Office Beta Homework Assignment 1

Outlook Improves your Productivity

Posted: November, 2002

The new Outlook is loaded with new productivity features like a new screen layout, Inbox enhancements, Search Folders, Side-by-side Calendaring, and Quick Flags. In this edition of the Office Beta Home Work Assignment, we will get you started working with these new features. In order to see everything that is discussed in this Homework Assignment please maximize your Outlook window so that it occupies the full screen. (You’ll have to switch back and forth between this document and Outlook, but this way you will be able see everything we are describing in Outlook without using the scroll bars. Or, you may want to print this page and keep it next to your computer as you work with Outlook)

New screen layout

The very first time you open the new Outlook you will see the changes made to the screen layout. Don’t be startled. This new screen layout puts the items you need on one page. In the picture below, you can see the new Outlook navigation pane on the left, the new Inbox layout in the middle, and the new vertical Reading Pane to the right. The Outlook navigation pane is your command center, which lets you get your work done in Outlook.  It provides access to all your Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, etc.

Homework Assignment 1.1 Experiment a little. Look at Outlook’s Tasks and Contacts views by clicking on their respective bars in the Outlook Navigation Pane. You can get back to your e-mail by clicking on the Mail bar.

Inbox enhancements

Several changes were made to the Inbox in this release and the most noticeable is the new reading pane on the right side of the screen. This new pane preview allows you to read your email without having to open each email into a separate window, while still allowing you to see more of the contents of your Inbox than if you had the preview on the bottom of your folder view. You can also sort and organize your Inbox by clicking on the “Arranged By” heading (see picture below – circled in orange).

Homework Assignment 1.2 Read through your Inbox items using the new Inbox layout.

If you receive a lot of emails that are related (sometimes called an email thread), try the new “Arrange by Conversation” view. It rolls up all the email threads in your inbox with the most recent threads on top, and shows you just the unread messages within those threads. If you want to see the already-read messages in those threads just click on the expand arrow to the left of the message (see figure below).

Homework Assignment 1.3 Try rearranging your Inbox with “Arrange by Conversation” or one of the other views.

Calendar View

Click on the Calendar bar in the navigation pane to see your Calendar view which should look something like the picture below. On the left is the current month calendar, which you can use to navigate to a specific date. Below the current month calendar you will see an area called “My Calendars”. Here you can view other calendars that you have setup to view in Outlook – like a personal calendar, work calendar, and sports calendar. Below the “My Calendars” area are links to “Open a Shared Calendar”, “Share My Calendar”, and “Customize Current View”. We will describe these in more detail in the Side-by-side Calendaring section below.

Homework Assignment 1.4 Use the Calendar view to see your upcoming appointments and meetings.

Search Folders

This new feature allows you to capture groups of Outlook items without the manual labor necessary in previous versions of Outlook. Instead of creating individual folders and physically moving items into them, you can setup a Search Folder that collects and shows you the items you want to see. These Search Folders don’t actually move items in your Mailbox, so any organization that you have in place stays intact. There are some Search Folders that come pre-installed with Outlook. You can find them in Search Folders (see the figure below). They are inactive by default, but all you have to do is select one of them to see how they work. Select the Unread Mail Search Folder and it will show you all the unread email in your Mailbox. There are several ways you can setup your own Search Folders. One way is to click the New button on the toolbar (or just right-click on one of the pre-installed Search folders), then select New Search folder, and fill out the information in the dialog box that appears.

Homework Assignment 1.5 Try gathering all the items related to one of your coworkers or a current project that you are working on into a Search Folder.

Side by side calendaring

This new calendaring feature allows you to view more than one calendar side-by-side. If someone else shares their calendar with you, you can view it next yours to see when the best time to plan an event. The first step is for you or someone you know to share calendars. You can do this by selecting the Calendar Bar and using the Share My Calendar link (see figure below)

Once you click on the “Share My Calendar” link, just fill out the items in the dialog that appear. The person(s) you designate can now view your Calendar. You can view someone else’s Calendar (only if they’ve given you permission) by clicking the “Open a Shared Calendar” link right above the “Share My Calendar” link.

Homework Assignment 1.6 Try sharing Calendars with some of your close friends or colleagues who are also using the Office Beta.

Quick Flags

Another enhancement is the new Quick Flag feature. This allows you to mark items in your Inbox with a follow-up flag so you’ll know to come back to them later -- just click on the Flag placeholder (see figure below) to activate the flag with the default color.

You can also choose from six different colors by right-clicking on the Flag placeholder instead of left-clicking. This allows you to assign your own meaning to the different colored flags. You could, for example, use red to indicate follow-up by the end of the day and blue for follow-up by the end of the week. Once a flag is set you can mark it as Complete by left-clicking it a second time. Finally, you can use the “For Follow Up” Search Folder to see all your flagged items in one view.

Homework Assignment 1.7 Use the Quick Flag feature to mark items in Inbox for follow-up and view them all using the “For Follow Up” Search Folder.

Rules and Alerts

The last feature we’ll cover allows you to manage your Outlook Rules and Alerts. Email rules allow you to manage incoming emails according to criteria that you specify.  For example, you can automatically put incoming messages from a sender into a special folder – just right-click on any mail message and select Create Rule to specify your criteria.

Homework Assignment 1.8 Create a new rule to put email concerning a current project into its own folder in your Mailbox.

The following requires your site to be running SharePoint Team Services V2. You can sign up to receive email alerts any time a critical document is updated, or any time a new announcement is added to an STS team website.  All of your Rules and Alerts can be managed in one place: the Rules and Alerts dialog accessible from the Tools menu.

Extra Credit -- Put a document that you are working on with others on your STS v2 website and create a rule to notify you when someone makes changes to the document. Then ask one of you coworkers to make some changes to the document.

Thanks for working through this Home Work Assignment. It would really help us if you could take a few minutes to provide your feedback right now while your experience is fresh in your mind. Please use the betaplace.com survey link to provide use with your feedback concerning your experience with these features.