makes it a science. When someone nags you with flags, you can still put it off. Yes, you can do it later.

To change the date on a flag:

Click the Inbox icon in the Outlook Bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
The Inbox screen opens, showing your incoming mail.
Double-click the message whose flag you want to change.
The Message dialog box appears.
Choose Actions, Flag for Follow Up (or press Ctrl+Shift+G).
The Flag for Follow Up dialog box appears.
Click the Reminder box and type the new date when you want the reminder flag to appear.
Type the date when you think you'll feel ready to be flagged again. Typing 999 years from now will work -- really!
Click OK.

Of course, there's a catch. You can always change the date on the flags that you've set, but if someone sends you a message, flags it, and marks it "Private," you can't change the contents of the flag. Rats!

FLYING THE FLAG ON E-MAIL

You can plant a flag in a message that you send to someone else to remind that person of a task they have to do (provided that the recipient also uses Outlook). To attach a flag to your outgoing e-mail messages, follow these steps:

Open a New Message by clicking the New Message button or pressing Ctrl + N.
You can add the flag before or after you compose and address the message itself.
Click the Flag button (looks like a little red pennant) on the New Message toolbar.
The Flag for Follow Up dialog box appears.
Click the down-arrow at the right end of the Flag To text box and choose one of the menu items.
A handy flag is actually "Follow Up," which will remind the person to do something about your message on a particular date.
Click the Reminder box and type the date on which you want the reminder flag to appear. If you'd rather just pick a date from a calendar, you can click the little down-arrow next to the Reminder box to reveal a calendar, and then click the date you want.
Click OK.

When the date that you entered in the Flag for Follow Up dialog box arrives, a reminder dialog box pops up to jog the recipient's memory.

EXPLORING TWISTS ON FOLDER NAVIGATION

To bop around folders in Outlook, some people prefer working with the Outlook Bar and some prefer working with the Folder List. (And some people like to keep both open for mysterious reasons known only to themselves.). Unlike the Outlook Bar, where you can control which folders are displayed and how they're grouped, the Folder List displays all the Outlook folders all the time. Here are two nifty things to know about folder navigation in both the Outlook Bar and the Folder List:

If you right-click a folder in the Outlook Bar, you can choose Open in New Window on the shortcut menu to display a folder in a separate Outlook window. And if you right-click a folder in the Folder List, choosing Open from the shortcut menu displays the folder in a new window.
To widen (or narrow) the Outlook Bar or the Folder List, drag the divider (the right-hand edge of the panel) between the Outlook Bar and the main part of the screen or between the Folder List and the main area to resize the bar or list area.

NAVIGATING WITHIN FOLDERS WITH OUTLOOK

You can use the Outlook Bar to navigate through all your folders and files, not just e-mail folders. To open any file or folder stored on your computer using Outlook 2000 instead of Windows Explorer, follow these steps:

In the Outlook Bar on the far left side of your screen, click Other Shortcuts, and then click either the My Computer icon or the My Documents icon, depending on where you want to look at files. If the Outlook Bar is not visible, choose View, Outlook Bar.
Double-click the folder in the Folder List on the left side of your computer screen. If the Folder List is not visible, choose View, Folder List. Outlook opens that folder and displays the contents (which can be more folders or files) in a list on the right side of your screen.
Continue clicking on folder icons until you find the file you want. Each time you click a folder, Outlook displays its contents in the area to the right.
Double-click the file to open it.

FANCY FONTS BY DEFAULT

To change the default font for e-mail messages that you send in HTML or Rich Text format, follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options.
Click the Mail Format tab.
Select a new default font in the Stationery and Fonts section of the dialog box.

Next time you send a message, it will automatically use your preferred font.

Remember that the person on the receiving end needs to have that font in his or her font repertoire in order to see it the way you do, so you're best off choosing more common fancy fonts, such as the popular Comic Sans. If recipients can only see plain text, alas, that's what they'll get from you no matter which font you choose.

FORMATTING FORWARD WITH OUTLOOK

You can control the appearance of messages that you forward in distinctive ways in Outlook. To set the format of a forwarded message is much like setting the format for a reply:

Choose Tools, Options (or press Alt, T, O).
The Options dialog box opens.
Click the E-mail Options button (or press M).
The E-mail Options dialog box appears.
Click the scroll-down button (triangle) at the right end of the When Forwarding a Message box.
A menu of options drops down. This menu has one choice fewer than the When Replying to a Message box does, but it works the same way, with that little diagram of the page layout off to the right.
Choose the style that you prefer to use for forwarded messages and click OK.

A TISKET A TASKET FOR THE INBASKET

The quickest way to get a task out of your hair is to get someone else to do it. Outlook enables you to send tasks to your coworkers for completion. However, your office network must be set up to allow it. If you're using Outlook on an office network that uses Microsoft Exchange Server, you can see status information entered by the person to whom you assigned the task. If your office network isn't set up to enable you to assign tasks (or if you're not on an office network), tasks you assign to others are received as e-mail messages.

To assign a task to someone else, follow these steps:

Double-click the task you want to assign to someone else.
Click the Assign Task button on the toolbar to open the Task form.
Type in the To box the name of the person to whom you want to assign the task. (This step presumes that you've already set up the person's name and e-mail address on your Contact list.)
Click Send (or press Alt+S).

The task then appears on your Task list with a special icon next to it. The icon tells you that you've assigned this task to someone else for completion. If the task went out as an e-mail message, the message appears in your Sent Items folder.

POPPING UP A DIFFERENT INTERNET WINDOW

Sometimes you get an important e-mail in the middle of surfing a great Web site. So you open the e-mail, and it contains a clickable link to another Web site. You click that link and -- presto changeo, uh-oh -- the new site now takes over your Internet Explorer window, blipping you out of the Web page you were just enjoying, and you have to hit the Back button to find it again. If you find that annoying, you can make a new Internet Explorer window open instead; the trick is to change a setting in Internet Explorer, not Outlook:

On the Internet Explorer standard toolbar, choose Tools, Internet Options.
Click the Advanced tab.
Under the Browsing group of options, uncheck the Reuse Windows for Launching Shortcuts option.

CREATING A NEW ITEM IN OUTLOOK

To create a new item in whatever Outlook 2002 module you're in, just click the New Item tool at the far-left end of the toolbar. The icon changes when you change modules, so it becomes a New Task icon in the Tasks module, a New Contact icon in the Contacts module, and so on. You can also click the arrow next to the New Item tool to pull down the New Item menu.

When you choose an item from the New Item menu, you can create a new item in an Outlook module other than the one you're in without changing modules. If you're answering e-mail, for example, and you want to create a note, pull down the New Item menu, choose Note, create your note, and then go on working with your e-mail.

DELETING AN ENTIRE JOURNAL CATEGORY IN OUTLOOK

So when you started having your Outlook Journal track every phone call, it seemed like a good plan. You didn't realize you made 50 useless phone calls a day, but you could now care less about all those phone journal entries. To delete an entire journal category (such as Phone call or Task) along with any entries stored inside, follow these steps:

Click the My Shortcuts button in the Outlook Bar.
If the Outlook Bar is not visible, choose View, Outlook Bar.
Click the Journal icon in the Outlook Bar.
Click the journal entry type that you want to delete (such as Phone call).
Choose Edit, Delete, or press Ctrl + D.
A dialog box appears, asking if you really want to delete the entire category.
Click OK.
If you delete a journal category accidentally, you can recover the category and all its contents by pressing Ctrl + Z right away.

REVIEWING THE WEEK IN YOUR JOURNAL

The items that you're most likely to need first in your Outlook Journal are the ones you used last. Last Seven Days is a quick way to see your most recent activities at a glance. Documents that you've created, phone calls, e-mail messages -- anything you've done in the last seven days -- will all show up in Last Seven Days view. To see a week's worth of Journal entries, choose View, Current View, Last Seven Days.

Note that this view shows anything you've worked on during the last week, including documents you may have created a very long time ago; that's why you may see some pretty old dates in this view at times.

STOP THE CLOCK FOR JOURNAL ENTRIES

Although the Outlook Journal can automatically track quite a few different types of activities, it doesn't create Journal entries for everything you do on your PC. Often, you must create Journal entries yourself if you want to keep a log of your activities. In some cases, Outlook can provide some assistance with creating a Journal entry, but you'll have to handle some of the details yourself.

For example, if you use the Outlook AutoDialer to call one of your contacts, Outlook can create a Journal entry that begins when you click the Dial button. But because Outlook has no way of knowing when you complete the call, you'll have to stop the timer yourself. The Journal entry will then include the call duration as well as the information from the Contacts list.

LAUNCHING A FILE FROM ANOTHER PROGRAM

Besides letting you edit, rename, or delete files, Outlook also lets you launch the program that created a file (provided that you have that program on your hard disk in the first place). To load a file plus the program that created that file, follow these steps:

Navigate within the Folders list to the file you want to open.
Double-click the file that you want to edit.
Outlook obediently loads the program that created the file and then displays your file contents. For example, if you click an Excel worksheet, Outlook launches Excel on your behalf.
Choose File, Exit from the menu of the program that loaded in Step 2 (such as Excel 2000).
Outlook cheerfully appears once more, ready to do your bidding again.

SEND A FILE FROM A MICROSOFT OFFICE APPLICATION

You can e-mail any Microsoft Office document from the Office application itself, without using the Outlook e-mail module. Here's how:

In the application that created it, open an Office document that you want to send.
Choose File, Send To, Mail Recipient (As Attachment).
A New Message form appears, displaying an icon for the file in the text box to indicate that the file is attached to the message.
Type the subject of the file and the name of the person to whom you're sending the file.
If you want to add comments to your message, type them in the text box where the icon for the file is.
Click Send a Copy.
Your message goes to the Outbox. If you send your files by modem, you also have to switch to Outlook and press F5 to dial your e-mail service.

Word 2000 actually gives you two ways to send someone a file by e-mail. The method described in the preceding step list sends the Word file as an attachment to a message. If you choose File, Send To, Mail Recipient, not as an attachment, Word sends the document as the body of your e-mail message. That's better when you're sending the message to someone in your office who uses all the same hardware and software as you do, but not when you send a message to a person over the Internet (sometimes the other person's computer makes a mess of the message if you send it from Word). As a rule, send Word documents as attachments to people outside the office.

