Outlook: Your Personal Assistant

When I began my career as an office professional, Outlook was on my computer waiting to be utilized. Unfortunately, I had never used Outlook before, so I was somewhat intimidated. I quickly learned how useful of a tool Outlook can be. From finding an email my boss sent me over a year ago to reminding me of the meeting scheduled for Tuesday, Outlook is my personal assistant.

Outlook is an awesome tool to help you remember scheduled activities. It's a lot easier than writing your appointments on post-it notes and displaying them all over your computer monitor or desk.

To schedule a meeting:

In Outlook 2007, there's an easy feature to schedule a meeting and invite others to schedule the same in their calendar. To do so, simply click on Calendar button in the bottom left hand corner of the Outlook window. Choose the date that you want to schedule a meeting for and double click within that date. It should bring up a box where you can fill out certain information, i.e. time of the meeting, location, and a description. In the top left hand corner of the meeting window, click "Invite Attendees". This will simply add a field for an email address. Plug in your attendees email addresses, add any necessary note to the body of the meeting/email and send. Your invited guests can accept or deny the meeting based on their schedule. Outlook will automatically deposit it onto your invited attendees Outlook calendars.

Reminders:

Setting a reminder is important in making sure you are on time for scheduled activities. Make sure you pay attention to the amount of time set for a reminder to go off. While in an open calendar meeting, on the top toolbar, next to appointment/scheduling there's a little bell icon. This is your reminder setting. You'll see next to it is an allotted time. You can change it to any time you would like. However, if you choose none, you will not receive a reminder. If you choose zero minutes, this means the reminder will go off at the exact scheduled time, not leaving any time to get to the meeting or do anything else that may need to be done before hand.

Create Folders:

Outlook comes with a set of default folders. These are fine, however, there are often lots of emails we get from the same person or regarding a recurrent theme. I create folders under my inbox folder to help organize these emails. To do so, click on your inbox, then right click, and select "New Folder". Name your folder appropriately. If you receive several emails from your boss, try labeling it with your boss's name or if you get emails regarding meeting minutes, label it "meeting minutes". This will help you to get exactly where you need to go when you need to recall certain emails. Once you've created your system, simply drag and drop the emails to the specified folders for storage.

Search:

Search is one the most important features on Outlook. Outlook does a great job at managing everything you can throw at it, however, emails easily get lost even in designated folders. In any folder, on the top right-hand side of that folder is a search function. If you're in your inbox, you can easily change the file to search or you can search them all. Enter the name of the sender, anything you can remember being in the body of the email or in the subject and click search. It will organize the emails by date sent or received. This is the easiest way to find something that may have been archived or just lost.

Outlook has incredible resources for keeping your data organized. These are a few of the more simple ways to utilize Outlook to its fullest. Don't be afraid to play around with Outlook to really customize your experience.