Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 5. Mastering Information Management with Outlook

If you're anything like most of the professionals I work with, Outlook is one of the programs you use the most often, and at the same time, it's possibly the most underutilized application installed on your work computer. This is because, for many, many knowledge workers, Outlook is merely the program that enables them to "do" their e-mail and, at times, look up vital contact information.

More than a few Outlook users aren't even aware that the program is capable of doing anything useful besides sending and receiving e-mail and storing contact information. Because Outlook always starts up with the display of the Inbox, users naturally spend almost all their time in its Mail module, blissfully unaware of its other capabilities. This rather sad situation is about to change, for in this chapter, I expose you to, as they say, the "full Monty" when it comes to Outlook's functionality and interface (look and feel).

The goal of this chapter is for you to see Outlook as a full-featured personal information management program equipped with all the capabilities you need in order to organize, manage, and track electronic personal information on your computer. Note that to meet this goal, you don't need to become fully familiar with all of Outlook's bells and whistles. You simply need to become familiar with the productivity features that each of its modules offers and know how to work with these modules and blend their features so that ...