Type a name for your appointment.
3. Press Enter.
If you want to enter more detailed information about your appointment – such as ending time, location, category, and so on – see Chapter 8 for the nitty-gritty on keeping track of all the details in your calendar.
Time management involves more than just entering appointments. If you’re really busy, you want to manage your time by slicing and dicing your list of appointments to see when you’re free to add even more appointments.
✔ Day
✔ Work Week
✔ Week
✔ Month
✔ Schedule
If you need a more elaborate collection of Calendar views, choose one of the views listed under the Change View button on the View tab on the Ribbon. To really master time management, check out Chapter 8 to see the different ways you can view your Outlook calendar.
Adding a Contact
When it’s not what you know but who you know, you need a good tool for keeping track of who’s who. Outlook is a great tool for managing your names and addresses, and it’s just as easy to use as your Little Black Book.
To enter a new contact, follow these steps:
1. Click the Contacts button in the Navigation bar.
2. Click the New Contact icon on the Ribbon.
The New Contact entry form opens.
3. Fill in the blanks on the form.
Figure 1-4 shows an example.
4. Click the Save & Close button.
Presto – you have a Contacts list.
Figure 1-4: Use your Contacts list to keep detailed information about everyone you know.
Outlook’s Contacts feature can be a lot more than your Little Black Book – if you know the ropes. Chapter 7 reveals the secrets of searching, sorting, and grouping the names in your list – and of using email to keep in touch with all the important people in your life.
Entering a Task
Knowing what you need to do isn’t enough; you need to know what to do next. When you’re juggling 1,000 competing demands all at once, you need a tool that shows you at a glance what’s up next so you can keep your work moving forward.
Outlook has several task management tools that help you organize your lengthy to-do list for peak performance. Those tools include the Tasks module, the To-Do list, and the To-Do bar. Chapter 9 describes all of them, but here’s a quick way to get started in a jiffy.
To enter a new task, follow these steps:
1. Click the text that says Type a New Task.
The words disappear, and you see the insertion point (a blinking line).
2. Type the name of your task.
The task you typed appears.
3. Press Enter.
Your new task moves down to the Task list with your other tasks, as shown in Figure 1-5.
Figure 1-5: Entering your task in the Task list.
Outlook can help you manage anything from a simple shopping list to a complex business project. In Chapter 9, I show you how to deal with recurring tasks, how to regenerate tasks, and how to mark tasks as complete – and earn the right to brag about how much you’ve accomplished.
Taking Notes
I have hundreds of little scraps of information I need to keep somewhere, but until Outlook came along, I didn’t have a place to put them. Now all the written flotsam and jetsam go into my Outlook Notes collection – where I can find them all again when I need them.
To create a new note, follow these steps:
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+N.
A blank note opens.
2. Type the text you want to save.
The text you type appears in the note, as shown in Figure 1-6.
3. Press Esc.
The note you created appears in your list of notes.
Figure 1-6: Preserve your prose for posterity in an Outlook note.
After you’re in the habit of using Outlook to organize your life, I’m sure you’ll want to move beyond the basics. That’s what the rest of this book shows you. When you’re ready to share your work with other people, send email like a pro, or just finish your workday by 5 p.m. and get home, you’ll find ways to use Outlook to make your job – and your life – easier to manage.
Chapter 2
Inside Outlook: Getting More Done With Less Effort
In This Chapter
▶ Examining the many faces of Outlook
▶ Choosing menus
▶ Getting the big picture from the Information Viewer
▶ Using the tools of the trade
▶ Fine-tuning with the Folders list
I recently heard that the average office worker now spends 28 percent of each workweek answering email. No wonder times are tough – everybody’s too tied up with email to get anything done! When computers were invented, people thought they’d use them for something much more exciting than email. Oh, well. Welcome to the future – it’s already here and it’s already booked solid.
Fortunately, everyone gets more done now than in the past, partly because of tools like Microsoft Outlook. In fact, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Outlook to get more done every day. But most of those people use a fraction of Outlook’s power, so they work harder than necessary while getting less done. The people I’ve trained find that knowing even a tiny fraction more about what the program can do for them makes their lives easier. Let’s hear it for making your life easier!
Outlook and Other Programs
Outlook is a part of Microsoft Office. It’s called an Office suite, which means it’s a collection of programs that includes everything you need to complete most office tasks. Ideally, the programs in a suite work together, enabling you to create documents you couldn’t create as easily with any of the individual programs. For example, you can copy a chart from a spreadsheet and paste it into a sales letter you’re creating in your word processor.
Microsoft Office includes a group of programs – each of which is designed to address specific sorts of tasks easily but that also work together as