You can use Microsoft Outlook 2000 to organize and plan your business or personal life, to communicate and share information with people in your company or anywhere on the Internet, and to collaborate with your co-workers on group projects.
Here’s a more detailed sampling of what you can do with Outlook:
- Send, receive, store, and organize e-mail and fax messages.
- Keep a calendar of your personal appointments and events, and schedule meetings with other people.
- Store names, addresses, and other information on your business and personal contacts. Quickly send a message to a contact, dial a contact’s phone number, or reach a contact in other ways.
- Keep track of the personal tasks you need to complete, and manage group projects.
- Maintain a record of activities or occurrences that take place in your business or personal life, such as receiving an e-mail message, creating a document, or making a phone call.
- Quickly type and store miscellaneous bits of information in electronic "sticky notes."
- Share any of your Outlook information with other people on an network or on the Internet.
- Manage your disk files and file folders right in the Outlook window, without having to switch to a separate file management program such as Windows Explorer.
- Explore Web pages right in the Outlook window, without having to run a separate browser program.
New Features in Outlook
The original version of Outlook was part of the Microsoft Office 97 suite of applications. Outlook has acquired many new features since then. Some of them were added with Outlook 98, the second version, and some are brand new in Outlook 2000, the third version. The following sections describe many of these new features.
New features in Outlook 98
- The Outlook Today folder, which displays a Web-style page that gives you an overview of the current information in several commonly used Outlook folders, and lets you quickly manage this information.
- The Find page, a Web-style page that you can display in a separate pane and use to find Outlook items containing specific text.
- The Organize page, a Web-style page that you can display in a separate pane and use to quickly work with Outlook items. For example, you can use this page to create rules for automatically moving or color-coding selected messages (messages from or to a particular person, junk messages, or adult-content messages).
- Support for the HTML e-mail format, which lets you include backgrounds, graphics, and other Web-page content in your e-mail messages. You can use predesigned stationery to get a head start in creating an attractive HTML e-mail message for a specific purpose (such as a party invitation or an announcement).
- Support for standard Internet e-mail protocols so that you can use Outlook with a wider variety of e-mail services (SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4).
- An enhanced Preview pane that lets you view the entire contents of an e-mail message.
- Automatic saving of messages while you compose them, in the Drafts folder.
- The use of Internet directory (LDAP) services for verifying or finding people’s e-mail addresses.
New features in Outlook 2000
- Folder home pages, which let you display Web-style information in any Outlook folder.
- Custom menus and toolbars, which show only the commands you use most frequently.
- Personal distribution lists, which you can store in your Contacts folder and use to quickly send messages to entire groups of people.
- The Find A Contact list box on the Standard toolbar, which lets you rapidly find a contact wherever you are in Outlook.
- Viewing Web pages right in the Outlook window, using the new Favorites menu or Web-page shortcuts in the Outlook Bar.
How to Use the Book
I recommend that you read the book in the following way:
- If you haven’t installed Outlook yet, read Chapter 1 for installation instructions and for help making installation choices. This chapter refers you to Appendix A for instructions on some of the more involved configuration tasks you might need to complete during setup.
- Read Chapter 2, especially if you’re new to Outlook or Office, to get an overview of Outlook’s features and the types of information it manages, and to learn basic Windows and Office skills.
- Read through Chapters 3 and 4 to learn the basic Outlook techniques you’ll need when you work with almost any of the types of information Outlook manages. Refer back to these chapters as you start to work with the different Outlook folders.
- Chapters 5 through 11 cover each of the main types of information that Outlook manages. You can read just those chapters that cover the information types you want to work with, and you can read them in any order.
- Read Chapter 12 if you want to use Outlook to manage your disk files and folders, rather than using Windows Explorer or another file-management program.
- Read Chapter 13 if you want to use Outlook to explore Web pages.
- Read Chapter 14 if you want to customize Outlook. I recommend, however, that you don’t customize Outlook until you’ve finished working through the other chapters, so your program commands will match those described in the book.
