Living with Outlook 2007 Ebook

Living with Outlook 2007

Stop Wasting Time!

How a simple eBook will keep you from wasting time

You hate wasting time. Your days are too short and you can't accomplish everything you want to. Pointless meetings and time-consuming busywork make you crazy. You're always looking for ways to get more done in less time. I can help.

Go for the Low-Hanging Fruit

Let me ask you a question: "How many hours a day do you work in Outlook?" Two? Three? Four? More? For the sake of argument, let's assume the answer is two hours a day. That's ten hours a week. That's a significant chunk of time. What if you could be 10% more efficient when you are working with Outlook. That would save you an hour a week. Half an 8-hour workday each month.
If you're like most professionals, you work far more than forty hours a week. It's not like you're sitting around the office watching the clock. I'm sure you can think of some excellent uses for more free time. I certainly can.

This is why I've hand-picked my top tips from the Living With Outlook website, my online courses, the two How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Outlook books I wrote for Osborne/McGraw-Hill, and my articles in OutlookPower magazine, and put that information into two Top Tips for Living With Outlook eBooks. They're full of tips for saving time while living and working with Outlook.

Tips for Saving Time in Outlook

You may be thinking, "What will I read in these eBooks to save me time?" Here are some examples:

• Does Outlook start in the wrong folder for you? Fixing that is easy.
• Do old email addresses keep popping up when you are typing addresses? Banish them forever.
• Ever have trouble finding an appointment in your overflowing calendar? Learn to color-code calendar items to make finding them easy.
• Need a fast way to keep track of stuff outside of Outlook? See how to use the Shortcuts pane to keep track of all sorts of stuff on your computer.
• Does the way commands move around in the menus make you nuts (like it does me)? Learn how to stop the madness.

Those are just a few of the tips you'll find in these 40 odd page eBooks.
You don't have to buy anything else to use the tips. You don't have to download and install strange add-in programs from unknown software developers in the former Soviet Union. You don't need anything at all other than your Top Tips eBook and you.

It Isn't Magic and It Isn't Random

A Top Tips eBook isn't a grab-bag of random tips. Some of the tips are super short and easy to use, taking just a few clicks of the mouse to change some aspect of the way Outlook works. Others take some work and thought on your part. Some require simple memorization. But all the tips are hand-picked to help you get your Outlook stuff done in the least time and with the least effort.
You still need to set things up, learn the shortcuts, study and follow the tips.

But your Top Tips eBook makes it easy. The books are broken up into these sections to make it easy to find the kinds of tips you need.

In Part 1, you'll find:

• General Keyboard Shortcuts
• Tips for Working with Email
• Tips for Working with the Calendar
• Other Top Tips

Each tip has detailed instructions, including step-by-step procedures and illustrations when needed. These are all tried and true tips that I have tested and used myself.

In Part 2, we shift gears a bit. One of the biggest issues for Outlook owners is how to make Outlook work with our other email accounts. I'm constantly getting asked how to make Outlook work with Hotmail, or Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail. Part 2 of Top Tips contains detailed procedures for making those connections.

Specifically, in Part 2, Outlook and Web-based Email Accounts, you'll find:

• Outlook Web Mail Access Simplifies Life
• Google Gmail and Outlook
• Hotmail and Outlook
• Yahoo! Mail and Outlook
• Port 25 and Problems Sending Email

Want a sample?

Would you like a sample tip? Here's one of the small tips from the Top Tips eBook for you. It is a tip for how to delete old email addresses from those AutoComplete boxes that appear when you start to type a name or address into the To box of an email message.
People ask me how to do this all the time, and it is easy, once you know the secret.

Here's the tip as it appears in the Top Tips eBook:

Clear Out Old Auto-Complete Entries

Outlook's auto-complete feature can help you get things done faster, but sometimes you need to delete old entries to keep it as useful as possible. There is a simple trick to doing exactly that and this page tells you how. Let's begin at the beginning:
When you start to enter addresses into Outlook, you will often see a list of possibilities. Outlook looks at what you have typed so far, and displays a list of possible addresses that match what you have typed so far. Outlook creates the list by remembering the addresses you have entered into the TO:, CC: or BCC: fields previously.

This can be a great time-saving tool, but there's one big problem with it: old addresses. Outlook has no way to know if an address is crucially important to you, or one that you no longer want.
It turns out that it's easy to remove addresses from this list once you know the trick. Here's how it is done:

Deleting Addresses from the Auto-Complete List

The trick to deleting addresses from the Auto-Complete list is that you must do it using the keyboard, and not the mouse. Follow these steps:

1. Make the address you want to delete visible by opening a message and entering characters of the address until Outlook displays the one you want to delete in the Auto-Complete list
2. Use the Up and Down arrow keys on the keyboard to select the address you want to delete. You must do this with the arrow keys, not the mouse.
3. Instead of pressing the Enter key to use this address, press the Delete key to delete the address from the list

See what I mean? This is nice and easy, once you know the trick.

Each tip in the Top Tips books gets detailed instructions like this. You'll have no trouble following the instructions to use any of the tips.

To make things easier still, you can choose the Top Tips eBook that's right for you. There's one for people using Outlook 2003, and one for Outlook 2007 users.

More...