WAITING TO SEND YOUR FIRST MESSAGE TO A LIST

Some lists encourage new subscribers to send in a message introducing themselves and saying briefly what their interests are. Others don't. Don't send anything until you have something to say.

After you subscribe to a list, don't send anything to it until you have been reading it for at least a week. Think about it -- the list has been getting along without your insights since it began, and it can get along without them for one more week. You can learn what topics people really discuss, the tone of the list, what topics people are tired of, and so on. Bide your time to avoid any newcomer gaffes.

EDIT AN OUTLOOK DISTRIBUTION LIST

People come and people go in Outlook 2002 Distribution Lists, just like everywhere else. It's a good thing that you can edit the lists in Outlook 2002. Just click the Contacts icon in the Outlook Bar and double-click the name of one of your Distribution Lists. Distribution Lists are the entries with a little two-headed icon to the right of their name.

When you open a Distribution List entry, you see the same screen you saw when you first created the list. To remove a member of the list, click that name and click the Remove button. To select a new member from the names that are already in your Contact list or Global Address list, click Select Members and follow the same routine you used when you created the list. If you want to add a person whose e-mail address isn't listed in any of your address books, click the Add New button, fill in the person's name and e-mail address, and click OK.

USING A PERSONAL DISTRIBUTION LIST

The equivalent of the Outlook Express mailing group in regular Outlook is the Personal Distribution List. After you create a Personal Distribution List, you can send a single message to reach everybody on the list in one swoop -- very handy for e-mailing holiday greetings!

To send a message to your Personal Distribution List, follow these steps:

Choose File, New, Mail Message. (Or press Alt, F, W, M.)
Click the To button. The Select Names dialog box appears, showing names from your Contacts list.
Select Personal Address Book from the Show Names From drop-down list. Now the names in your Personal Address Book appear in the left window.
Note: You can store a Personal Distribution List only in the Personal Address Book, not the Contact list.
If you have already created a Personal Distribution List, it appears in the Personal Address Book in boldface with a little two-faces icon.
Click the name of the Personal Distribution List you want to use.
Click the To button if you don't mind everyone seeing everyone else's name on the list. Click the Bcc button (blind copies) if you don't want each person to see the others' names.
Click OK.

The New Message form reappears with the list you selected displayed as the recipient.

CLICKING ON AND OFF LISTS WITH OUTLOOK

One fun way to use Outlook is to join mailing lists (also called discussions) on topics of interest to you. A bunch of Web sites now host mailing lists, letting you join by clicking links on Web pages. These sites include the following:

Topica [ http://www.topica.com ]
Yahoo! Groups [ http://groups.yahoo.com ]

To subscribe to a list on one of these sites, just follow the instructions on the site. Some mailing list Web sites let you read the messages posted to their lists without actually subscribing -- you can click links to display the messages in your Web browser. But you can't post replies until you subscribe.

GETTING ON AND OFF MAILING LISTS WITH OUTLOOK

Shortly after you subscribe to a mailing list, you should get back a chatty, machine-generated welcoming message telling you that you have joined the list, along with a description of some commands you can use to fiddle with your mailing list membership. Usually, this message includes a request to confirm that you received this message and that it was really you who wanted to subscribe. Follow the instructions by replying to this message or you don't get on the list.

Keep the chatty, informative welcome message. For one thing, it tells you how to get off the mailing list if it's not to your liking after all. You may want to create a folder called Mailing Lists just to store the welcome messages from all the lists you join so they're easy to find when you're ready to unsubscribe.

EXERCISE GOOD FORMATTING TASTE IN OUTLOOK

After you discover all the lavish design tricks you can do with HTML formatting in Outlook, you can get carried away with unusual fonts, neon colors, and swirling stationery. Use restraint when you're tempted to get, um, exotic with format ting -- or your recipients may consider you dorky, perky, or some other adjective you'd rather not be described as. That's especially true when sending messages to a mailing list or newsgroup where you can't be sure that everyone's program enjoys the same HTML capabilities (and where you really want to avoid getting a reputation for dorkiness or perkiness).

POPPING UP A DIFFERENT INTERNET WINDOW

Sometimes you get an important e-mail in the middle of surfing a great Web site. So you open the e-mail, and it contains a clickable link to another Web site. You click that link and -- presto changeo uh oh -- the new site now takes over your Internet Explorer window, blipping you out of the Web page you were just enjoying, and you have to hit the Back button to find it again. If you find that annoying, you can make a new Internet Explorer window open instead; the trick is to change a setting in Internet Explorer, not Outlook:

On the Internet Explorer standard toolbar, choose Tools, Internet Options.
Click the Advanced tab.
Under the Browsing group of options, uncheck the Reuse Windows for Launching Shortcuts option.

DELETING ITEMS FROM A VIEW IN OUTLOOK

To delete an item by moving it to the Deleted Items folder, highlight it and click the Delete button (the one with the artistic X) on the toolbar, press Ctrl+D, or drag the item to the Deleted Items folder. Depending on the view you're working in, the Del key alone may or may not perform the same chore.

You can delete any item listed in a view permanently, without moving it to the Deleted Items folder, by highlighting it and pressing Shift+Del. But be sure you never want to retrieve it!

RESPECTING PRIVACY OF E-MAIL ADDRESSES

So, what if some of the message recipients do not wish their e-mail address to be known to the other message recipients? In that case, it would be better for you to remove those people from the distribution list. Either send the message to those recipients privately or use the Bcc (blind carbon copy) address box for their e-mail addresses. Outlook does not provide a method of suppressing the recipient list directly.

DELETING OLD E-MAIL WITH OUTLOOK

If you don't watch out, you may find your Inbox overflowing with ancient e-mail messages that you no longer need. Rather than waste valuable hard disk space storing useless e-mail messages, take some time periodically (the last weeks of the year are good, but once a month is better) to clean out your Inbox.

Besides the Inbox, another folder that may get cluttered is the Sent Items folder, which contains copies of every e-mail message you've sent out. Although you may like to keep a record of some of these messages for future reference, you probably want to wipe out the rest at some point.

To delete messages in either folder, simply click the Inbox or the Sent Items folder in the Folder pane, and then click the message you want to delete. If you want to delete a range of messages, hold down the Shift key, click the first message you want to delete, then click the last message you want to delete. The doomed messages are now highlighted, and you can do away with them by clicking the Delete button on the toolbar or pressing Ctrl + D.

DELETING E-MAIL FOR GOOD WITH OUTLOOK

In with the new, out with the old! If you want to get all deleted messages in the Deleted Items folder off your hard drive once and for all, choose Tools, Empty "Deleted Items" Folder (or press Alt, T, Y).

Warning: After you do this, you can never recover the messages deleted.

RECOVERING DELETED E-MAIL WITH OUTLOOK

Deleted messages are sent to the Deleted Items folder, where you can recover them if you suddenly decide you need something after all. To recover e-mail from your Deleted Items folder, follow these steps:

Click the Deleted Items icon on the Outlook bar.
Click the e-mail message you want to recover.
You can select multiple messages by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each message.
Choose Edit, Move to Folder or press Ctrl + Shift + V.
The Move Items dialog box appears.
Click the Inbox icon (or choose another folder) and then click OK.
The message appears back in your Inbox in its original condition.

SAVING E-MAIL DRAFTS IN OUTLOOK WHILE ONLINE

If you're not online when drafting an e-mail in Outlook, clicking the Send button merely sends your message to the Outbox, where it waits until you reconnect with the Internet. So if you need to edit that message one more time before sending, you can click the Outbox and get your draft back, and then go online to Send it.

But what if you are online (as networked computers usually are) and you want to store your e-mail temporarily before sending it?

Do you just have to leave it open on your desktop until you can finish that message? Nope: You can put it in the Drafts folder. As its name implies, the Drafts folder can contain rough drafts of all the e-mail you haven't finished but plan to send eventually (like that New Year newsletter you started in December). After composing a draft e-mail, follow these steps:

Choose File, Move to Folder (or press Ctrl + Shift + V).
The Move Item To dialog box appears.
Click the Drafts icon and then click OK.
A dialog box appears letting you know that Outlook has copied your e-mail message to the Drafts folder instead of sending it. Don't let that scare you.
Choose File, Close (or press Alt, F, C).
A dialog box appears asking if you want to save the current e-mail message.
Click No (Alt, N) because you already saved a copy.

GOBBLEDYGOOK IN YOUR E-MAIL

If you receive a great deal of e-mail from the Internet, the first few lines of your messages may be nothing but computerese. That's because Internet e-mail bounces between computers all over the country -- and sometimes all over the world -- before it gets to you. The lines of gibberish at the beginning of your Internet e-mail messages are directions used by the computers that the messages bounced among so that the message ends up bouncing to you successfully.

STICKING WITH A CLASSIC STYLE FOR NON-OUTLOOK E-MAIL

Be careful how you format e-mail to send to people on the Internet. Not all e-mail systems can handle graphics or formatted text, such as boldface or italics, so that masterpiece of correspondence art that you send to your client may arrive as gibberish. If you don't know what e-mail program the other person uses, go light on the graphics. When sending e-mail to your colleagues on the same office network, or if you're sure that the person you're sending to also has Outlook, any formatting and graphics should look fine.

E-MAIL FOR EMERGENCIES

E-mail came through for a lot of worried friends and family when tragedy struck the nation on September 11. People who could not get through on a phone were sometimes able to send a message via the Internet. Receiving a reassuring "I'm okay, how are you?" message can mean so much in the midst of an emergency situation.

However, you may have some long-distance friends or relations who do not have access to e-mail. For example, an elderly relative may not even have a computer. Just as you have the phone number of a neighbor or friend who can check on your Great Aunt Grace, ask whether the person has an e-mail address you can use in case of emergency. If the phone lines are overwhelmed, it may be a while before anyone can check dial-up e-mail either, but at least your reassuring message will be waiting as soon as possible, and your great aunt's neighbor can send a speedy reply to reassure you when phone service is restored.

