The purpose of the Ribbon in Outlook is to help you become more efficient in getting your work done – be that processing e-mail in your Inbox (Mail Home Tab), managing your Calendar (Calendar Home Tab), or doing work in Tasks (Tasks Home Tab). In designing the Ribbons, we strove for consistency so that you’ll always be able to look to the left side to create a new item or to the right side to find a contact – and to the middle to get what you need to do - done. In Mail, the center...

Remember that cool mini calendar from Melissa MacBeth’s “ Preparing to be away ” blog post? Well, this post describes how to make one for your own Out of Office message! Here is an example mini calendar for the dates when I’ll be home for the holidays: Mini calendars are helpful and provide a visual reminder of how long you will be gone. I like to use them to emphasize when I’ll be back to answer e-mail. Instead of trying to deal with messy spacing and fonts to make your own mini calendar you can...

The Outlook Mobile Service (OMS) was introduced in Outlook 2007 to allow you to send and receive text messages in Outlook. It also enables you to configure mobile notifications to have important messages, calendar summaries, and reminders forwarded to your mobile phone as text messages. The OMS features depend on hosting providers which provide the connection between Outlook and your mobile phone. Until now, few users in North America were able to use these features because only a few wireless service...

A few months ago we blogged about the new To-Do Bar in Outlook 2007 , and today I'm going to expand on that by talking about the new Daily Task List , and how you can use it together with the To-Do Bar as a pretty cool little task-and-time-management system. Every good feature starts with a real-world problem, and the Daily Task List's problem is: “How do I relate the stuff I have to do (my task list) with the time I have to do it (my calendar)?” Outlook's approach is to carve out some...

Thanks to all of you who have installed the latest Outlook Live Connector Beta version 12.1. We’ve received lots of feedback through our blog, so we wanted to recap the top questions and provide some answers all in one post. Question 1: Do tasks and notes sync? No, the beta does not sync tasks and notes.  We are currently evaluating whether to support task and notes sync in a future release. If you are a premium customer (meaning you have a paid MSN subscription), you can go back to using...

The Outlook team is very pleased to announce the official release of Office 2007 Service Pack 2, the culmination of months of hard work to bring our users performance and reliability improvements which have been tested and shown to significantly improve the speed and responsiveness of Outlook! This Service Pack is the result of a large and directed effort to make your Outlook 2007 experience great and we think that you will be pleasantly surprised. The Outlook team targeted your most common daily...

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 2010 I was still able to find her email address quickly using Suggested Contacts. Suggested Contacts automatically keeps track of everyone you send...

Ever wonder what's going on with the person you haven't spoken to in a while?  Want to find out what's new with someone before sending them an email or giving them a call? If you do, Office 2013 is the product for you.

Office 2013 brings all the people you care about in one place. You can view contacts from multiple email accounts, and updates from social networks, including Facebook and LinkedIn. Office 2013 makes it easy for you to get things done with people.

If you are like most people, you have contact information spread across multiple different sources. For example, Wendy is a Facebook friend, a LinkedIn connection, and I have her personal mobile number saved in Outlook. In Office, I can see all of Wendy's data from these various sources in one place:

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Outlook 2013 uses newly-added support for the rich Exchange Active Sync (EAS) protocol that has become the gold standard used by smartphones and other mobile devices. EAS will sync mail, calendar, contacts and tasks from your Outlook.com account! We've heard many requests from users who want to sync their tasks from an Outlook.com account, and now you can.

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Hello from the Outlook team in Redmond! It's been a couple of months since we released the Preview of Outlook 2013, and many of you have already downloaded and used it. If you haven't given it a try, we encourage you to download it here . If you've been watching our blog recently , you already know about the release of our new consumer webmail offering, Outlook.com. The new version of Outlook for your PC is designed to work great with Outlook.com and Office365 . You can connect in seconds, and sync...