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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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...

The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We’ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments! In previous posts I have talked about Message Templates and Advanced Message Templates , and how I use them to easily manage status reports or any other type of e-mail that I regularly send. While Message Templates are very powerful, sometimes I just want a simple way to easily insert...

With Microsoft Outlook 2010, you can stay connected by sending and receiving text messages (SMS). For instance, you could send a quick note to a co-worker saying you're running late for a meeting. You can also forward your upcoming Outlook schedule or important e-mail messages as a text message directly to a mobile device.  This post shows you the two ways to set up text messaging in Outlook.

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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...

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...

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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On Tuesday, December 14, we released an update (KB2412171) for Microsoft Outlook 2007. We have discovered several issues with the update and want to inform you about problems you might encounter and what corrective steps we recommend. As of December 16, this Outlook 2007 update has been removed from Microsoft Update. This Outlook 2007 update was distributed via Microsoft Update. Many of you receive updates automatically and if you installed the update between Tuesday, December 14, and Thursday, December...

The To-Do Bar is brand-new to Outlook 2007, and enables you to track your time and tasks wherever you are in the application. We hope you’ll find the post below informative, and in the coming months we will posting more about tips and tricks about using the To-Do Bar. Enjoy! Instead of looking at scraps of paper, notepads, planners, and the Outlook Inbox, you can see everything you need to do simply by looking at the To-Do Bar. The To-Do Bar shows a Date Navigator (a small monthly calendar), your...

When Outlook doesn’t shutdown cleanly, your Outlook Data File (either a .pst or .ost file) can be left in an unverified state that can cause one of the following errors to appear the next time you boot Outlook: “Outlook cannot open the data file filename until it has been checked for problems.” “Microsoft Office Outlook’ exited without properly closing your Outlook data file ‘ drive :\Users\ username \AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.ost’. ‘Microsoft...