Top 10 Microsoft outlook tips for small groups

Microsoft Outlook is a very popular calendar and personal information manager, for large and small groups, businesses and organizations. It is almost a corporate standard for large corporations that can afford the additional server costs and significant administrative skills and staffing required to make all those features work.

But what about the small organizations that need to keep it simple and cheap?

The corporate user gets used to features like calendar sharing, out-of-office auto reply messages, and not having to worry about losing their messages or contacts because the IT department is responsible for backup and recovery.

The small group Outlook user looks around for these features and can't find them. Well many of the corporate goodies are available to the small group user. Check out these simple and free tips that you can use to get more out of your Microsoft Outlook.

1. Share your Outlook calendar.
2. Make your own Vacation or Out-of-Office message.
3. Set up an automatic backup of your Outlook information.
   
4. Copy your Outlook contact information.
5. A simple trick when your Outlook program won't start.
6. Look up email addresses with this shortcut key.
7. Save email messages on your hard drive instead of within Outlook.
8. Tuneup your Outlook for better performance.
9. Use Categories to manage and code your information.
10. Change the reading pane default setting to keep your unread messages marked as unread.

Would it be helpful if somebody else had access to your calendar from within their Outlook? An assistant, spouse, group member, partner...

It's easy to set up a shared calendar from within Outlook. Your shared calendar is read only and can be regularly updated. This method of Outlook calendar sharing is free and easy to manage.

Going to be away from your Outlook Email for a few days? Concerned about people wondering why you aren't answering Emails messages? Want to refer questions or problems to somebody while you are gone? You can set up your own out-of-office message and have one less thing to worry about while you are away.

You backup your files, don't you? What about all that personal information you've built up over the years in your Outlook contacts, calendars, saved messages? All of this information is kept in one file (pst) by Outlook and if this file became corrupted or lost it could be a disaster.

Fortunately there is a free utility that is easy to install and setup to backup your Outlook personal folders.

Most of us build up a very useful set of contacts in Outlook over time. Those contacts can be a valuable resource. You can do more than use them as an Email address list. You can share your contacts with other Outlook users. You can transport those contacts between home and office computers, old and new computers... You can import that information into spread sheets and databases. It's easy and safe to copy contact information in Microsoft Outlook.

Ever click on the Microsoft Outlook icon and the program didn't open? One of the common causes of this problem is that Outlook did not completely shut down after you closed the program.

A process is still running and that prevents a new instance of Outlook from starting up while you sit there waiting! You give up in frustration and reboot your PC. Then you wait for that process to complete, and if your PC is slow, it can be a long wait.

There are two quicker ways to get around this problem. You can log off and then log back on; this closes the stuck Outlook process for you. Also, you can open the Task Manager, look for a process named "Outlook"; if you find one, end that process, and you are back in business.

Over time we can accumulate a lot of Email addresses in Outlook. Often, there will be several Email address choices for one individual. A helpful tool for me is the Alt + k shortcut key.

Simply click in the address field, either To or Cc or Bcc, and type the first few characters of the person or address you are looking for. Then hold the Alt key down while you tap the K key. Outlook will pull up a list of all of the Contact choices with that letter sequence. Click the one you want and it is filled into the address field for you.

We love Email. Email messages become part of our information audit trail. We find we can't let go of an old email; instead, we feel the need to save it. Either we keep it in our Inbox, or delete it but never empty the Deleted folder so we can keep the Email forever.

If we are a little clever, we create folders withing Outlook and move the cherished Email to a save folder for future reference, action, or just for historical reference. Over time our Outlook data file (the pst file) becomes bloated and gigantic. This makes Outlook slower to open and respond and puts us at risk of a corrupted pst file.

Two tips here: first don't save every dang Email, second, if you must save that Email, save it outside of Outlook.

Open the message, click Save As, and save it in a folder on your PC. You can also easily move those Emails you've saved within Outlook, by dragging them to a computer hard drive folder and then deleting them from Outlook.

Many of us use Outlook daily and depend on it to keep us organized and in touch. Few Outlook users spend any time maintaining this vital information resource. Though we are in it constantly, we treat it like a junk drawer that never gets cleaned out or organized. There are some easy things you can do to keep your Outlook personal information healthy and safe: dump the trash, clean the Inbox, trim the Send folder, and more...

Information in Outlook accumulates relentlessly. Trying to find things by date or alphabetically doesn't always provide quick or easy results. Set up a few Categories and assign your contacts and calendar events to an appropriate category. Select categories or groups that make sense to you.

Each of my ongoing clients is a category. Other categories that work for me are "Friends and Family" Personal, Poker, etc... My Contacts is set to open in Category view.

A related trick is to color code your categories. This comes in handy when viewing my calendar, as the client issues are color coded for me.

Most Outlook users use the reading pane to preview their messages. By default, Outlook is set to mark an unread message as read when selected or highlighted for 5 seconds. This means that if if a message is just exposed in the reading pane it interprets it as read by you. This is very often not true, and you can later miss a message you want to read, because it was automatically marked as read.

The solution is simple. Change the reading pane default setting to keep your unread messages as unread till you actually open them. The steps may vary slightly with different versions, but in Outlook 2007, click on Tools, then click Options, then click the Other tab, then click Reading Pane, then uncheck "Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane".

If you are not using the latest version, you should seriously consider upgrading Microsoft Outlook. It will be more stable and more productive.

Outlook issues and solutions.