If you’re making the switch from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2007 or 2010 you may find the Ribon (menu system) difficult to navigate. If you’re working from a home computer it may seem surprising that people still use Office 2003.  However a high percentage of corporate and institutional users have stuck with 2003 rather than upgrade. Why?  First, Office 2003 meets most users’ needs and second it is very costly to upgrade...

Have you ever received an e-mail that looks real but you weren’t quite sure?  If so, don’t open it.  Lately I’ve received dozens of messages that look like they’re from our IT support department.  They looked so convincing that I almost opened the first one.  Fortunately I didn’t do it. Spammers are a clever bunch (I’m being very nice) and can make a very nasty message look like it’s from your...

If you create the same e-mail on a regular basis, then you will like the Outlook e-mail template tool. Although Outlook’s e-mail template function is hard to find, it is very easy to use. Watch this short video to learn how to do...

Hey there masochists early adopters it’s official, the beta version of Microsoft Office 2010 is now available for download. All 684MB of it! Just start it up and go have lunch. I’m not quite ready to give it a spin, but I have to sooner or later to start preparing for  the latest version of Master Your Workload with Outlook.  The words Beta and Microsoft in one sentence make me just a little concerned. Maybe I’ve...

Your daily to do list can seem like a burden if you use it as an inventory of everything you want to accomplish between now and the end of time. Too many people feel as if they accomplish nothing because they’re unable to complete dozens of tasks in a day.  Frustrated at the end of the day, they re-write their task list wishing that the time to get it all done tomorrow will  magically appear.  Doing this day in and day out is...

In our earlier article about performing an e-mail audit I promised to demonstrate how to use Outlook’s rules to automatically move your Like to Have messages to specific folders. Outlook gives you two ways to create rules. One is very robust but rather complex. The other is quick, simple and applies to most users’ needs. Watch this Outlook Time Saver to learn the quick way to create a...

If you find yourself deleting a large number of e-mails each day, it is a good idea to take a few minutes to do a quick E-mail Audit to assess the sources.  Armed with this information you can take action to reduce your e-mail bloat so that you can focus more time and energy on the things that are important to you. Here’s a quick video about how to do it: Here are the steps: Sort your inbox by the From (sender) column. In most...

Microsoft has been giving us sneak peeks at the new Outlook (and the rest of Office) 2010 over the past several months. Recently they released this video that gives as an even closer look under the hood. It hints about some very cool features that can streamline your e-mail management. The mail management features that look very promising, but the one that has me really excited is are the “Quick Steps” function. Quick Steps...