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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In January of this year, we released an update to the software that connects Outlook Social Connector (OSC) to Facebook. Starting on May 1^st, all users of the Facebook provider for the OSC will need to download this update to continue getting social media updates from their Facebook contacts and to avoid getting errors when they connect to Facebook via the OSC.

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If you are a heavy email user like me, chances are good that you subscribe to a lot of mailing lists. Unsolicited spam is one issue we battle in our inboxes, but perhaps more perplexing is the amount of email messages that we call “graymail.” Graymail consists of all those newsletters and notifications that can be useful, but aren’t necessarily what you you want at the top of your Inbox. The Rules feature in Outlook 2010 makes it easy to sort emails that need your attention from the graymail ones that don't. This post shows you how.

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Schedule View is a horizontal layout for the Outlook calendar that shows you many calendars at the same time.  If you and your co-workers share calendars, this feature makes it much easier to schedule meetings with each other.

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It's kind of funny that a software application would use abbreviations that refer to pre-software days. Remember carbon copies? Cc means carbon copy and Bcc means blind carbon copy. For emailing, you use Cc when you want to copy others publicly, and Bcc when you want to do it privately. Any recipients on the Bcc line of an email are not visible to others on the email. These five tips get beginners started and provide info for those who already know how to use Bcc.

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Watch ths Office 15-Minute Webinar to learn about uncluttering your inbox with Outlook. You can join Office webinars at 9:15 am PDT on Tuesdays. Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for complete information.

What you will learn at the webinar

1. How to search in Outlook
2. Clean-up with Conversation View
3. Delete: a personal philosophy
4. What are...

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A common problem with email searches is that they can return too many results. For example, entering someone’s name may return matches where the name appears in parts of the message’s body even though you meant to look for messages from that person. It can be also hard to enter other criteria to help narrow your search, such as whether it has an attachment or that it has a particular category applied. Wouldn’t it be great if you could specify these parameters easily and get a better set of results - finding what you want even faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easy!

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We wanted to let you know about some good news from the Exchange team.They've released a new administrative tool called PST Capture that helps IT administrators manage .pst files. It lets them search across networks to discover .pst files and then import them into Exchange Server or Exchange Online.So what's a .pst file?

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Recently, we released a small update to the software that connects the Outlook Social Connector to Facebook. If you already use the Outlook Social Connector to connect to Facebook, you can get the software update in our download center. If you don't use Outlook Social Connector, you should try it out. It integrates your contacts and email messages in Outlook with status updates from social networks in one single place for you to view. The really good thing about the update is that it lets you connect...

I'm starting a new feature here on the Outlook blog: A seasonal roundup of the best and brightest blog posts, articles, and general news about Outlook. Take a look; you may have missed something that could very well change your life (at least the way you email about it, calendar around it, and make tasks for it).

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