Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 6. Giving Outlook a Productivity Makeover

Everybody can use a makeover from time to time, and Outlook is no exception. Part of using Outlook as your primary productivity tool involves looking at the options for customizing it to the way you work.

This chapter covers a bunch of different ways that you can tailor Outlook to the individual ways you work. Understand, however, that the customizing techniques covered here are only suggestions. If you find that a particular technique suits neither your hardware setup nor the way you use a certain module, by all means ignore it.

The only thing that I'm really keen on having you do when customizing Outlook is to find the screen and option setup that makes you the most comfortable — while at same time, productive — for each of the modules you routinely use (and I hope that eventually includes all of them).

Changing the Outlook Startup Module

As seasoned Outlook users, you're perfectly aware that when you launch the program, Outlook automatically opens the Inbox folder in the Mail module. Of course, if the e-mail that fills your Inbox is your great stumbling block to peak productivity, this arrangement may not be such a good thing. What you may not know is that you can change which folder opens each time you launch Outlook. This means that you can have another folder in the Mail module as your startup folder (say, Outlook Today) or even make another module such as the Calendar or Tasks module your startup default.

Changing the Outlook startup ...