Читать книгу Outlook 2016 For Dummies - Dyszel Bill - Страница 18

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 a team when you need them to. It’s a little bit like the utensils you use for dining: You can eat your turkey 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.

Outlook also turns up in connection with several other Microsoft products. Microsoft Exchange Server is the backbone of the email system in many corporations, and Outlook is often the program that employees of those corporations use to read their company email. Another program, called SharePoint, connects to Outlook to help streamline the work of a group in much the same ways that Outlook speeds up the work of an individual. Skype for Business is an instant messaging and conferencing program that connects to Outlook to show you who’s in the office at any given moment (so you know who you can interrupt and who’s busy interrupting somebody else). You don’t need to worry about all this though. You can start Outlook and use it the same way no matter which other programs it’s bundled with.

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.

Even so, to make it easier to get your bearings, I recommend waiting until you feel entirely at home with Outlook before you start rearranging the screen.

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.

Looking at modules

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.

Using the Folder pane

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.

Otherwise, you can move between Outlook modules by clicking the name of a module in the Navigation bar, which is in the lower-left corner of the screen.

The Information Viewer: Outlook’s hotspot

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 Information Viewer is also where you can do fancy sorting tricks. (I talk about sorting contacts, tasks, and so forth, in the chapters that apply to those modules.)

Because you can store more information in Outlook than you can see at any one time, the Information Viewer shows you a slice of the information available. The Calendar, for example, can store dates as far back as the year 1601 and as far ahead as 4500. I use that to see the day when my credit card bills might finally be paid off, but in this economy, I may need to take a longer view. The smallest calendar slice you can look at is one day; the largest slice is a month.

The Information Viewer organizes what it shows you into units called views. You can use the views that come with Outlook or you can create your own views and save them. (I go into more details about views in Chapter 10.)

You can navigate among the slices of information that Outlook shows you by clicking different parts of the Information Viewer. Some people use the word browsing for the process of moving around the Information Viewer; it’s a little like thumbing through the pages of your pocket datebook (that is, if you have a million-page datebook). To see an example of how to use the Information Viewer, look at the Calendar module in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2: Your calendar in the Information Viewer.

To browse Calendar data in the Information Viewer, follow these steps:

1. Click the Calendar button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+2).

Your calendar appears.

2. Click the word Week at the top of the Calendar screen.

The weekly view of your calendar appears.

You can change the appearance of the Information Viewer in an infinite number of ways. For example, you may need to see the appointments for a single day or only the items you’ve assigned to a certain category. Views can help you get a quick look at exactly the slice of information you need.

When you choose the Day or Week view, you can click the tiny arrow in the bottom-right corner of the screen to see all the tasks scheduled for completion that day as well as any email messages you’ve flagged for that day. After all, if you have too many meetings on a certain day, you may not have time to finish a lot of tasks. You can drag a task from one day to another to balance your schedule a bit.

Navigating folders

Most people don’t create multiple folders in Outlook, so folder navigation isn’t important for most people; the buttons in the Folder pane do everything most people need. On the other hand, I know people who create elaborate filing systems by creating dozens of Outlook folders for their emails and even their tasks. It’s personal: Some people are filers; some are pilers. Take your pick.

A tale of two folders

Folders can seem more confusing than they need to be because, once again, Microsoft gave two different things the same name. Just as two kinds of Explorer (Windows and Internet) exist, two kinds of Outlook exist – and way too many kinds of Windows exist. You may run across two different kinds of folders when you use Outlook – and each behaves differently.