Microsoft Outlook 2000 for Windows for Dummies

Deep space adventurers have control panels on their spaceships, explorers in the Wild West had their faithful guides, and detectives have their little black books. Why? Because every adventurer knows how important it is to have good information. Knowing about the people with whom you're dealing, the things you need to do, and when you have to do them can make a difference between triumph and failure.

Okay, maybe your daily adventures aren't exactly life-and-death struggles, but having a tool to help you keep a handle on what you need to do and whom you need to see from day to day is really nice. Microsoft Outlook 2000 has become that tool for millions of professionals – and probably you, too! Outlook 2000 is a Personal Information Manager that can act as your assistant in dealing with the flurry of small, but important, details that stand between you and the work that you do.

But how do you get started with Outlook 2000 if you've never used it before? How do you make sense of all those buttons and windows? And how do you actually get something accomplished after you figure all that out? Let Microsoft Outlook 2000 For Windows For Dummies come dashing to your rescue. This easy-to-understand guide can make organizing your daily information easy by helping you bring together everything you need to know about your daily tasks, appointments, and e-mail messages into one convenient program.

Here are just a few things you can find in Microsoft Outlook 2000 For Windows For Dummies:

• Understanding the Outlook interface and finding the right View for you
• Using e-mail and filtering junk e-mail
• Setting up your contacts
• Scheduling appointments and meetings
• Tracking your task list
• Keeping an automatic journal in Outlook
• Sharing folders over the Internet
• Top Ten lists for creating better e-mail messages, using Outlook on the Internet, and finding shortcuts in Outlook

So whether you're using Outlook for the first time or you're an experienced user looking for ways to streamline Outlook, Microsoft Outlook 2002 For Windows For Dummies can help you organize your daily details and get back to business.

The latest release of Microsoft Outlook 2000, Microsoft's tool for managing time, tasks, contacts, and resources at a personal level, runs more smoothly and has more features than any of its predecessors. Microsoft Outlook 2000 for Dummies shows you--without wasting time--how to use this powerful program.

Author Bill Dyszell dedicates much of this book to electronic mail. Though readers get a thorough overview of how to configure Outlook to retrieve e-mail from a mail server on the Internet, the author (perhaps unfairly) assumes that users on a local area network (LAN) have access to an organizational guru to configure their mail for them. Once you get connected, you can count on this book to explain how to filter, sort, store, track, and otherwise use Outlook to get the most out of e-mail. You'll also find explanations of related features, like the Contact List and Tasks List.

Dyszel pays a fair amount of attention to the ways in which you can customize Outlook. That's important, because customization can significantly improve Outlook's usefulness and it's one of the program's least intuitive capabilities.

Microsoft Outlook 2000 for Dummies also shows you how to fix up the button bar to your liking, as well as how to add and delete columns in tables and modify sort sequences. The book also shows how to add custom fields to Outlook's forms. --David Wall