Outlook Web Access

Conditional Formatting: Highlight your most important mails

Last month I wrote about how to quickly create rules to help rid your Inbox of so-called graymail. This week I wanted to share another tool for making sure the right email messages stick out when you’re reading down the message list in your Inbox. This advice comes straight out of the Outlook Best Practices – a series of guidelines to help you be as productive as possible with Outlook.

Conditional Formatting allows you to customize how different messages appear in your Inbox message list based on criteria that you set. By default, conditional formatting makes unread messages bold. By adding your own customizations, you can highlight the messages that are most important to you.

For example, when you are at work, emails that are sent directly to you and no one else are probably some of the more important messages for you to review. For that reason you might want to set these messages to appear larger than others in your Inbox.

To set up Conditional Formatting from your Inbox, on the View tab, in the Current View group, click View Settings, and then click Conditional Formatting. Click Add to create a conditional formatting rule.

Let me take you through an example. I first created a formatting rule for mail that is sent only to me, so after clicking Add, I named it “Only You.”

Next, I clicked Condition and then specified that I want this to apply for messages where I am the only person on the To line.

After clicking OK, I clicked Font and then selected how I want the text to appear in the message list. Because these are the most important messages, I chose a red color and a larger, bold font.

I repeated these steps to create conditional formatting for mail where I am on the To line with other people, mail that I was on the CC line, and mail that was sent to a specific distribution list (DL) instead of directly to me. Here are the results of what these look like in my Inbox.

The different sizes and colors help me see the most important emails and leave the others for later. I recommend that you try conditional formatting rules that help you keep your Inbox more organized. For some people that might mean using a specific color for messages from family members, or making messages from your boss larger than others. We love to hear what works for you, so leave a comment below.

Josh Meisels

Outlook Program Manager

Community Support at answers.microsoft.com

Hello Readers,

Many of you have posted comments on our previous posts asking for help with specific features or questions with Outlook 2010. While we enjoy hearing your thoughts about Outlook, we cannot support individual users via blog comments.

That’s why we want to introduce you to answers.microsoft.com, a community forum where you can post questions and receive responses from other users, Microsoft MVPs, and support personnel. Best of all, support from answers.microsoft.com is free!

If you’re an Outlook expert, test your skills by answering other users’ questions on answers.microsoft.com. If you have questions about Outlook or Microsoft Office, check out the answers forum to see if other people have asked your question, or ask your own. You can also find forums for other Microsoft products such as Windows, Security Essentials, or Windows Phone. We hope you find the answers forum a useful reference!

Josh Meisels

Outlook Program Manager

Suggested Contacts: Never lose an email address

Last week I needed to send an email to a contact at Contoso, a company we partner with on marketing materials. Unfortunately, I had not emailed my contact in about a year and I couldn’t remember her name, let alone her email address. Since we had only exchanged a few emails I had neglected to add her to my Outlook contacts. However, with Outlook 2010 I was still able to find her email address quickly using Suggested Contacts.

Suggested Contacts automatically keeps track of everyone you send a message to. Unlike the Auto-Complete List that appears when you begin typing a name or e-mail address in the To, Cc, or Bcc boxes of a message, you can search your suggested contacts, and there is no maximum number of suggested contacts (the Auto-Complete List has a maximum of 1,000 entries).

Here’s how I found my Contoso contact. In the Navigation Pane, I clicked Contacts. Then I clicked the Suggested Contacts folder. In the search box near the top I entered @contoso, knowing that my contact’s email address would end with @contoso.com or @contoso.net. Sure enough, I found her — Anna Lidman. For good measure, I dragged Anna’s contact business card from Suggested Contacts to my Outlook Contacts folder so I would have it handy in the future.

Thanks to Suggested Contacts I don’t feel stupid when I forget someone’s email address or even their name; I can easily search or browse and find the people I’m looking for.

Let us know if you’ve had an occasion to use Suggested Contacts and what you think of this new feature.

Josh Meisels
Outlook Program Manager

Insert and send a calendar!

During the summer season, I like to travel and visit my family and friends. Before I leave the office for my trips, I share these important dates with my colleagues so they know that I won’t be around the office. Instead of sending an email message to my colleagues with a list of dates, I prefer to include a visual representation of my calendar.

On the Insert tab, in the Include group, click Calendar.

I choose which calendar that I want to include in my message.

After I click OK, my calendar is inserted into the message body.

This enables my colleagues to see which days I’ll be away.

