Improving Your Outlook

You can use Outlook's views and print styles to help manage your day-to-day appointments, e-mails, and tasks. You already created folders for your various projects in the last chapter. Now you can create custom views to provide at a glance viewing of just the tasks, e-mails, and appointments pertaining to those specific projects.

You're approaching a deadline on the Urban Flood Control project. You must summarize a long environmental impact report for your immediate supervisor and deliver a presentation to him about its potential to delay the project. That summary requires that you make several phone calls to individuals at the EPA, research a small indigenous rodent named the spotted tailed field mouse, and prepare a report on how long it will take to build in measures to the project to keep the rodent safe. At the same time, you need to make copies of the report and send it to all the city planners for their records. You are storing all of your tasks in your main Tasks folder. You can now use views and print styles to show you only the information you need to complete your project.

After you enter all these tasks, your Tasks folder looks like Figure 4.39.

Figure 4.39. An unsorted view of your Tasks folder.

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With this view, it's hard to see which tasks are related to this project. Your task list is a little overwhelming with more than 20 active tasks listed in no particular order.

The first step to an organized view of your tasks is to group your tasks by category. You can create a custom category for each of your projects, such as the Urban Flood Control Project. Grouping by Category will show you all the tasks related to the Urban Flood Control project in one place. To group tasks by category, select View, Arrange By, Categories. Collapse unneeded groups and your Task list now looks like Figure 4.40.

Figure 4.40. All tasks for the Urban Flood Control project are easily located.

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For more information about creating and using custom categories, see "Assigning Categories to Items," p. 157.


If you're away from your computer on a regular basis and want to keep a copy of your Task list with you, you can use Outlook's print styles to print a customized list of your tasks for the Urban Flood Control project. Select the Urban Flood Control group in your view. Select File, Page Setup, Table Style to display the Page Setup dialog box. Select a custom paper type and the Franklin Day Planner Classic for your paper size. Click Print to print out your task list for your Franklin Planner. In addition to printing your Task list, you also need to print your task details. You have notes in several tasks that you need to bring with you as you do your research and make your phone calls. Select File, Page Setup, Memo Style. Click Print Preview to display Figure 4.41.

Figure 4.41. You can print a group of tasks including notes using the Memo style.

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Click Print to print your task list. These examples briefly illustrate how creating views and using print styles can help organize your tasks.



Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
Special Edition Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003
ISBN: 0789729563
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 426

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