FILTERING YOUR YEARLY EVENTS

Sometimes it's handy to look over your calendar and remind yourself of upcoming yearly events such as Mother's Day, Father's Day, your anniversary, or your best friend's birthday (oops, that was last month?). If you remember to enter important birthday and anniversary dates in your Outlook Calendar, you can call up a quick rundown any time by choosing View, Current View, Annual Events. Annual Events shows the list of items that last at least an entire day and return at the same time each year.

If you want to separate your list of birthdays from the 14 annual business conferences you also listed as annual events, you can further filter the list by following these steps:

In the Annual Events view, choose View, Current View, Customize Current View.
In the View Summary dialog box, click the Filter button.
On the Appointments and Meetings tab, type birthday in the Search for the Word(s) text box.
Click the Advanced tab.
In the Define More Criteria section, click the Field button.
Choose All Appointment Fields, Recurrence.
From the Value dropdown list, select Yearly.
Click Add to List.
Click OK twice to return to Outlook.

Voila! A list of everyone's birthdays for the year appears.

EXPLORING PUBLIC FOLDERS IN OUTLOOK

A popular feature of Outlook on an Exchange network is the ability to use public folders. Public folders are places that a whole group of people can look at and add items to. A public folder may contain a Contact list that the entire company shares or a Tasks list used by an entire department. You can also create a public folder that contains messages, a lot like your Inbox, except that everybody can add messages and read the same set of messages. This kind of arrangement is often called a bulletin board; you post a message, someone replies to it, a third party then replies to both of you, and so on. It's a method of conducting a group conversation without having all the parties to the conversation available at the same time.

When you click a public folder, you see a list of items that looks like a list of e-mail messages, except that all the messages are addressed to the folder rather than to a person. In a public folder, you can add new items or reply to items that someone else entered.

To view a public folder:

If the Folder List is not already showing, choose View, Folder List or click the Folder List button in the toolbar or press Alt, V, E.
In the Folder List, there is often a folder called, simply enough, Public Folders. Within this general folder, companies may have many smaller folders.
Click the name of the folder you want to see.
Double-click the title of any item that you want to view the contents of.

PROBING PUBLIC FOLDER POSSIBILITIES IN OUTLOOK

When you're working in Outlook on an Exchange network, public folders look just like any other folders. You may be using public folders without even knowing it. In Outlook, all folders look the same, whether you create them yourself on your own PC or they're on a corporate network or the Internet. All you really need to know about public folders is that they're public, so whatever you post to a public folder can be seen by anybody who has access to that folder. You may even be able to create your own public folders; check with your system administrator to see whether you have rights to create public folders and a place to put them. Also determine a plan for who has access to the folder.

Why would you want to create a public folder? You can set up a public discussion folder for an ongoing group conference about topics of interest to everyone sharing the folder, such as current company news, opinions on upcoming decisions, human resource forms, or intra-company classified ads. Any kind of information that you'd like to exchange among groups of people on your network can be organized as a public folder.

FORMATTING FORWARDS WITH OUTLOOK

You can control the appearance of messages that you forward in distinctive ways in Outlook. To set the format of a forwarded message is much like setting the format for a reply:

Choose Tools, Options (or press Alt, T, O).
The Options dialog box opens.
Click the E-mail Options button (or press M).
The E-mail Options dialog box appears.
Click the scroll-down button (triangle) at the right end of the When Forwarding a Message box.
A menu of options drops down. This menu has one choice fewer than the When Replying to a Message box does, but it works the same way, with that little diagram of the page layout off to the right.
Choose the style that you prefer to use for forwarded messages and click OK.

SORTING YOUR INBOX BY SENDER

To sort the messages in your Inbox by the person who sent them to you, click the From button above the list of messages. The messages rearrange themselves in order by sender. To switch to descending order by sender, click the From button again and the messages appear in reverse alphabetical order. To go back to having your messages sorted by date, click the Received button until the messages are in ascending or descending order by date, whichever you prefer.

INDENTING VERSUS PREFIXING REPLIES AND FORWARDS

You can specify how you want Outlook to format your forwarded messages or your replies. To set these options, follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options to display the Options dialog box.
Click the Preferences tab if necessary to bring it to the front.
Click the E-mail Options button to display the E-mail Options dialog box.
Under the "On replies and forwards" section, you can tell Outlook how you want to handle the original text of a message that you reply to or forward.

For example, it has become an Internet custom to prefix the original message lines with a greater than symbol. If you want to follow that tradition, check the "Prefix each line with" option.

Remember that some of these options are codependent, whereas others are mutually exclusive. For example, you cannot prefix each line of the original message with a character when replying to messages if you also choose to include and indent the original message.

"HANDWRITTEN" JOURNAL ENTRIES

Rather than rely on the Outlook Journal to automatically track all activities, you can manually place an activity directly in your Journal at any time by following these steps:

Choose File, New, Journal Entry.
In the Subject box, type a description of the item that you want to record.
Click the Entry type list box and then choose an entry type, such as Phone call or Task.
Click the Start time or Duration list boxes.
If you want to time your activity, click the Start Timer button.
Type any text that you want to record.
Click Save, and then Close.

PRINTING A JOURNAL ENTRY

You may want to get a printed copy of a particular Outlook Journal entry. That way you can show your boss (in black and white) just how much time you've been wasting attending his meetings that are designed to teach you how to spend your time more productively.

To print a journal entry, follow these steps:

Click the My Shortcuts button in the Outlook Bar.
If the Outlook Bar is not visible, choose View, Outlook Bar.
Click the Journal icon in the Outlook Bar.
Click the plus sign of a journal entry to view all your entries organized by date and time.
Click the journal entry that you want to print and then choose File, Print (or press Ctrl + P).
A print dialog box appears.
Click OK.

JOURNALING: OUTLOOK'S STAR LOG

Stardate 2002: On Star Trek, the captain of the starship Enterprise faithfully makes daily entries in the star log. Now it's your turn. Just like Captain Kirk, you can record your daily interactions with strange beings in bizarre environments under stressful circumstances, even if the aliens are all in your own office. The Outlook Journal is your star log.

The Journal automatically records any document you create, edit, or print in any Office 2000 application. The Journal also automatically tracks e-mail messages, meeting requests and responses, and task request and responses. You can set Outlook to make journal entries for nearly everything you do, or you can shut off the Journal entirely and make no entries at all. Just go to Tools, Options, Journal Options to set your preferences.

LABEL-MAKER SHORTCUT IN OUTLOOK

Creating a mail merge between Outlook 2002 and Word takes many steps to do (too many for this eTip space!). If you print labels frequently, you can reduce your workload. Just save a blank label document and use it over and over. Here's how: After you finish creating your labels, press Alt+Tab a few times until you see a document that looks like your labels but has weird-looking text like this:

<<Full_Name>><<Mailing_Address>>

Save that document and name it something you'll remember, such as Blank Labels. The next time you decide to create labels, click the Existing document check box in the Mail Merge Contacts dialog box. Then click Browse and click Blank Labels wherever you saved it. This procedure greatly shortens the Mail Merge process and lets you get on to more exciting things, such as stuffing envelopes.

CREATING A LABEL TEMPLATE, SORT OF

Anyone who's ever tried a mail merge between Outlook and Word knows it takes a lot of steps (too many for this tip space!). If you print labels frequently, you can reduce your work by saving a blank label document and using it repreatedly. When you've finished creating your labels, press Alt+Tab a few times until you see a document that looks like this:

<<Full_Name>><<Mailing_Address>>

and so on. Save that document and name it something you'll remember, such as Blank Labels. The next time you decide to create labels, click the Existing document check box in the Mail Merge Contacts dialog box. Then click Browse and click Blank Labels wherever you saved it. That eliminates approximately steps 7 through 12 of the Mail Merge process and lets you get on to more exciting things, such as stuffing envelopes.

GOOD SUBJECT LINES

Devising a good subject line adds up to more than simply coming up with a word or phrase that catches the eye. Sure, you want the recipient to read your message, but you probably want the recipient to be able to associate messages with the actual communication you're delivering. Remember that recipients may receive hundreds of e-mail messages, and it's important for them to be able to locate specific messages based on the topic. For example, when corresponding with your attorney, you would probably want to include a reference to a specific case in the subject line. This clue can help the lawyer to quickly see which of your messages concerned your lawsuit against the orchard owner who sold you an apple that contained a worm and which of your messages were related to redoing your will.

EMERGENCY SETUP LIST

After you've signed up with an ISP (Internet Service Provider), you need to set up Outlook to send and receive e-mail from your account. You need to set up your Internet e-mail account only once; however, in case your computer ever crashes so completely that it loses all that info, it's probably a good idea to jot down everything you need for setting up your account and keep it handy in a desk drawer or file.

Of course, if you're on your own, you should probably call your ISP's tech support line to get all the proper spellings of the server names and so on. Here are the basics you want to write down:

Your e-mail address (such as name@isp.com)
Your password (if your ISP requires one, as it most likely does)
Type of server your e-mail provider requires (most likely POP3)
Name of your incoming e-mail server (ask your ISP, but often mail.ispname.com)
Name of your outgoing e-mail server (ask your ISP, but often smtp.ispname.com)
Name of the news server (such as news.ispname.com)

DEALING WITH MULTIPLE MAIL ACCOUNTS

It's possible to exchange e-mail through more than one e-mail address with Outlook. You may have different e-mail addresses for business use and personal use. All you have to do if you want more than one address is to set up a separate account (follow your ISP's instructions for that) for each address.

Normally, Outlook sends replies to e-mail messages through the account from which you received the message, so you don't really have to think about which account you're using. When you're creating a message from scratch, though, Outlook sends the message through the account that you marked as the default account. If you want to check which account a message will be sent through, click the Accounts button on the message form toolbar and look at the box labeled "Send message using."

CONFIRMING A MAIL DELIVERY IN OUTLOOK

You can get Outlook to inform you of the fate of your e-mail message -- when it arrived and when it was read --but there's a catch: Both your e-mail system and your recipient's mail system must support those features or they won't work at all. If you and your recipient are both on the same network using Microsoft Exchange Server, everything should work just fine; otherwise, it's a gamble.

