First Look Microsoft Office 2003
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If you're like most of us, the sheer volume of the e mail you receive in a day has increased dramatically. Not only do we sift through spam in various forms, but more and more people are using e mail as the communication channel of choice. There's logic behind that-e-mail is fast, simple, and you can read and respond when it's convenient for you, which is a great consideration if you attend meeting after meeting throughout the day and rarely find the time during business hours to return phone calls, for example.
E-mail is fast, convenient, and flexible, but it can get out of control quickly. When you receive interdepartmental e mail and e mail from service vendors and suppliers, prospective customers and long-term clients, your boss and your boss's boss, various industry publications, and friends and family, the volume can become unmanageable fast.
Realizing that people who work with information need a way to sort it quickly (which messages do you need to read right away, and which ones can you read later?) and a simple way to organize and store what's important, the developers of Outlook added several features that enable you to see the messages coming in and act on them accordingly.
One time-saving feature is the prompt that appears as a message is downloading. When a new message arrives, a message alert pops up in the lower right corner of the Outlook window showing the sender's name, the subject, and the first few words of the incoming message. You can skim the information in the message and opt whether to stop what you're doing and read the entire message or simply let it go to the Inbox where you can read it later.
| Note | Outlook 2003 also includes an improved Rules Wizard and a new alerts feature that enable you to automatically organize, sort, and store specific messages in folders you create. The alerts let you know when something on one of your SharePoint Team Services documents has been changed. For more about working with rules and alerts, see the section, 'Working with E-Mail Rules and Alerts,' later in this chapter. |
Another small-but-helpful time-saving feature: a message info tag appears when you position the cursor over a selected message, giving you information about the sender, the date and time the message was sent, and the subject and size of the message. This can be helpful when you're looking for a particular message but don't want to expand the Inbox column or read through too many subject lines.
If you often find yourself scrolling through dozens of old messages, looking for the specific one you want, you'll love the Arrange by Conversation option that allows you to display messages as threaded conversations. This option groups all messages with a related subject together so that you can easily find the one you're looking for. The new messages are displayed at the top of the thread, and unread messages are nested beneath. Click on the expand button to see past messages related to that subject, and click the collapse button to hide the display of the messages when you no longer need them. (See Figure 2-4.)
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