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Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #11 Search

Well I’ve been on an end of summer vacation and so it’s taken a while to finish the series, but at least we’ve saved the best feature until last! And that’s the search that comes with Outlook 2010.

After years of the clunky Advanced Search in Outlook 2003 where you were forced into carefully filing emails in very specific folders or experienced a world of waiting for Advanced Search to go through all your folders in the hope of finding that email you were sure you’d filed into Project X only to find you’d accidentally dropped it in Project F.

But no more.

Now simply type your search term in the box above the emails and Outlook quickly goes through that folder looking for the term you’ve entered. And I mean quickly.

Should you not find the item in that folder just click on the link below the results to expand the search across all your folders. And the speed at which it does this will blow you away if you were expecting Outlook 2003 Advanced Search type performance!

As you use the search the ribbon shifts into the Search Contextual Tab and from here with a simple click you get even more options. Like just show me the emails with attachments.

Take a look at this site for more information on the options available to make Outlook 2010 even more powerful.

Now if only Autonomy would hook into this and add a “Try searching again across emails in My Workspaces (WorkSite)” link below the Microsoft one, a link that would fire an IDOL search across all your filed emails in the WorkSite document management system!

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #10 Out of Office

OK, this one’s a bit of a cheat as it’s not really a cool new feature, more a case of “where on earth has it gone?”. Yes this one’s a bit like the big print button (you know that one that stares you in the face on the Print pane but first time in you spent ages looking for!), it’s right there on the backstage.

If you’ve got Outlook 2010 communicating to an Exchange 2003 environment, then your Out of Office will be a familiar pop-up where you can just enter your message. However if you’ve got Exchange 2010 then you get some additional options which are quite handy.

• First you can have different messages for internal recipients and external recipients. Handy when you want to provide extra contact information for employees of your firm on who to contact but which you may not want to pass onto the client.

• Also you can setup specific times for auto responses. So if you want to send auto responses only in business hours for example.

• You have the choice of using HTML in out of office replies, not sure why you’d want to but it’s there.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #9 Preview documents within the email

This feature is simple yet brilliant.

You receive an email with one or more attachments.

Single click on the attachment and the document is displayed within the email body.

So no loading up a separate copy of Word, just a preview of the document quickly within the same application!

“What if we’ve a document management system and we send links rather than copies of the document?” well from what I understand a preview of NRL links sent using iManage WorkSite is on the roadmap for development! Which is great news if it is released. If you’re reading this and work for Autonomy and can confirm this, please post in the comments.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #8 Using drag and drop to create tasks

Alright the title is a little misleading and this one definitely goes in the category of “I just found this out but it could well have been there in Office 2007 and maybe even 2003!”, but I hope you’ll forgive the inclusion, it’s new for me in 2010 and I think it’s really useful.

It’s a quick way of using tasks rather than your Inbox as your task list.

How many times have you heard lawyers (or even people in Legal IT depts) say they use their Inbox as a to-do list? (I’ve even heard of some people using their deleted items folder as a task list but let’s not go there!). This tip is a quick way to use drag and drop to quickly create a task using the information within the email.

The scenario:

• You get an email that requires an action.

• You want to keep the information on the email with the task.

• You could (as I used to) create a task with – refer to email from Jason 02/08/2011. But you can’t clear that email out until the task has been actioned.

OR

• You can drag and drop your email to the Tasks navigation button in the bottom left, when you let go of the mouse button a task is created with the Subject as the title of that email and with the content of the email in the task body. Set your due date and then you can delete the email. Job done!

This also works for calendar items. So if you want to pull a meeting together where the email would be useful pasting into the meeting request, just use the same process and drag and drop into the Calendar navigation button.

Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #6 The organiser pane

I love the “organiser pane” or “right hand pane” in Outlook 2010, but you’ll need a nice sized widescreen monitor to really appreciate it!

I have my Outlook set up with the vertical reading pane (what you still use the horizontal reading pane?? That’s so Outlook 2000!). So I’ve got my traditional 3 panes. From left to right I’ve the folders list, then my email items view and then my reading pane. Outlook 2010 then brings me a fourth pane.

In here I can see a view of the current month with my upcoming appointment just below. Then under that I’ve my current tasks. And finally the people I’ve most recently IM’d (instant messaged using Office Communicator or Lync, more of IM integration in a later post).

So without having to jump into my calendar and tasks, in one view I can see all my recent stuff. Emails, Appointments, Tasks and contacts! It doesn’t sound much but it is one of the most useful features I’ve encountered in 2010.