Improve Your Outlook, Improve Your Business

With email so critical to business, Outlook is probably the first program you open and the last one you close each day. Managing all those messages, along with all the other bits of information and tasks in your life, can be maddening. The good news is you can use some often overlooked features of Outlook to achieve your goals, manage your time, organize your information, and improve your business. Here are a few of those features. You don’t have to learn them all; just what will have the biggest impact.

Calendar

While I could spend an entire article on the calendar features, I’ll offer just a couple of my favorites. First, I use color-coding to quickly see what kind of appointments I have scheduled (right-click and choose Label). Another is to use categories. That way, I can change the view to By Category (from the toolbar) and see how I’ve been spending my time. It lets me quickly see who I need to invoice since I use a Billable category.

You also can connect appointments to contacts (click on Contacts button in the bottom left corner of the appointment or task window). They’ll show up in the contacts record on the Activities tab.

Contacts

“When in doubt, right-click.” This is my favorite piece of advice. When you right-click on a contact record, you are one click away from creating a new message or having Outlook call the contact for you (assuming you have a modem connected to your phone line).

Another useful feature is being able to put links to files I’ve created for that contact. Just click in the Notes section, click on the Insert menu, then choose Object (if you choose File it puts the whole file in there which is usually more than you want to do). Then choose Create from File and Browse… to the file. Be sure and put a check in the Link box and in the Display as Icon box.

Tasks

Once you get to know me, you’ll learn I simply don’t function without a deadline. Unfortunately, some things need to get started before the last minute (although I try to see how few really do). For those tasks, Outlook’s Start date (in addition to the Due date) comes in very handy. But be careful, by default Outlook sets the reminder for the Due date (sort of defeats having a Start date if you ask me).

One major problem with the tasks feature is there’s not a way to break a task into sub-tasks. The simplest way I’ve found is to start each sub-task with the same words referring to the main task. For example, if I want to do several things to update my website, I’ll start each with “Update website.”

Email

My favorite feature is using reminders to keep up with messages involving responses I’m not ready to do yet. Just right-click on the message and choose Follow Up, Add Reminder. Then I get to hit the Snooze button endlessly when the alarm goes off.

One of the most common problems I see with clients is their Sent folder has thousands of messages—making it almost impossible to find a message. You can change a setting so all of your replies are saved with the original message (if you first move the original message to a folder and then reply).

Click on Tools, Options, Preferences tab; E-mail options…button, Advanced e-mail options… button, and put a check next to In folders other than the Inbox, save replies with original message.

A feature that comes in very handy for me is Edit Message. Sometimes, instead of replying to a message, I need to call the person and discuss the issue. I still want a record of my response; so I open the message, click on the Edit menu then Edit Message, and then type my notes about the phone call. I save the message and have my record.

Notes

The notes feature is probably the most-overlooked in Outlook. I love it. I use it to keep up with all the little bits and bytes of information and ideas that come my way. The best part is since it syncs with my PDA notes, I can make notes when I’m out and about and then get them on my computer when I’m back in my office.

For more tips and tricks, updates, add-ins and tons of other useful information about Outlook and all of the Microsoft Office products, go to http://office.microsoft.com.

Well, there they are: a few features to help you improve your Outlook and hopefully improve your business in the process. As always, if you have any questions on how to do any of this, please contact me.