dinner entirely with a fork, but it’s much easier if you have a fork and a knife. And, of course, you want a spoon for the cranberry sauce. Each program in Microsoft Office specializes in something important: Microsoft Word for documents, Microsoft Excel for calculations, and Microsoft Outlook for communications and organization. It’s easy to use them separately and hugely productive to use them all together.
Until now, Microsoft has sold each program as a packaged, store-bought product you could buy and use for years. They’re changing their approach and encouraging everyone to rent Microsoft Office for a monthly or annual fee as part of a program called Office 365. I’ll have more to say about Office 365 in Chapter 12, but at the moment, Microsoft is offering some packages of Office 365 services that are very economical and worthwhile. Time will tell which approach is better; some people prefer a small monthly fee, whereas others prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a permanent copy. Microsoft clearly believes that software rental is the way of the future, so stay tuned.
About Personal Information Management
When it comes to the basic work of managing names, addresses, appointments, and email, the word processing and spreadsheet programs just don’t get it. If you’re planning a meeting, you need to know with whom you’re meeting, what the other person’s phone number is, and when you can find time to meet.
In designing Outlook, Microsoft took advantage of the fact that many people use Microsoft products for most of the work they do. The company created something called a Personal Information Management (PIM) program that speaks a common language with Microsoft Word, Excel, and the rest of the Microsoft Office suite. Microsoft also studied what kind of information people use most often and tried to make sure Outlook could handle most of it. The program also has scads of customizability – a tongue twister of a buzzword that just means you can set it up however you need – after you know what you’re doing.
Whatever the terminology, Outlook is – above all – easy to understand and hard to mess up. If you’ve used any version of Windows, you can just look at the screen and click a few icons to see what Outlook does. You won’t break anything. If you get lost, going back to where you came from is easy. Even if you have no experience with Windows, Outlook is fairly straightforward to use.
There’s No Place Like Home: Outlook’s Main Screen
Outlook’s appearance is very different from other Microsoft Office applications’. Instead of confronting you with a blank screen, Outlook begins by offering you a screen filled with information that’s easy to use and understand. The Outlook layout is pretty similar to most webpages. Just select what you want to see by clicking an icon on the left side of the screen, and the information you selected appears on the right side of the screen.
Feeling at home when you work is nice. (Sometimes, when I’m at work, I’d rather be at home, but that’s something else entirely.) Outlook makes a home for all your different types of information: names, addresses, schedules, to-do lists, and even a list to remind you about all the stuff you have to do today (or didn’t get done yesterday). You can move around the main screen as easily as you move around the rooms of your home.
Today, most people expect to find their way around a website or a computer program by clicking something on the left edge of the screen and seeing something appear in the middle of the screen. Outlook follows that pattern by putting the navigation controls on the left side of the screen – just the way you’d expect. The way it’s arranged sounds confusing at first, but it becomes utterly obvious after you’ve used it once or twice.
The Outlook main screen – which looks remarkably like Figure 2-1 – has all the usual parts of a Windows screen (see this book’s Introduction if you’re unfamiliar with how Windows looks), with a few important additions. At the left side of the screen, you see the Folder pane. Next to the Folder pane is the Information Viewer – the part of the screen that takes up most of the space.
Figure 2-1: The Outlook main screen.
All the work you do in Outlook is organized into modules, or sections. Each module performs a specific job for you: The Calendar stores appointments and manages your schedule; the Tasks module stores and manages your To-Do list; and so on. Outlook is always showing you one of its modules on the main screen (also known as the Information Viewer). Whenever you’re running Outlook, you’re always using a module, even if the module has no information – the same way your television can be tuned to a channel even if nothing is showing on that channel.
Each module is represented by a label along the bottom left edge of the screen. Clicking any label takes you to a different Outlook module:
✔ The Mail label takes you to the Inbox, which collects your incoming email.
✔ The Calendar label shows your schedule and all your appointments.
✔ The People label calls up a module that stores names and addresses for you. Sometimes, Outlook calls this the Contacts module – but don’t worry, they’re the same thing.
✔ The Tasks label displays your To-Do list.
The Folder pane occupies a tiny strip on the left edge of the screen. Normally, it’s just big enough to accommodate some text displayed sideways, showing the names of a few email folders. You can widen the Folder pane by clicking a small arrow at the top of the list of text labels and then shrink it back by clicking the same arrow again.
Outlook speeds your work by letting you deal with several kinds of information in one place. It does that by organizing those different types of information into folders. Most people only think about folders when they’re dealing with email, which is why Outlook only makes its folders completely visible when you’re dealing with email.
The bottom of the Folder pane can have tiny icons representing each major Outlook function but only if you choose the Compact Navigation option. You can make that happen with these steps:
1. Click the View tab on the Ribbon.
2. Choose Folder Pane and then Options.
3. Click the check box labeled Compact Navigation.
The Information Viewer is where most of the action happens in Outlook. If the Folder pane is like the channel selector on your TV set, the Information Viewer is like the TV screen. When you’re reading email, you look in the Information Viewer to read your messages; if you’re adding or searching for contacts, you see contact names here. The