To set these receipt options on your important e-mail messages, follow these steps:

While composing your message, click the Options button on the toolbar.
The Message Options dialog box appears.
In the Voting and Tracking options section, click either Request a delivery receipt for this message or Request a read receipt for this message so that a check mark appears in the checkbox.
The Delivery receipt lets you know for certain that your tax preparer received that last-minute e-mail you sent with vital information. The Read receipt reassures you when she opened it. You could check both, of course, if you're very concerned.

MAIL MERGE FROM OUTLOOK 2002

The Mail Merge tool is an impressive feature of Outlook 2000 and 2002. When you need to send a mass mailing, your Contacts list can provide the names and addresses you want to merge into labels or form letters. When you use the Mail Merge feature in Outlook, Microsoft Word really does all the heavy lifting. Outlook just manages the names and addresses and passes them over to Word. If you're not running any version of Microsoft Word, you won't be able to run a Mail Merge from Outlook. To access the Mail Merge feature, in the Contacts view, choose Tools, Mail Merge. A series of dialog boxes will walk you through the rest of the process.

MORE MAIL MERGE FROM OUTLOOK 2002

When you want to use the Mail Merge feature of Outlook 2000, you probably don't want to send a letter to every person on your Contact list. To limit your list of letters or mailing labels to just a handful of contacts, in Contact view hold down the Ctrl key and click the names of the people you want to include. After you've selected everyone you want, choose Tools, Mail Merge. The Mail Merge tool will create letters or labels only for the people whose names you select.

SAVING MAIL AS TEXT WITH OUTLOOK

Sometimes instead of saving an e-mail message as an e-mail message, you want to save it as a text document to file it with other text and word processing documents.

With Outlook Express, you can save the text of a message in a text file by clicking the message and choosing File, Save As from the menu, clicking in the Save as type box and choosing Text Files (*.txt), typing a filename and clicking the Save button.
With Outlook 98/2000, the File, Save As command allows you to save the message as either a plain Text File (*.txt) or a Rich Text File (*.rtf) that retains the font formatting.

SENDING PRIORITY MAIL

You can change the priority level of an Outlook e-mail message from normal to either high or low. A high priority message doesn't travel any faster than other messages, but Outlook does attach a priority icon to the message that indicates its relative importance to the recipient. Assuming that the recipients of the message are using Outlook or Outlook Express to read their mail, you can hope that they will get around to reading your message faster when they see the priority icon.

The high-priority icon has an exclamation mark in from of the envelope, whereas the low-priority icon has an arrow pointing downward. If you select Normal, no notice is displayed.

To boost or lower the priority of the message, choose View, Options, and under Message Settings choose the priority level from the Importance drop-down list. You can also set priorities by clicking one of the priority buttons on the New Message toolbar (either the red exclamation point or the blue down-pointing arrow).

MEETING AGAIN AND AGAIN WITH OUTLOOK

When you have an appointment that occurs every day, week, or month at the same time, you can enter it once and define how often it occurs. From that point on, Outlook automatically schedules your recurring appointments unless you specifically tell it otherwise. Follow these steps to define a recurring appointment:

Choose Actions, New Recurring Appointment (or press Alt, A, A)
In the Appointment Recurrence dialog box, under the Appointment Time group, click the Start list box and enter the start time for your recurring appointment by clicking the down-pointing arrow until the right time shows up. (Or just type it in.)
Click the End list box and enter the end time for your recurring appointment. (The Duration box should fill itself in automatically.)
Click one of the following options buttons to specify the frequency of the appointment: Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly. Or choose a specific day, such as Tuesday.
In the Range of Recurrence area, click the Start list box and click the date you want to start seeing this appointment on your calendar.
Click one of the Range of Recurrence option buttons to define when you want these appointments to stop showing up: after a certain number of appointments (End after), after a certain end date (End by), or for eternity (No end date).
Click OK. The regular Appointment dialog box appears for you to fill out in the usual way with Subject, Location, Reminder, and so on.
Click the Save and Close button.

Remember: You can turn any existing appointment into a recurring appointment by double-clicking the appointment and clicking the Recurrence button.

CHANGING YOUR MESSAGE FORMAT

To change the format of your outgoing e-mail messages, choose Tools, Options. Click the Mail Format tab and choose from the available options in the drop-down list box or list of radio buttons at the top of the dialog box. Click OK or Cancel to save or not save your changes, respectively, or click Apply to save your changes and go on exploring the other tabs.

SAVING INSTANT MESSAGES

Instant messaging is a relatively new feature that Outlook 2002 supports. Instant messages may seem ephemeral because you can chat back and forth almost like a real conversation, but if you're chatting about something important -- such as your grandson's account of his most recent ball game -- you may want to save a copy of that conversation. With the message window still open, simply select the entire thread of messaging and copy it to another document. Some people might prefer to copy it to a Word document, but if you copy it into an e-mail in Outlook, you may find that format more convenient. For example, you may already have a folder of e-mails that were exchanged on this topic before the conversation culminated in instant messages, so you can just add this one to the rest.

OUTGOING MESSAGE STORAGE

If you use Outlook to send mail to online services, such as the Microsoft Network or CompuServe, or through an Internet service provider (ISP) you reach by using your telephone line, your outgoing messages are stored in the Outbox until you choose Tools, Send/Receive, All Accounts (or press F5) or click the Send/Receive button on the toolbar. Your messages are then dispatched to your online service and sent on to your recipient.

COPYING MESSAGES INTO OTHER DOCUMENTS

To copy some or all of a message to the Windows Clipboard, highlight the part of the message you want to copy, right-click the selection, and choose Copy. Alternatively, you can highlight the selection and press Ctrl+C. You can use your selection in many other kinds of documents, such as Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

To copy the selection, put your cursor in the place you want the text to appear in the other document and press Ctrl+V to paste.

PRINTING A LIST OF MESSAGES

You can print a list of messages while viewing the contents of your Inbox, Outbox, Sent Items folder, or any mail folder you create. Follow these steps while viewing the list you want to print:

Choose File-->Print (or press Ctrl+P) to open the Print dialog box.
Select Table Style from the Print Style list.
Choose other print options, such as the number of copies and which pages to print.
Click OK. Your messages are then printed.

Outlook prints whatever message titles appear in the information viewer when you call up the Print command. If you're in Unread Messages view, for example, only the unread messages are printed. To print your entire list of messages, you have to switch to a view, such as Messages view, that includes all your messages.

MARKING OUTLOOK MESSAGES AS "UNREAD"

In Outlook, you can unread messages that you've read -- sort of. At least, you can mark them as unread, so they look as unopened as the day they arrived in your Inbox. You may want to take advantage of this feature, for example, if you don't have time to deal with the message the first time you glance at it and you want to be reminded to read it again later when you can address the content properly.

Follow these steps to turn back the hands of time and mark a message as Unread:

Click the title of the message you want to un-open.
This step highlights the message.
Choose Edit, Mark as Unread (or press Ctrl + Q).

To leap forward in time -- for example, to pretend you've read every boring memo your boss sent this morning when you haven't actually had time -- you can mark a message as read without opening it. Simply click the message and choose Edit, Mark as Read (or press Alt + E, N).

SAVING MESSAGES AS TEXT FILES

To save an e-mail message outside of Outlook as a regular text file, choose File, Save As from the menu. Navigate to the disk folder you want to save the file to and then click the Save button. The filename defaults to the message subject, and the .txt extension is selected by default. You can change either one, of course.

USING MSN MESSENGER WITH OUTLOOK 2002

Looking for the best reason to upgrade to Outlook 2002? How about instant messaging capabilities?

With Outlook 2002, whenever you open an e-mail message (even if you're just previewing it), you see a little message informing you whether the sender is online and thus available to receive an instant message. If you want to chat right away, you can start an MSN Messenger session. You set up this feature by following these steps:

Select Tools, Options.
In the Options dialog box, click the Other tab.
Select "Enable Instant Messaging in Outlook."
Click OK.

CHANGING YOUR NAME

If you have more than one e-mail account, you may not intuitively recognize each one by its proper name. Rather than trying to remember the difference between jdoe1345@isp.com and jdough987@isptoo.com, you can rename these accounts something like My Business Account and The Silly Walkers Club.

Follow these steps to change an account name:

Choose Tools, Accounts.
Select the View or change existing e-mail accounts option, and then click Next.
In the account list, select the account you want to rename by clicking it.
Click the Change button.
Click More Settings.
Type a new name for the account in the text box.

Go for something memorable this time.

WRITE A QUICK NOTE

Nothing is easier to use than those yellow sticky notes, which is probably why you see them everywhere. Outlook notes are just as easy to use -- but they won't accidentally get stuck to something else, lose their stickiness, or get lost.

If you can click a mouse, you can create a new note:

If you're not already in the Notes module, click the Notes icon on the Outlook bar.
Click the New icon on the toolbar (or press Ctrl+N). A blank note appears.
Enter what you want to say in your note.
Press Esc to close and save the note.

Your new note takes its place in the collection of notes in the Notes module. Creating a note doesn't involve a lot of fuss; just open, type, and close.

To create a note quickly, you don't even have to switch to the Notes module. Just press Ctrl+Shift+N from any other part of Outlook.

Note: This tip applies only to the full versions of Microsoft Outlook; it does not apply to Outlook Express.

TAKE NOTE!

To create a new note:

If you're not already in the Notes module, click the Notes icon on the Outlook bar.
Click the New icon on the toolbar (or press Ctrl + N). A blank note appears.
Enter what you want to say in your note.
Press Esc to close and save the note.

Your new note takes its place in the collection of notes in the Notes module. Creating a note doesn't involve a lot of fuss; just open, type, and close.

To create a note really quickly, you don't even have to switch to the Notes module. Just press Ctrl + Shift + N from any other part of Outlook.

PICKING YOUR NOTES

When you're sorting your notes, one way to work a little faster is to select several notes simultaneously. If you want to select a group of notes that you can see one right after another in a list, click the first one and then hold down the Shift key while clicking the last one. That action selects both the notes that you clicked and all the notes in between.

If you're selecting several notes that aren't next to one another in a list, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking each item. The notes that you click are highlighted and the others stay plain. Then you can open, move, delete, or categorize an entire group of notes that you selected in a single stroke. To view several notes, right-click any notes you've selected and choose Open.

