Using Outlook to manage and read your RSS feeds has several advantages over a stand-alone aggregator, including the ability to place flags and run rules on any RSS feed to which you subscribe. Some of you might be wondering what is RSS? Really Simple Syndication (usually referred to as RSS) is a way to get updates to websites sent to you instead of having to go back to the web to see if any changes have been made. In this way, you can keep up-to-date on news and information from many different sources...

We’ve previously blogged about the To-Do Bar in Outlook. Here are a few tips that show how this little slice of screen real estate is more than just a static list; in fact, you can easily customize it to reflect the priorities in your work day and week. First off, don’t get rid of the To-Do Bar when you need more screen space on a smaller monitor! You can easily minimize it by clicking the at the top of the To-Do Bar. You can then conveniently expand and collapse it while working that...

If you’re a fan of the Outlook 2007 To-Do Bar, but wish your upcoming appointments and tasks could be shown even when Outlook was minimized, I’ve got great news for you, you can do this today with the Outlook Sidebar Gadgets. One of the new features introduced in Windows Vista is the Windows Sidebar, an application that allows gadgets—small applications that provide quick access to useful information or commands—to be displayed on your desktop or in the Sidebar. The Sidebar presented a great opportunity...

Hello, Office 2010 Beta users! A couple of months ago, Michael discussed the new Conversations arrangement in Microsoft Outlook 2010. We hope you’re enjoying using Conversations. Since the Conversations arrangement offers new capabilities for your Inbox , we want to share some videos to help you better understand how Conversations make your Inbox easier to manage. Feel free to comment, and let us know what you think. These videos are best viewed in full screen mode.     Jenny Liu and Josh...

Conditional formatting is an Outlook tool for making sure your important email messages stick out in your Inbox. The tool lets you customize how different messages appear in your Inbox based on criteria that you set. This post shows you how.

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Over the past few months, we have shared our excitement about the new features of Outlook 2010, such as Quick Steps, Conversations, and the Contact Card. Our team is proud to announce that Outlook and the rest of Office 2010 are available in retail stores and online today. Thank you to the millions of you who downloaded and tried our Beta and provided feedback. Get a trial or buy it today at www.office.com ! The Outlook 2010 Team

Outlook.com left preview a few weeks ago, and as part of that, we shared that we'd start to upgrade the hundreds of millions of people using Hotmail to the new, modern Outlook.com experience. We had done multiple pilots during the preview period and learned a ton. Overall, the upgrade has been going very well - people have upgraded much faster than we had expected. The vast majority of people using our services have had a smooth experience during this time and are enjoying the new Outlook.com experience. That said, we had an issue yesterday and wanted to provide you with a deeper look at what happened.

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Having a printed copy of your Outlook calendar can be quite convenient. If the available printing options aren’t sufficient for your needs you should try the Microsoft Calendar Printing Assistant for Outlook 2007 . The Calendar Printing Assistant supports a wide variety of layout templates and allows you to print multiple shared calendars at once. Here are some examples: The Calendar Printing Assistant is a separate program from Outlook. After you install it from the link above, you can find...

After each post, we often receive responses from users with specific support questions and feature requests. Microsoft offers several sites featuring comprehensive support for a wide-range of issues, targeted at all levels of expertise. I’ll cover each of these in some detail below. Microsoft Support (support.microsoft.com) Microsoft Support is a great first stop for any end user in need of troubleshooting. This portal contains articles on many of the most commonly reported issues across different...

Outlook 2003 introduced integration with SharePoint, allowing you to see some SharePoint information (like calendars) in Outlook alongside your personal information. In Outlook 2007, we made this a whole lot better. Here we’ll focus on the new Document Library syncing capability that allows you to easily access, preview, search, and edit your SharePoint document libraries in Outlook. To begin, let’s start by syncing an existing Document Library to Outlook: 1. First, navigate to a SharePoint...