Managing e-mail for fun and profit: Outlook tips and tricks

Do I even need Outlook?
If all you want to do is manage your e-mail, you don't need Outlook. Programs such as Thunderbird, an excellent free e-mail program, and Eudora, available in free ad-sponsored and paid ad-free versions, offer robust spam filters and mail-organization features. If, however, you want one program for all of your information management needs, such as scheduling, maintaining a contact database and to-do lists, Outlook is an excellent choice.

Which version of Outlook?
Outlook Express, a no-frills version of the program that comes installed on most Windows PCs, is fine for basic e-mail management. It comes with a stripped-down address book, support for HTML messages, and a newsgroup reader. But the best choice for small businesses is Outlook, sold separately ($87 to $99 for the 2003 edition) or as a component of Microsoft's Office Suite ($370 to $450 for Small Business Edition 2003). Outlook lets you keep information such as addresses, phone numbers, e-mail, and notes from meetings in one place and organize it in ways that make sense to you.

Use it with Microsoft Exchange Server, and colleagues can share scheduling information and contact lists, and they can prevent recipients from forwarding, copying, or printing private important e-mail messages.

How can Outlook help my business?
Here's just one example of a way to use Outlook to be more efficient during your busy day. Let's say you receive e-mail from a client requesting a phone meeting. Just drag the message over to the calendar button on Outlook's taskbar, and a dialog box pops up scheduling the call. Drag the message onto your task list, and the call is added to your to-dos.

If the e-mail happens to be from a new contact, drag it over to the contacts button, and a new address book entry is created with information from the e-mail. The e-mail's text is also pasted into the calendar, task, or contact boxes for a handy reference. Having everything in one place can save time and increase efficiency.

Tailor Outlook to suit your needs
Expect to spend some time customizing Outlook to get the most out of the program. Ann Markham, a New York-based freelance makeup artist, devoted the better part of a weekend to that process. She set up folders for filing e-mail messages and created categories for her calendar and task lists, along with commands to send e-mail directly into designated folders.

"Outlook out of the box is a time-waster," she says. "I could never find the information I needed without searching through hundreds of e-mails or other information. After I set all this up, Outlook immediately turned into a huge time-saver."

Markham says Outlook has replaced her desk calendar, appointment notebooks, and "the scraps of paper I used to write critical information on and promptly lose. Now," she says, "everything goes into Outlook--my work schedule, my personal appointments, and notes on what products I suggested to clients. I have everything I need to take care of my business, apart from my 20-pound makeup case."

Setting up rules
Outlook's Rules feature lets you automate many tasks. For example, you can set up rules so that Outlook alerts you with a pop-up dialog box and/or sound when e-mail arrives from specified senders. These alerts free you from constantly checking your in-box. You can also set up rules to sort e-mail into project folders, forward all messages from specific clients to an assistant or a partner while you're out of the office, or send messages to your cell phone.

Business Contact Manager
When you purchase Microsoft's Office Small Business Edition 2003 or Office Professional Edition 2003, Outlook 2003 comes with Business Contact Manager (BCM), a useful tool designed to help small businesses manage customer information and sales opportunities. BCM is a database in which you store information on clients and partners, such as billing records, sales leads, and meeting action items. The program is integrated into Outlook, making it easy to move information in BCM to and from e-mail, calendar entries, and to-do lists.

You can perform simple but useful functions, such as opening a client's record and clicking on a timer, while you're working on that client's job to keep track of billable hours. But most useful is the Reports function, which automatically culls information from all of your client records into an easy-to-read format. For example, if you're wondering how to make best use of your time this week, run a "to do" report. The program will search through all of your client records, find pending deadlines, scheduled meetings, and follow-up calls, then it will create one unified to-do list based on all that information.

If you're a licensed user of Office Small Business Edition 2003 or Office Professional Edition 2003 who purchased the product before BCM was released in June 2005, you can download the Business Contact Manager Update for free.

How about other add-ons?
Microsoft also offers a slew of free add-ons for Outlook (and Office), ranging from plug-ins that provide new functions to clip art to templates for business forms. You can, for example, get an automatic backup of Outlook files and plug-ins for working with Outlook on your cell phone or handheld devices. Browse through the offerings and find the ones that are right for your business.

Keeping out spam
Outlook 2003's junk e-mail filter works fairly well, but the free Outlook add-on SpamBayes works even better. You'll need to train the program by letting it compare a folder of your collected spam to a file of legitimate messages.

It's not all good
Outlook has its drawbacks. Besides being so feature-packed that it's easy to overlook useful functions, Outlook is also a large program that hogs computer resources. But the biggest downside is security. Microsoft has done a good job of making Outlook 2003 less vulnerable to e-mailed viruses by blocking certain attachments, but since most e-mail viruses are created with Outlook and the Windows operating system, using Outlook still presents a potential security risk. That makes updating the program with Microsoft's free security patches all the more important.

Do I have to use Outlook?
You won't find anything to equal Outlook's range of functions wrapped up in a single package. That said, Thunderbird expects to release a version of its e-mail program with a full-featured calendar sometime soon. Meantime, if you want to "build your own," you can download a copy of Thunderbird and mix and match extensions, such as calendars, assorted contact managers, and note-taking and to-do lists. It isn't the integrated solution presented by Outlook, but it is free.

For more information
Slipstick offers an excellent selection of frequently updated tips and tricks in discovering all of Outlook's features. About.com's Outlook page has a lengthy list of Outlook suggestions, many aimed at beginners.