PRINTING YELLOW STICKY NOTES

Sometimes one of those little yellow notes you slapped down somewhere in Outlook contains something important that you want to print, just in case you don't trust that your computer's hard drive saves your data indefinitely. To print a note, follow these steps:

Click the Outlook Shortcuts button in the Outlook Bar.
If the Outlook Bar is not visible, choose View, Outlook Bar.
Click the Notes icon in the Outlook Bar.
The Notes window appears.
Click the note that you want to print.
Choose File, Print (or press Ctrl + P).
A Print dialog box appears.
Click OK.

Just remember the note content will print on whatever paper you have loaded in your printer; it will not print on little yellow sticky paper unless you have a very special printer indeed.

RESIZING NOTES IN OUTLOOK

A note in Outlook (one of those "sticky" yellow squares) can appear as a teensy little squib, or it can cover your screen. The size of the text in the note is the same no matter how large you make the note. When the note is too small, however, much of your text is invisible, so you have to make the note larger:

Click the Notes icon on the Outlook bar, if you're not already in the Notes module.
Double-click the title of the note whose size you want to change. The note opens.
Move your mouse pointer to the bottom-left corner of the note until the pointer changes into a two-headed diagonal arrow.
Drag your mouse until the note is the size you want it.

In most Windows programs, after you enter more text than will fit in a text box, the scroll bar appears on the right side of the screen. Because notes don't have scroll bars, however, if a note has more text than you can see on the screen, you have to click your mouse on the text and press the arrow keys to scroll up and down through the text. Weird, eh?

NOTING SOMETHING IN OUTLOOK

There are at least three ways to create a note in Outlook:

Click the Notes icon in the Outlook Bar, and then click the New Note button: When you go to the Notes module first, you can see your note appear on the list of notes when you finish. Otherwise, your note seems to disappear into thin air (but it doesn't). Outlook automatically puts your note in the Notes module unless you make a special effort to send it someplace else.
Choose File, New, Note: The blank Note box appears, and you type what you want to note. Then click Close.
Press Ctrl + Shift + N: This is the quickest way to make a note appear in any Outlook module. You don't see your note listed in other modules, but you can jot down your thought quickly.

You can leave a note (or more than one note) open for a long time and keep switching to it on the Windows task bar to add comments. You can even have an e-mail message and a note open at the same time and drag text from one to another.

SYNCHRONIZING OUTLOOK EXPRESS MAIL ACCOUNTS

Most e-mail accounts provided by Internet service providers (ISPs) automatically delete your e-mail messages from the mail server when you receive the mail to your Inbox. If you use only one computer to access your e-mail, this arrangement works fine. But what if you want to access your e-mail from two or more computers? For example, suppose you want to access e-mail at work and at home. If you do, some of your messages may wind up in the Inbox on your office computer, while other messages may be in the Inbox of your home computer. Neither computer contains all the messages that you've received.

If you access mail from two or more computers, you may want to consider setting up a special type of e-mail account called an Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) account. IMAP mail accounts do not automatically delete messages from the server whenever you download mail to your Inbox. Instead, IMAP accounts keep copies of downloaded messages and enable you to synchronize the Inbox on each computer you use to access your e-mail. To synchronize your e-mail account, choose Tools, Synchronize All.

Unfortunately, not all ISPs offer IMAP accounts. You have to ask your ISP if it can set up an IMAP account for you.

ADDING LINKS TO E-MAIL MESSAGES IN OUTLOOK

All Microsoft Office programs automatically recognize the addresses of items on the Internet. If you type the name of a Web page, such as http://www.pcstudio.com, Outlook changes the text color to blue and underlines the address, making it look just like the hypertext you click to jump between different pages on the World Wide Web. That makes it easy to send someone information about an exciting Web site; just type or copy the address into your message. If the recipient is also an Outlook user, he or she can just click the text to make the Web browser pop up and open the page you told that user about.

POPPING A MESSAGE IN INTERNET EXPLORER

If you're working in Internet Explorer and you want to send some quick e-mail without starting up Outlook, just click the Mail button in the toolbar (looks like an envelope with a sheet of paper in the background) and choose New Messages from the pop-up menu that appears. This command takes you straight to a New Message window, where you can compose and deliver your message without opening up all of Outlook.

VERIFYING DELIVERY OF A VITAL MESSAGE

You can get Outlook to inform you of the fate of your e-mail message -- when it arrived and when it was read -- but there's a catch: Both your e-mail system and your recipient's mail system must support those features or they won't work at all. If you and your recipient are both on the same network using Microsoft Exchange Server, everything should work just fine; otherwise, it's a gamble.

To set these receipt options on your important e-mail messages, follow these steps:

While composing your message, click the Options button on the toolbar.
The Message Options dialog box appears.
In the Voting and Tracking options section, click either Request a delivery receipt for this message or Request a read receipt for this message so that a check mark appears in the checkbox.

The Delivery receipt lets you know for certain sure that your tax preparer received that last-minute e-mail you sent with vital information. The Read receipt reassures you when she opened it. You could check both, of course, if you're really really concerned.

VERIFYING DELIVERIES OF ALL MESSAGES

Maybe you're never sure anyone ever really gets your e-mails or reads them (and maybe you want to talk to someone about your paranoia). Or maybe your job as a corporate spy requires you to track delivery of every message you send out. With Outlook, you can get a delivery and/or read receipt on every single message you send automatically! (Remember that this feature only works if the recipient's e-mail program can also handle receipts.) Just follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options.
On the Preferences tab of the Options dialog box, click the E-mail Options button.
In the E-mail Options dialog box, click the Tracking Options button.
Under the section that starts For all messages I send, request . . . , put a checkmark in front of the Read receipt or Delivery receipt option by clicking the desired checkbox.

If for some reason you grow weary of receiving endless receipts for everything you send out in Outlook, just go back to this dialog box and uncheck those boxes. You won't even receive an I told you so message from us.

PRINTING MESSAGES ASAP

You can print the text of a message you're reading in Outlook by clicking the Print button on the toolbar. The Print button sends your message directly to the printer without opening a Print dialog box to offer you some choices about how many copies you need or what kind of paper to print on or which printer to use (if you're using a network with more than one printer). To see your range of choices before you print, choose File, Print (or press Ctrl+P). The principles of printing are the same in all Outlook modules.

SKIMMING MESSAGES IN OUTLOOK

If you have the Preview pane visible in any version of Outlook, here's a handy shortcut for skimming your messages. Instead of using the mouse to click up and down the list, press (Ctrl + greater than symbol) to read the next message or press (Ctrl + less than symbol) to read the previous message. This shortcut works even if you already have a message open.

PRINTING AN INDEX OF NOTES

If you create a lot of little electronic sticky notes, you may find yourself losing track of them all. You can use Outlook to print a list of your notes:

Click the Notes icon in the Outlook Bar. The Notes list appears.
Choose File, Print or press Ctrl+P. The Print dialog box appears.
In the Print Style box, choose Table Style. If you choose Memo Style, you print the contents of a note rather than a list of notes.
Click OK.

PARAPHRASING TO SHORTEN E-MAIL

When you forward a really long message and only part of it is relevant, you should, as a courtesy to your reader, cut it down to the interesting bits. People pay much more attention to a concise message than they do to 12 pages of quoted stuff followed by a two-line question. Sometimes it's easy enough to edit material down to a line or two without altering the original's meaning. Other times you may be tempted to paraphrase the information to save everyone time. However, realize that if you do it badly and someone takes offense, you may be in for a round of accusations and apologies that will wipe out whatever time you tried to save.

A HOW-TO ON SENDING OFFICE FILES

One of the handiest features of Office XP is that you don't have to open Outlook to send something via e-mail. If you happen to be in Word (or another Office program) and decide you want to e-mail that document to someone, you can send it right from there as an attachment or as the body of an e-mail message.

NEW FOR OUTLOOK 2002: MSN INSTANT MESSAGING

One key reason you may want to upgrade to Outlook 2002 is to take advantage of the new MSN Instant Messaging feature. If you open e-mail from another MSN Messenger user, Outlook notifies you -- by displaying a message across the top of the e-mail you're reading -- when the other person is online so that you can choose to send an Instant Message in reply. After you get the hang of it, this method of online communication sure beats playing e-mail tag!

LIMITS TO FILTERING NEWSGROUP MESSAGES

One of the biggest problems you're likely to encounter in newsgroups is that many newsgroup messages don't really apply to the newsgroup topic. You may find messages that are promoting get-rich-quick schemes, advertisements for Web sites offering pornographic content, bogus stock market advice, and many other off-topic messages. This situation makes it difficult to sort through and find the message that you really want to read.

The Outlook Newsreader provides you with several ways to filter newsgroup messages. You can create a quick filter that simply deletes messages from specified people. You can also create a more complex filter that processes newsgroup messages based on content. However, be aware that no rule you can create for filtering newsgroup messages can possibly be 100 percent effective in blocking every message that you may find offensive. Use common sense and realize that if you are truly offended by messages in certain newsgroups, you may be better off avoiding those newsgroups entirely.

SUBSCRIBING TO NEWSGROUPS

Outlook actually uses the Outlook Express Newsgroup Reader to provide you with access to newsgroups. You won't really notice too much difference, except that you'll have a second program running alongside Outlook.

Just as you must specify which mail server Outlook should access to send and receive e-mail messages, you need to specify which news server to access for newsgroups. Your ISP will provide this information. The server you want will be called either the news server or the NNTP server -- these two are the same thing.

Subscribing to newsgroups offers you one big advantage -- you don't have to search through thousands of available newsgroups to find your favorites. When you subscribe to a newsgroup, that newsgroup appears on your folder list in the Outlook Newsreader. You can then go directly to that newsgroup by selecting it from the folder list.

SYNCHRONIZING YOUR NEWSGROUPS

If you've found an interesting newsgroup, you probably want to update the message headers for that newsgroup often enough so that you can see what new messages have been posted. You can have the Outlook Newsreader synchronize (update) newsgroups that you've subscribed to automatically:

Click the news server folder in the Outlook Newsreader folder list.
To change the synchronization settings for a newsgroup, select the newsgroup and then click the Settings button.
Choose the method for updating the messages in this newsgroup.
Click the Sync Account Now button to update each of your newsgroup subscriptions according to your selected settings. If you aren't currently connected to the Internet, you may have to respond to prompts to connect.

