- Sending, receiving, storing, and managing email. That sounds pretty obvious. But I'm including it here anyway, just to gain agreement with my readers on the boundaries here.
- Scheduling meetings and events. More on that later, but if you work in an office that runs Microsoft Exchange Server, Outlook is about all you need to make sure that meeting announcements get to the right people.
- To-do lists.
Again, to be consistent with my ongoing tradition, what is Outlook not good for? A few things jump right out at me:
- Outlook sucks as a project management tool. I can remember one very specific job I had a few years ago as a programmer. My Project Manager would use Outlook to assign tasks to people. Sounds good on the surface, but the reality was, Dave had nowhere he could look to see the big picture; how what I was doing was related to Brad, or Steve, or Frank. That was the hugest problem. Not to mention, if we had to bill a client for services, there really wasn't any way to create meaningful invoices. In answer to your next question, Microsoft Project.
- Outlook is mediocre as a mail merge data source. I've found, after multiple trials and errors, that when I have my contacts stored in Outlook, and I try to use that contact database as a data source in Word, then I don't have access to all the contact fields. Port it into Excel, and all is well. (For my money, though, I'd probably choose Access. That'll be my final Getting it Right topic, which will probably be a while.)
- Outlook is weak for making organization-wide forms, for such functions as time off requests, expense reports, and the like. The scripting language behind Outlook is kind of weird, and not very intuitive. For my money, making forms that people can use could be either done via an Access client-server application, or via a company Intranet, with web forms.
Now, for the best Outlook practices:
- Let's start with e-mail. E-mail is all about folders. I would recommend that folders should have a logical, intuitive structure. I have a client who works for an engineering firm; I recommend to people like her to put emails in folders by client name; in the case of my boss, he has one folder for each of the techs he supervises. Those are both logical, intuitive strategies.
- E-mail part 2 - when you get an e-mail whose sole purpose is to say, "Hi Geoff, here's the attachment you asked for," you have a ready-made way to save space on your account. Right-click on the attachment, and save that attachment to the proper folder on your hard drive. That's part one. Part two, delete the email. Otherwise, you're hogging up server space needlessly.
- Emails should be brief and to the point. If you have a long, involved process to describe, you're probably better off sending the process as an attachment (like a Word document) rather than let the email do the work.
- On emails - grammar and spelling still matter, I don't care what anyone says. And yeah, spell check is all well and good, but it won't prevent malapropisms and grammatical errors. One of the most grievous malapropisms I ever saw was when a manager a few years ago happily reported that "Linda excepted a position..." Yeah, spell check let that one go through. As well it should have. But the person sending it should not have.
- On email options in Tools->Options that make sense:
- Tools->Options->Spelling and Grammar - check "Always check spelling before sending." As mentioned earlier, this won't solve everything, but a good place to start.
- Tools->Options->Mail Format. Make at least two signatures - one internal and one external. My internal signature includes my cube number, my AIM address, and my extension. My external signature is pretty much prescribed to me by company policy. But that's OK.
- On email attachments - don't just double-click on them to open them. Bad idea. Instead, right-click on the attachment, and then save the attachment somewhere useful, like My Documents. Problem is, if you just open the document, it gets saved in your TEMP directory, and is almost impossible to find later.
- On email templates - some of you may know that you can create a template in Word, or Excel, or PowerPoint. But what about Outlook? Can do. Create a message with a subject line, intended recipient(s), and body. Do not include attachments. Trust me, those don't work.
- Once you have the skeletal framework in place, in the message, go to File->Save As. Choose the file type "*.oft."
- Put the file where prompted - probably C:\Documents and Settings\[user]\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates. That's OK.
- To use that template, click on the "File" menu from Outlook, and click on "Choose Form." Click on "Personal Forms Library." You'll see your template.
