Outlook

You can preview Outlook email messages without opening them by using the Reading Pane.

To control if you want the Reading Pane open, and where you want it to appear in Outlook...

1. On Outlook's menu bar, click "View"

2. Hover your mouse pointer over "Reading Pane"

3. Click on your preference.

Repeat for any additional folders for which you want to customize the Reading Pane.

More info on customizing Outlook 2007's Reading Pane can be found at this Microsoft Office Outlook page.

When you receive an email message that has information about a meeting or a training session, you can easily add it to your Outlook Calendar by simply dragging & dropping it.  From the view of the folder where the message is (most likely your Inbox), click on the little envelope icon, and drag it to the Calendar icon.

Outlook will create a new appointment for you -- you'll need to enter the time and date information, but the note field of the appointment form will contain the text of the email, which is convenient if the message contains details about the appointment, such as the address and travel directions, or link & login information for an online meeting.

You'll probably want to change the subject line of the appointment, so it shows up as something like "Selection Committee Meeting", instead of "Doodle poll to set the date of our next meeting".

Last week I asked someone to send me files as email attachments, and the 4 Publisher files turned a small 3KB message into 12MB.

Since large email attachments inflate the size of Outlook .pst files and can cause problems (as well as generating email quota warnings), I knew I needed to get those email attachments out of my mailbox.

Luckily, there's an easy way to do this -- without deleting the original email message or losing the attachments. You can save attachments to your local drive, and then delete them from the email message.

Here's how:

1. Open the email message in Outlook.

Note: The key to making this work is to open the message, not just read it in the viewing pane.

2. Right-click on the email attachment, and choose "Save As". Choose the local drive & folder in which to store the files.

If there are two or more attachments, in the right-click menu choose "Select All" to save all of them at one time.

3. Right click again and select the "Remove" option this time.

4. After you've removed the attachments and close the email message, Outlook will pop up a dialog window saying, "The attachments of the message have been changed. Do you want to save changes to this message?"  Click the "yes" button to save the message sans attachments.

Voilà -- the large files are deleted from Outlook, but your email message stays intact!

When you want to keep track of a project -- like who you communicated with, and what you talked about & decided -- but not all of your transactions on the project are email messages, you can use Outlook's Journal funtion to collect the info in one place. The Journal is an often-overlook feature of Outlook. It can create a timeline of transactions (phone calls, conversations, meetings, etc.) that can be linked to one of your contacts.

For details on how this might work for you, read more at this Productivity Portfolio 5-minute Tip.

[As mentioned in LifeHacker, via Jeff Gilderson-Duwe]

Bad news: the calendar in Outlook 2007 doesn't display holidays, unlike previous versions of Outlook.
Good news: adding holidays to your calendar is easy! Just follow these steps...  read more »

1. Open Outlook
2. Click Tools on the menu bar
3. In the Tools dropdown menu, click Options
4. In the Options dialog box, click the Calendar Options button
5. In the Calendar Options dialog box, click the Add Holidays button
6. In the Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box, click the box next to United States, and then click the OK button
   
7. The Import Holidays window will open
8. When a "The Holidas were added to your Calendar" confirmation dialog box pops up, click the OK button to close it
   
9. Click the OK button to close the Calendar Options dialog box
10. Click the OK button to close the Options dialog box
    

Did you know that your calendar in Outlook 2007 is customizable? Even though the default view might be Week, find out how you can make it Day or Month to suit your needs. And find out how to change it from a 7-day week view to a 5-day work-week view. You can also show more or less detail in your calendar. These and more custom settings are demonstrated in this 4½ minute video http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA102392311033.aspx.