NEWSREADING AT THE OFFICE

Many corporations don't want their employees browsing Internet newsgroups at the office. Many newsgroups contain nasty things that most companies don't want on their computers, such as pornography and details about some pretty strange philosophies and political groups. Also, out of the fifty-thousand-odd newsgroups on the Internet, relatively few are business-related. For that reason, your system administrators may have removed Outlook Express from your computer at the office.

However, if you're on a corporate network that runs Exchange Server, and your employer wants you to read any of the handfuls of business-related Internet newsgroups, your administrators can make an Internet newsgroup show up as an Exchange Public Folder. It's worth asking.

NIFTY NOTE COLORING

Sticky notes in Outlook let you jot down ideas as they occur to you. But you may want to distinguish one kind of brilliant insight from another. You can color-code your notes in Outlook by right-clicking on a note, then choosing Color, and then selecting the color that you want, such as Blue (for business thoughts) or Green (for grocery lists).

Later, you can sort your colored notes into groups by choosing View, Current View, and then selecting the By Color option.

CHANGING THE SIZE OF A NOTE

When viewing a note, you can change the size of the note. This is useful when the note is too small to display all the text. Position the mouse over the bottom right corner of the note. The arrow changes to a double-headed arrow. Drag the corner of the note until the note is the size you want. You can also use this technique with message windows that are not maximized.

A PASTE IN TIME SAVES TYPOS

When composing an Outlook message, keep in mind that you can insert text directly into the body of your e-mail message from other documents via the Clipboard by using ye olde Cut, Copy, and Paste commands (Ctrl + X, Ctrl + C, and Ctrl + V, respectively). Even if you're a fast typist, this habit can prevent unseemly errors from creeping into your e-mail messages.

MAKING OUTLOOK WORK WITH POWERPOINT

If you're making a PowerPoint presentation at a meeting, you may need to make a note to do something as a result of the meeting. You can use the PowerPoint Meeting Minder feature to enter items on your Outlook task list without leaving your PowerPoint presentation.

To enter items by using the PowerPoint Meeting Minder feature, follow these steps:

In PowerPoint, choose Tools, Meeting Minder to open the Meeting Minder dialog box.
Click the Action Items tab.
Fill in the appropriate information in the Description, Assigned To, and Due Date boxes.
Click Add to make each item appear on the list of Action Items.
After your list is complete, click the Export button to open the Meeting Minder Export dialog box.
Click the check box that says Post Action Items to Microsoft Outlook.
Click Export Now to export action items to your task list.

The dialog boxes disappear, and you return to your PowerPoint presentation. Later, when you check your task list, you see listed there the action items you exported.

PREVIEW PANE VERSUS AUTOPREVIEW

The difference between looking at messages in the Preview Pane and looking at them in AutoPreview mode (where the first few lines appear below the subject in your Inbox) is that you can see graphics and formatting in the Preview Pane, but you can only see the text of a message in the AutoPreview mode. If your friends send you messages using Outlook Stationery, for example, you can appreciate their graphic genius by viewing their messages in the Preview Pane. But if all you want is to cut to the chase and determine whether a message is worth opening, AutoPreview could do the trick.

RESELECTING A PRINTER

Whenever you change printers -- such as when you send a fax -- the new printer will generally remain selected. The next time you attempt to print an Outlook message or other document, you may discover that your computer will try to initiate another fax. It's always a good idea to check your printer selection after you've sent a fax and reselect your standard printer if necessary.

PRINTING TASKS AND APPOINTMENTS SIMULTANEOUSLY

If you like the Calendar views in Outlook in which you can see tasks and appointments at the same time, you may want to try a special Print Style called Trifold. In the left column, you get the day's appointments, hour by hour; in the center column, the TaskPad lists all your active tasks; in the right column, you can see that week's worth of calendar appointments. Here's how to print your calendar this way:

Click a date or select a range of dates you want to print.
To print a range of dates, click the first date and then hold the Shift key and click the last date of the range. The Trifold Print Style will print one page for every date in the range.
Choose File, Print (or press Ctrl+P).
The Print dialog box appears.
In the Print Style group, choose Trifold.
In the Print Range box, set the range of dates you want to print.
Because you began by clicking a particular range, it should already be correct, but if it isn't for some reason, change the range to the dates you want to print.
Click OK.

Your dates are sent to the printer.

SETTING RECEIPT OPTIONS IN OUTLOOK

You can get Outlook 2002 to inform you of the fate of your e-mail message -- when it arrived and when it was read -- but there's a catch: Both your e-mail system and your recipient's mail system must support those features or they won't work at all. If you and your recipient are both on the same network using Microsoft Exchange Server, everything should work just fine; otherwise, it's a gamble.

To set these receipt options on your important e-mail messages, follow these steps:

While composing your message, click the Options button on the toolbar.
The Message Options dialog box appears.
In the Voting and Tracking options section, click either Request a delivery receipt for this message or Request a read receipt for this message so that a check mark appears in the checkbox.

The Delivery receipt lets you know for certain that your tax preparer received that last-minute e-mail you sent with vital information. The Read receipt reassures you when she opened it. You could check both, of course, if you're very concerned.

ACTIVATING THE AUTOMATIC RECORDING FEATURE

You have to tell the Journal to start recording everything, but fortunately, you only have to tell it once. To activate the Journal's automatic recording feature, follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options.
Click the Journal Options button to open the Journal Options dialog box.
Click to place a check box for the items and files you want to record automatically and for the contacts about whom you want the information recorded.
Click OK.

One peculiarity about the Journal is that you can't blithely check off a box that says, "Record everything about all my contacts." You must check off every contact's name in the Journal Options dialog box. Alternatively, you can check the Automatically Record Journal Entries for This Contact check box on the Journal tab of the Contact form when you create each new contact entry.

STOP SEEING RED

When a task becomes overdue, Outlook changes the color of the task from the normal black to an alarming red to get your attention. Each task you've finished becomes gray with a line through it. If you prefer another way to display overdue and completed tasks, you can change it.

To change the color of overdue and completed tasks, follow these steps:

Choose Tools, Options to open the Options dialog box.
Click the Task Options button.
Click the scroll-down button at the right end of the Overdue Tasks box to see your choice of colors.
Choose a color for overdue tasks by clicking the color you want to use.
Click the scroll-down button at the right end of the Completed Tasks box to see your choice of colors.
Choose a color for completed tasks.
Click OK.

The Options dialog box disappears, and your tasks appear in Ocean Blue or Marvelous Magenta (or whatever you choose).

KEEP THOSE REMINDERS COMING

If you're using reminders for all your important appointments, you must have Outlook running so that the reminder pops up at the appropriate time. You can keep Outlook running in the background (minimized) even if you start a second program such as Microsoft Word. When the reminder time arrives, you see either a dialog box or a message from the Office Assistant.

AUTOMATICALLY ADDING YOUR NAME TO A REPLY IN OUTLOOK

When you reply to a message, it sometimes helps to include parts of the message that you're replying to, so the person knows exactly which bit you're commenting on. The trick is, how will the reader know which comments are his or hers and which are yours?

Outlook allows you to preface your comments with your name (or any text you choose). To tag your replies with your name:

Choose Tools, Options (or press Alt, T, O).
The Options dialog box appears.
Click the E-mail Options button (or press M).
The E-mail Options dialog box appears.
Click the Mark My Comments With check box (or press M) so that a check mark appears.
In the Mark My Comments With text box, type the text that you want to accompany your annotations. (Your best bet here is your name; anything else can get confusing.)
Click OK.

You can now select and delete text from the original message and stick in comments tagged with your name wherever you please.

REPLY VERSUS REPLY TO ALL

Clicking the Reply button directs your response to the sender of the message. Reply to All, however, sends your message to the sender as well as everyone who received the original message. Sometimes you will even receive a copy of your own reply if you use Reply to All. You can manually delete your name from the To: line to avoid receiving this copy if you like.

OBEYING THE RULES WIZARD

In life, following rules can be a real pain; with Outlook, however, you're calling the shots and rules can be a real time-saver. The rules feature lets you make Outlook act on certain kinds of e-mail messages automatically. You can set up rules in Outlook to automatically sort your incoming mail into different folders to save yourself some time.

Let the Rules Wizard lead you step-by-step to create a rule:

1. From your Inbox, choose Tools, Rules Wizard. The Rules Wizard dialog box appears.

2. Click the New button, and a dialog box for creating new rules appears. The dialog box contains a list of the types of rules you can create. For this example, choose "Move new messages from someone."

3. The words "Apply this rule after the message arrives from [people or distribution list] move it to the [specified] folder" appear in the Rule Description box at the bottom of the dialog box. Click the first underlined phrase, "people or distribution list."

4. The Rules Address dialog box appears. Double-click the name of each person whose messages you want to move to a new folder. Click OK when you're finished.

5. Next, click the second piece of underlined text in the Rule Description box, "specified." Another dialog box opens. Double-click the name of the folder to which you want to move messages.

6. Look at the Rule Description box. The sentence for your rule should now list the appropriate people and the folder that you have chosen. Click Finish to return to the Rules Wizard. Check the box next to your rule to turn it on (or off), and click OK.

SAVING FOR A RAINY DAY

Outlook normally saves all sent messages in your Sent Items folder, but you can turn off this option if you don't need to keep copies of everything you send out. But then suppose you are suddenly put in charge of an important project and need to turn this feature back on again? Follow these steps to file your sent messages automatically:

Choose Tools, Options to open the Options dialog box.
Click the E-Mail Options button.
Click the Save Copies of Messages in Sent Items Folder option so that a check mark appears in the check box.
Click OK to close the Options dialog box.

It can be extremely handy to have copies of your sent messages available when your boss asks you for a copy of that urgent e-mail you sent last week that she accidentally deleted. Or just use them for record keeping and making sure that you actually remembered to send that urgent message last week.

SCAM OR TREAT?

