Three Outlook 2010 favorites you need to know about

I probably spend most of my working day in Outlook—work email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and even personal email (hey if Outlook makes it so easy then I have no choice but to use it). Every new version of Outlook comes with its own set of new and improved features, but Outlook 2010 really raised the bar (and frankly, I'm not easily impressed).

And even though you and I both have been using Office 2010 for more than a while now and have started to take some of these fun and useful features for granted, it's time to trot them out again for you, in case you're not aware of them or completely forgot about them.

Below are my three favorite new/improved features in Outlook 2010.

Conversation View

This view improves tracking and managing related messages, regardless of the folder that contains the messages. You can see the complete course of the conversation, including your responses, find the most recent responses, and figure out a lot more easily which messages are the most important to you. You can also easily categorize or ignore a complete conversation (I explain the Ignore feature in the next item).

Read more about Conversation View

Ignore button

I take serious issue when people use the Reply All button indiscriminately. Well now, neither you nor I have to be a party to all of the messages that have no business being messages: "Me too!" "I agree!" "Does anyone have the password?" Welcome to the age of the Ignore command, which moves the whole conversation and any future messages that arrive in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder. I feel I've been waiting my whole adult life for this feature, and I sorely wish I could implement it in oh-so-many other ways...)

Quick Steps

A Quick Step applies multiple actions at once to an e-mail. There are some default Quick Steps such as Move to (moves the selected message to a mail folder you choose and marks the message as read), Reply & Delete (opens a reply to the selected message and then deletes the original message), and Create New (where you create your own Quick Step to do anything you want, name it, and even assign it an icon to help you identify it).

Read more about how to use and create Quick Steps and read about how top MVP Diane Poremsky cuts down on email drudge work with Quick Steps.

You'll never lose a message, miss a meeting, or forget to follow up on anything anymore. You, my friend, are a model of consistency, competence, and class (not to mention efficiency, effectiveness, and equilibrium).

If you like these tips, I am chock full of them (and other things too) so let me know via your comments below and I'll slice open the top of  my head and allow more of them to pour forth.

— Annik