Recently I was asked to do a seminar on Microsoft Outlook at one of our clients to which my first reaction was, ‘What the hell am I going to talk about for 20 minutes, it’s Outlook!’.

Like many of you, I’d imagine, I’m a long-term user of Outlook, so long-term in fact that much of what I use it for on a day-to-day basis I just take for granted. While preparing for the seminar I was reminded of many of the great features of Outlook that make it more than just an email client. Mail, contacts, calendars, task lists, reminders, it does so many of them well that it’s become a one-stop shop for organising our daily work lives! It’s no surprise that a lot of our most urgent calls are about email outages.

You’ve Got Mail!
Microsoft Outlook does mail very well. The standard views enable you to sort messages by name, date, subject and group certain mails together. From 2007 onwards you also get the conversation view, which groups emails in the same ‘conversation’, i.e. where you’ve bounced back a number of replies. I use the preview pane primarily as my way of checking email and it’s very rare for me to actually double click an email to open it directly. The ability to add rules to move, change the priority or forward mail from certain senders is also a great feature that’s often overlooked.

The contacts you store in Outlook are more important than ever now, as often it’s your central repository for all your contacts that sync with all your mobile devices.

That’s a date!
Does anyone carry a diary anymore? If so, why?!

Outlook’s calendar offers a myriad of choices, from scheduling your own appointments to creating conferences and meetings that with a simple email invites all attendees and automatically adds it to their calendar. It’s a fantastic tool and vital to the organisation of a lot of companies. If you like to keep a list of tasks, it’s worth making the change to a digital list so you can have access to it anywhere. Audible or on-screen reminders make this even more invaluable for making sure you don’t miss that deadline or important meeting.

There are many, many more features within Outlook, many of which we went through at the seminar. It was great fun for us to do, in a nice relaxed environment, with a lot of questions from the 30 or so people who came.

We’re keen to get our teeth stuck in to more so if you need some training or more information on any of Riverbank’s products or services please let us know, we’ll be happy to take a trip out of the offices to come and see you!