You have no doubt received forwarded e-mails from friends that pass along jokes and positive thoughts and so on. But you probably receive an equal number of forwarded e-mails that perpetuate ridiculous urban legends and even money scams. If you get an e-mail that seems suspicious, check it out against the Internet ScamBusters [ http://www.scambusters.org ] Web site, a reliable source for debunking e-mail chain letters and other Internet scams. If you have any e-mail buddies that regularly forward you such nonsense, you may want to gently direct them to this site, as well.

SENDING IN SHORT ORDER

Check the shortcut for this:

If you use Outlook to send mail to online services, such as the Microsoft Network or CompuServe, or through an Internet service provider (ISP) you reach by using your telephone line, your outgoing messages are stored in the Outbox until you choose Tools, Send/Receive, All Accounts (or press Alt+S) or click the Send/Receive button on the toolbar. Your messages are then dispatched to your online service and sent on to your recipient.

KEYBOARDING SHORTCUTS

Here are some Outlook shortcut keystrokes that can relieve your weary mouse-wielding hand. Try these ways to keep your fingers on the keys while you're fooling around in the main Outlook window:

F5: checks for incoming messages on the server
Ctrl + Shift + F: searches for a message (opens the Find dialog box)
Ctrl + O: opens the selected message
Ctrl + P: prints the selected message
Ctrl + D: deletes the selected message

SIGNED, SEALED, DELIVERED?

The fact that you clicked Send on your outgoing message doesn't automatically mean that your message was sent. People who use Outlook (or Outlook Express) at home normally connect to the Internet via the telephone line. Each time you send messages, your computer needs to make a phone call to your Internet Service Provider so that Outlook can drop off the messages you've created and pick up the messages that others have sent to you. So, some time after you've created a batch of messages, you need to choose Tools, Send/Receive (or press F5) to tell Outlook to dial up your ISP and actually send the messages out if you're using Outlook at home.

HITTING THE SNOOZE BUTTON

Even after you've instructed Outlook to nag you to pieces with flags and reminders, you can always wait just a teeny bit longer by hitting the Snooze button when your flag pops up.

If you're using Outlook 98, click the scroll-down menu that says "Click Snooze to be reminded again" on the Reminder dialog box. If you're using Outlook 2000, click the scroll-down menu that says "Remind me again in."
Choose the length of time by which you want to delay the reminder.
Click the Snooze button (or press Alt + S).

SORTING BY SENDER

When the boss calls and asks, "Did you get the e-mail message about bonuses that I sent you three weeks ago?" you probably don't want to spend a great deal of time sorting through everybody else's messages from the past three weeks. The quickest way to answer the boss's question promptly is to switch to By Sender view. To use the By Sender view:

Choose View, Current View. The list of current views appears.
Choose By Sender view. Your messages appear by sender, alphabetically.

Or just click the Sender column heading, and Outlook resorts your Inbox the same way.

SPELCHEK BEFORE SENDING

If you have Microsoft Office or any of its programs (Word, Excel, or PowerPoint), Outlook includes a bonus feature: a spell checker that can catch those embarrassing spelling errors before they go out to the Internet. The spell checker checks the spelling of every word in your message, and any misspelling is tactfully brought to your attention.

To spell check your messages, follow these steps:

In the New Message Window, choose Tools, Spelling after you finish composing your message.
Try not to be annoyed if the spell checker finds a spelling error. If it finds an error, it highlights the offending word and displays the misspelled word along with a suggested correction.
Choose the correct spelling, and then click Change or click Ignore to skip to the next word that the spell checker doesn't recognize.
If the correct spelling doesn't appear in the list, type the correct spelling for the word in the Change To box. Then click Change.
Repeat Steps 2 and 3 until the spell checker gives up. When you see the message "The spelling check is complete," your work is done.

SPRINGING FORWARD IN WINDOWS

For most parts of the United States, Daylight Savings Time begins Sunday (except in Indiana -- center of the known universe -- and Arizona), so don't forget to set your clocks ahead an hour. Remember, too, that Outlook dates its messages based on that little clock ticking away in the corner of your Windows screen. If you need to reset the clock on your computer or if you're not sure your computer is set for the correct time zone to enable Windows to calculate the change on your behalf, follow these steps:

Click the Start button and choose Settings, Control Panel, Date/Time.
The Date/Time Properties dialog box appears. You can also just double-click the time in the lower right corner of your screen.
Click the Time Zone tab.
Click the downward-pointing arrow next to the currently listed time zone. A long list of countries and locations appears; click the one where you're currently hanging your hat.

REPLYING WITH STYLE IN OUTLOOK

You can control the appearance of your e-mail replies in several reader-friendly ways in Outlook.

To set the format of a reply message:

Choose Tools, Options (or press Alt, T, O). The Options dialog box opens.
Click the E-mail Options button (or press M).
The E-mail Options dialog box appears.
Click the scroll-down button (triangle) at the right end of the When Replying to a Message box.
A menu of options drops down. The Include and Indent Original Message Text is the default option. The diagram to the right of the scroll-down menu illustrates how the message will be laid out when you choose each option.
Choose the style that you prefer to use for replies and click OK.

EFFICACIOUS COLOR-CODING

If your inbox is chronically crammed with incoming messages, it can be daunting to know where to begin reading. Let Outlook help you spot messages from key people at a glance so that you won't miss any important incoming information. Check out your organizational options by clicking the Organize button on the Outlook toolbar.

Select Using Colors to make specific messages stand out by using a contrasting color. You can, for example, have Outlook show all messages that come from your boss in green, all messages from a special customer in red, and all messages from any members of your family in blue. Now, whether there are 5 messages in your inbox or 50, you'll be able to immediately spot the ones that are most important to you.

PUTTING YOUR MESSAGE ON STATIONERY

Stationery is a background image that you can use to make your e-mail messages appear as though they were written on a fancy pad of paper. Some people like the often interesting visual effects, whereas others find that stationery can make messages more difficult to read -- especially if the sender isn't careful to select contrasting background and text colors!

Be careful: Stationery may look pretty, but it increases the file size of your e-mail messages and takes longer for you to upload them and for recipients to download them.

To create a new message using stationery, follow these steps:

Select Actions, New Mail Message Using, More Stationery.
The Select a Stationery dialog box appears.
Scroll down through the stationery choices and double-click the stationery you wish to use.
You'll likely find several stationery choices that display the message Stationery not installed yet. It will be installed when you compose mail. If you wish to choose one of these options, you will need to have your Outlook 2000 CD-ROM available so that your selection can be copied to your hard disk.
If the choices shown in the Select a Stationery dialog box don't quite fit your needs, click the Get More Stationery button to visit the Office 2000 Web site.
There you'll find additional stationery options that you can download.
Click the OK button to close the dialog box and to begin creating a new message using your selected stationery.

Tip: Make certain the text of your message stands out -- especially if the stationery you choose uses a dark background. You may need to change the text color and size to make sure your message is readable.

TAKING OUTLOOK TO TASK

Most of the time, you need only a word or two to jog your memory about a task, something like Call Mom. You don't need much detailed information about how to do that, so you jot it down in the Outlook TaskPad to the side of your Calendar.

But suppose that you need to enter more information about your task, such as driving directions, or you want to have Outlook remind you just before the task is due. There's no limit to the information you can add to a task if you go the slow, complete way. To open the full New Task form, follow these steps:

Click the Tasks icon on the Outlook bar to switch to the Tasks module if you're not already there.
Click the New Task button on the toolbar (or press Ctrl+N) to open a new form.

You can also double-click the TaskPad in the Calendar view to open this form, or press Ctrl+Shift+K from any other Outlook module.

Now you can fill out as many details and miscellaneous notes about this task as you like: due date, status, priority, category, and so on.

TASKING AND SCHEDULING SIMULTANEOUSLY

An Outlook feature you may not fully appreciate -- unless you've ever tried another task management program without it -- is the ability to view your task list and calendar at the same time. If you choose Calendar view and then choose Outlook Today, Day, Work Week, or Week view, your task list appears on the right side of the screen. From any of these views, you can check off completed tasks just by clicking in each task's check box.

BECOMING YOUR OWN TASKMASTER

To help you organize your tasks, Outlook 2000 can store tasks according to different categories, such as Business tasks or Key Customer tasks. To assign a task to a category, follow these steps:

Click the task that you want to assign to a category.
Choose Edit, Categories. The Categories dialog box appears.
Click the check box for each category that your task belongs in. The Contact dialog box appears again.
Click OK.

MANAGING RECURRING TASKS

Lots of tasks crop up on a regular basis. You know how it goes -- same stuff, new day. To save you the effort of entering a task, such as a monthly sales report or a quarterly tax payment over and over again, just set it up as a recurring task. Outlook can then remind you whenever it's that time again.

To create a recurring task, follow these steps:

Open the task by double-clicking it.
Click the Recurrence button in the Task Form toolbar (or press Ctrl+G).
The Task Recurrence dialog box appears.
Choose the Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Yearly option to specify how often the appointment occurs.
Each choice you make -- Daily, Weekly, or Monthly -- changes the types of exact choices available for when the task recurs. For example, a daily recurring task can be set to recur every day or every five days or whatever. A monthly recurring task can be set to recur on a certain day of the month, such as the 15th of each month, or on the second Friday of every month.
In the next box to the right, specify how often the appointment occurs, such as every third day or the first Monday of each month.
If you choose to create a monthly task, for example, you can click the scroll-down buttons (triangles) to choose "First" then "Monday" to schedule a task on the first Monday of each month.
In the Range of Recurrence box, enter the first occurrence in the Start box.
Choose when you want the appointments to stop (no end date, after a certain number of occurrences, or at a certain date).
Click OK.
A banner appears at the top of the Task form describing the recurrence pattern of the task.
Click Save and Close.

Your task appears in the list of tasks once, but it has a different type of icon than nonrecurring tasks so that you can tell at a glance that it's a recurring task.

