Improving Your Outlook

Joe likes the new Quick Flag feature. The By Follow Up search folder makes it so easy to see all of his Quick Flagged items. He likes to use Quick Flags to categorize his messages, but he feels it takes too much effort to use all the flag colors. Right-clicking on the message, choosing Follow Up, Flag takes too long to set different flag colors. Joe also thinks using different color flags to categorize the messages is a great idea, but he has a hard time remembering what each flag color means.

One day, Joe was browsing www.slipstick.com and picked up a tip that has made using Quick Flags easier. He created a custom toolbar for the flag commands and replaced the name of flag color with his category.

Joe opened the Customize dialog box and created a new toolbar named Flags. He dragged the flag command buttons to it, along with the Clear Flag and Reminder commands. After he had all the buttons on the toolbar, he customized each button to display the name and icon, and changed the text names from Red, Blue, Green, to the titles he needed, including Important, ASAP, and Personal (see Figure 5.9).

Figure 5.9. Using his custom Flags toolbar, Joe now easily flags his Outlook items with the correct flag.

graphics/05fig09.gif

Joe needs to send a weekly email to a distribution list. The subject of the message is always the same, so he decided to create a custom toolbar button. Joe opened the Customize dialog box and dragged the Mail Message command to a position to the right of the Help menu. Joe could have picked any other command, but chose Mail Message because it was in the first screen and he wouldn't need to change the image much. To differentiate the mail icons, he used the Edit Image command to change the button a little.

He added a mailto hyperlink to the button and included the subject line in it. The hyperlink he used was mailto:FridayReport?subject=The Weekly Report for Friday. He changed the Name field to Friday &Report. Now when Joe needs to send his report, he uses the keyboard shortcut Alt+R to open the form, adds the date to the end of the subject line, and types in his message.

Joe could have created a custom form and published it to his Inbox, and opened it using the Actions menu, or saved it as a template and opened it using a hyperlink, but it was much easier for him to create a mailto hyperlink.

Joe likes the hyperlink feature so much that he recently added hyperlinks to an Excel workbook he uses often, Notepad, and one to a file share on the network. Now, Joe never has to leave Outlook when he needs to open the files and programs he uses the most.



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

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net