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Getting organized
OUTLOOK has been the de facto email client for those who POP their emails, both at home and in corporate environments. Outlook is integrated with other Microsoft products and consists of security features and rich organization tools like tasks, calendar and journal.
Today, we are going to take a look at some quick tips for both starters and advanced Outlook 2003 users.
Arrangements and grouping
The Arrangement option appears just above the list of emails. The name of mail folder is displayed on top, for example Inbox, and clicking on “Arrange by” below it displays a list of pre-defined arrangements. You can select one from the list to choose how your emails are displayed. Selecting “show in groups” will group emails by days, starting from “yesterday” to days of the current week. It also goes on to Last Week, Two Weeks Ago, Last Month and Older. This gives a pretty neat look to your Inbox — no more dealing with lists that contain hundreds of mails. Just a collapse / un-collapse functionality, using the well-known (+) button can help you view the mails you want.
Password protection
If you don't want every Tom, Dick or Harry to use your PC (if Guest account is enabled, or otherwise) and read your emails, here's how you can password protect your Outlook.
1. Go to menu File>Data File Management.
2. Press Settings.
3. Press Change Password.
4. Enter password and the next time you open Outlook, it will ask for it.
Colour coding emails
So you want mails from your boss to be displayed in red and from your sweetheart in pink? Here's how you can define colours for different senders' emails:
1. Go to menu Tools>Organize. The “Ways to Organize Ideas” section appears. Select the second item “Using Colors.”
2. Select a mail to which you want to assign a colour. The sender's name automatically appears in this section.
3. Select a colour from the dropdown list and press “Apply Color.”
Creating rules
Automatically moving emails by specific senders to separate folders helps in better management and tracking. For this, you can set rules. Here's how:
Before you create rules to automatically move mails, you need to create folders. R-click Inbox, select New Folder, specify a name and press OK to create new folders.
1. R-click the email for which you want to create a rule.
2. Select Create Rule. A dialog box is displayed.
3. In the “When I get email…” section, select the first checkbox which displays “From
4. In “Do the following” section, select the last checkbox, “Move email to folder”, and press the Select Folder button to select a folder. Press OK.
5. A message box will appear, saying the rule has been created and will ask if you want to run the rule that appears. Press OK.
Signatures
You can create and specify different signatures for different, configured email accounts — for new messages, replies and forward both.
1. Go to menu Tools>Options.
2. Select the Mail Format tab.
3. In the last section called Signatures, press Signatures.
4. Press New.
5. Enter a signature name, press Next.
6. Enter signature text, press Finish.
7. The signature is added to the list of signatures. Press OK.
8. Select the email account from “select signatures for account.” Drop down and specify signatures.
Same data
Do you have more than one operating system with Outlook installed, and you want both to display the same data? There is an easy way to deal with it.
First keep in mind, that whatever Outlook displays is present in a PST file. The default path of this file is your Windows specific user profile folder. By moving the PST file to a separate folder and pointing Outlook to use this file from say both Windows XP and Windows ME results in same data being displayed.
The writer’s email address is arbil@cyber.net.pk