COLOR-CODING OVERDUE TASKS IN OUTLOOK

When you complete a task or when it becomes overdue (oh, yes, those New Year's resolutions), Outlook changes the color of the text for the completed tasks to gray and overdue tasks to red, which makes it easy for you to tell at a glance which tasks are done and which tasks loom ahead, undone. If you don't like that color scheme, however, you can change it by following these steps:

Choose Tools, Options (or press Alt, T, O).
The Options dialog box appears.
Click the Task Options button (Alt, T).
The Task Options dialog box appears.
Click the scroll-down triangle at the right end of the Overdue Tasks box (Alt, O) or the Completed Tasks box (Alt, C).
A list of colors drops down.
Choose a new color for overdue tasks -- or completed tasks.
Green is so much less strident than red, don't you think?
Click OK.

CLONING REGENERATING TASKS IN OUTLOOK

A regenerating task in Outlook is like a recurring task (one that shows up on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis) except that it recurs only when a certain amount of time passes after the last time you completed the task. Suppose you mow the lawn every two weeks. If it rains for a week, and one mowing happens a week later than usual, you still want to wait two weeks before the next one. To create such a regenerating task, follow these steps:

Open the task by double-clicking it.
The Task form appears.
Click the Recurrence button in the toolbar in the Task form (or press Ctrl + G).
The Task Recurrence dialog box opens.
Click Regenerate New Task.
Enter the number of weeks between regenerating each task.
Click OK.
A banner appears in the Task form describing the regeneration pattern.
Click Save and Close.
Your task appears in the list of tasks only once, but it has a different type of icon than nonrecurring tasks so that you can tell at a glance it's the regenerating type.

Remember, a regenerating task does not show up again until you mark the first instance completed. Also remember that a regenerating task does not make your grass grow -- it only reminds you that lawn mowing is never-ending.

TEN WAYS TO VIEW YOUR TASKS

To-do lists are highly personalized time-management tools, and Outlook 2002 enables you to view your Task list in at least ten different ways to accommodate your personal style.

THE OUTLOOK TIME MACHINE

Follow these steps to turn back the hands of time and mark a message as Unread:

Click the title of the message you want to un-open. This step highlights the message.
Choose Edit, Mark as Unread (or press Ctrl + Q).

ADVANCING TO THE ADVANCED TOOLBAR

Even if you don't use the Advanced toolbars much in other Office programs, you may want to keep the Advanced toolbar on your screen in Outlook. (Choose View, Toolbars, Advanced.) Its buttons offer one-click access to many commonly used menu commands, as well as to some functions that aren't on the menus at all. For example, in addition to the Undo button and a button for the Group By dialog box, you find several folder navigation buttons.

Once you've switched to at least one other folder besides the one you started in, you can use the Back and Forward arrow buttons on the Advanced toolbar to retrace your steps in either direction, just as you would among Web pages you've visited in your browser. The Back button is a split button so that you see a little downward-pointing arrow on a narrow bar between the Back and Forward arrows. Clicking on that narrow bar produces a little menu of the folders you've previously visited, enabling you to select the one you want to return to.

OUTLOOK LEFT OUT OF TWO-SIDED SETUPS

Some people like to print their schedules and keep them in a binder to look just like one of those old-fashioned planner books. (Perhaps they're just sentimental for the good ol' paper-and-pencil days.) The only problem with that is that Outlook doesn't know how to reorganize printed pages according to whether the page is on the left side or the right side of the book when you look at it. This is a very small quibble, but if it's important to you, sorry, you'll have to live with one-sided printing.

TYPING SHORTCUTS

Here are some Outlook shortcut keystrokes that can save you time as you're typing a new message. When you're focused on typing, it can be annoying to keep reaching for the mouse. So try these tips to keep your fingers on the keys:

Ctrl + Shift + B opens the address book
Ctrl + N creates a new message
Alt + Enter displays message properties
F7 checks spelling
Ctrl + Enter sends the message
Esc closes the window

UNDATING YOUR NOTES

At the bottom of each note, Outlook displays the date and time when you most recently changed the contents of the note. You may start to notice that you change a lot of notes on Mondays around 9:45 a.m. You may not want to notice that fact, so you can turn this handy little feature off. Here's how:

Choose Tools, Options so that the Options dialog box appears.
Click the Other tab.
Click the Advanced Options button so that the Advanced Options dialog box appears.
Click the check box that says, "When viewing Notes, show time and date."
A check mark appears in the check box if you click once, then disappears if you click again. If you don't want to see the time and date display, make sure the box doesn't contain a check mark.
Click OK.

UNDELETING DELETED ITEMS IN OUTLOOK

It's that time of year to begin purging old Outlook items you no longer need. You can delete any Outlook item by dragging the item to the Deleted Items icon on the Outlook bar. However, clicking the item you want to delete and then clicking the Delete button on the toolbar or pressing the Delete key is much easier.

But suppose you goof. You can easily Undelete to bring any items back by dragging them from the Deleted Items folder, as explained in the following steps:

Click the Deleted Items icon on the Outlook bar to open the list of deleted items.
Drag the deleted item you want to restore back to the icon of the module from which the item came (contacts to the Contacts icon or e-mail messages to the Inbox, for example).
After you drag an item from the Deleted Items folder back to the folder from which it came, the item takes its place among the other items in the folder as though it had never been deleted.

INTERMINGLING VERSIONS OF OUTLOOK

If you have Outlook 2000 or 2002, you may also have Outlook Express! Kind of.

Outlook Express is included with Internet Explorer and certain releases of Windows, so if you have regular Outlook, you can tap Outlook Express, too. You can start Outlook Express by choosing View, Go To, News (Alt V, G, S) from the Outlook menu bar. After you start Outlook Express from within Outlook, you see a special version of Outlook Express that only enables you to read and contribute to Internet newsgroups. So the version of Outlook Express that appears when you choose the View, Go To, News command is different from the version that appears when you can click the Outlook Express icon on your desktop.

Don't worry if this situation confuses you: It confuses everybody. And if you use Outlook at work on a network, don't forget that your company may still have disabled access to any version of Outlook Express.

AUTHORIZING OUTLOOK TO VIEW BY AUTHOR

Outlook can help you sort files in many ways. Guess how By Author view groups your files in Outlook. If you're the only person who uses your computer and you don't regularly share files with other people, you really won't get much use out of the By Author view. When you're the only author, you just see all the files in whatever order they happen to be in.

Viewing By Author is most useful when you share files on a network with many other people, in which case questions of authorship may be important. Viewing files By Author is also handy if you consolidate the work of several people; this way, you know at a glance which file came from whom.

To see your files By Author, follow these steps:

Click the My Computer icon in the Outlook Bar.
Double-click the name of a folder, such as My Documents.
If you see only drives, not folders, click one of your drives, such as the C drive, to see the folders on it.
Choose View, Current View, By Author.

A list of your files appears, grouped by author. If you see a plus sign next to a name, click it to see details about the files under that author's name.

SORTING A VIEW IN OUTLOOK

Some Outlook views are organized as simple lists, such as the Phone List view of the Contacts module. But you may not want the list organized alphabetically by name. You may prefer to see the Phone List sorted by company (or some other column). All you have to do to sort on that column is to click once on the title of the column.

You see a little icon with the letters AFZ and an arrow. That tells you that Outlook is sorting the column in alphabetical order. If you only have a few items to sort, the icon may flash by so quickly you don't notice it. When you have a really long list to sort, the icon may stay there several seconds as Outlook sorts your list.

After you sort your list by company, all the contacts line up in order of company name, so you can scroll down to the section of your list where all the people from a certain company are listed.

ADDING VIRUS DETECTION

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, the ides of March, and attachments from unfamiliar sources. It's a good idea to delete any message you receive with an attachment from an unfamiliar source before you even open the message. Attachments may hide a virus that could infect your computer. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn't have any built-in virus protection; however, if you work in an office environment, chances are your system administrator has done his or her darnedest to keep the system safe by installing some antivirus software. If you are concerned about viruses on your home computer (and you should be), purchase, install, and regularly update separate virus protection software. Two good online sources for antivirus programs are McAfee's VirusScan [ http://www.mcafee.com ] or Symantec's Norton AntiVirus [ http://www.symantec.com ].

BROWSING A WEB PAGE WITH OUTLOOK

You can view any page on the Internet without even leaving Outlook, just as you can with your Web browser. In fact, Outlook is connected to a browser, Internet Explorer, so that all the Web pages you added to your list of favorites in Internet Explorer also show up on the Outlook Favorites menu. Just choose Favorites and then click the name of your favorite Web page.

While you're surfing the Web with Outlook, you can add any pages you see to your list of favorites by choosing Favorites, Add to Favorites, just as you can in Internet Explorer. If you do lots of heavy-duty Web browsing, Outlook may not be the best tool for the job because it doesn't have Internet Explorer's elaborate tools for Web browsing, such as History lists and the ability to view a Web page as raw text. But because you can't run Outlook without installing Internet Explorer, you can launch Internet Explorer anytime to take advantage of a more powerful set of browsing tools. Choose View, Go To, Web Browser from the Outlook menu to launch Internet Explorer.

SENDING A WEB PAGE LINK FROM INTERNET EXPLORER

When you come across a really cool Web site that you think your friends or associates should know about, you can send them a link without disrupting your own Web surfing adventure. You can insert a hyperlink to the page in an Outlook message by following these steps:

With the Web page displayed in the browsing area of Internet Explorer 5, choose File, Send, Link by E-mail (or press Alt + F, E, L).
If you get a Choose Profile dialog box, click OK to continue. If you have only one e-mail program, you may skip straight to the next step.
Internet Explorer opens a new Outlook message that contains the title of the current Web page in the subject field and a hyperlink to the Web page in the body of the message. Add the recipient(s) of the message to the To: field and any message text you want.
Click the send button (or press Alt + S) to send the message.

WHO SAID THAT?

When you reply to an e-mail message, Outlook includes in your reply the text of the original message. Including the original text helps the person you're replying to remember what you're talking about. Whenever you mix what you've written with what the other person wrote in the first place, however, the message can get confusing. Outlook gives you the option of automatically inserting your name before everything you add to a reply.

Follow these steps to turn this option on (and off):

Choose Tools, Options to open the Options dialog box.
Click the E-Mail Options button to show the choices available for message replies and forwarded messages.
Click the Mark My Comments With check box.
A check mark appears in the box.
In the Mark My Comments With text box, enter the text you want to accompany your annotations.
Your name is usually a safe bet.
Click OK.