I’ve found this handy for visually sharing other important dates with my colleagues, such as project deadlines. I can also send my calendar to friends that aren’t using Outlook, such as those that are using a Hotmail account.

Have you been using this? Let us know!

Quick Rule Creation in Outlook 2010

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, coupons, and notifications that can sometimes be useful, but aren’t the things that you want to appear at the top of your Inbox. For example, some of the graymail I regularly receive includes notifications from Netflix, sale flyers from a local outdoors retailer, and email from a food and wine discussion group.

I like to see what movie Netflix has shipped to me, or what is on sale at my favorite stores, but since these messages aren’t time-sensitive and I don’t need to reply, I don’t want them to appear in my Inbox. I would rather move the messages to a folder where I can browse them later.

Outlook 2010 makes it easy for me to sort emails that need attention from graymail. For example, when I received a shipping notification from Netflix, on the ribbon I went to the Home tab and then clicked Rules. Then I clicked Always Move Messages from: Netflix. The sender was suggested based on the message sender and recipients (if it was sent to people other than you).

For a destination folder, I selected my Notifications and Alerts folder so that all of my current and future messages from Netflix would go to that folder. I did the same thing for other companies that regularly send me messages about sales and events that I am interested in.

Now, I’ll never see another Netflix notification in my Inbox, but they are always available in my Notification and Alerts folder that I review at my convenience every day or two.

When I sign up for a new mailing list such as the Food and Wine list I am on I use this “Always Move” command to quickly create a rule that moves messages sent to that mailing list to a new folder I make specifically for those emails.

I hope this simple way to create rules helps you take control of your Inbox by moving graymail messages into their own folders and keeping only the most important messages in your Inbox.

Josh Meisels

Outlook Program Manager

Developing a provider for the Outlook Social Connector version 1.1

Following the release of the Outlook Social Connector (OSC) version 1.1 and the availability of new and updated providers, we have released a set of updated and expanded content for developers. The Outlook Social Connector 1.1 Provider Reference incorporates content from OSC 1.0 with new additions for OSC 1.1.

If you’re developing a provider for the OSC, here is a quick guide to the new provider reference on MSDN:

• Getting Started with Developing an Outlook Social Connector Provider helps you understand why and how to develop a provider. For developers who are just getting acquainted with OSC provider development, I especially recommend the topic entitled Quick Steps for Learning to Develop a Provider.
• Updated content on provider deployment and packaging. See the topic entitled Installation Checklist for guidelines about building a provider installation package. Although OSC 1.1 is not redistributable, you can link to the appropriate OSC 1.1 installer using a GLINK.
• Completely new content on testing a provider. See the section entitled Getting Ready to Release an OSC Provider. This section contains the complete guide for your Quality Assurance team to fully test provider installation, authentication, and core OSC features such as contact and activity sync.
• Updated code samples for OSC 1.1. The code samples include a working sample provider and provider templates for Visual Basic, Visual C#, and C++. The code samples require Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 or Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

If you are a developer interested in building a provider for the Outlook Social Connector, review this new reference content on MSDN. If you have questions or issues with the documentation, contact us at oscprex@microsoft.com. Happy coding!

Randy Byrne

Microsoft Outlook Program Manager

Use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live!

Outlook is the premier communications tool to stay connected with colleagues, friends, and family. Your email messages, even from multiple accounts, are in one place. Connections and communication also happen on websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live. Through these sites, you find new contacts and reconnect with old ones. You can share who you are, what you think, what you are doing, and what you like or don’t like. So, it makes sense that you can now add your friends and colleagues to these sites and get their activities from within Outlook.

Today, we are announcing that you can use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook and Windows Live. Our partners LinkedIn and MySpace are also releasing updates for their providers. All of the latest providers appear on the provider page.

We are also releasing the Outlook Social Connector for Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Office Outlook 2003 in the following languages:

Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai, with more languages in the upcoming months.

You can the download Outlook Social Connector for your language at the Microsoft Download Center.

Lastly, we are also releasing an update to the Outlook Social Connector for Outlook 2010. This update is distributed through Microsoft Update.

To learn more about the Outlook Social Connector, see this introductory article.

With today’s updates:

You can add friends and colleagues to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live, directly from the Outlook People Pane.

When viewing a message from someone, you see real-time updates from his or her activities on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Windows Live. You see information that your friends and co-workers have made public on those sites, as long as the email address they are using to communicate with you has been added to their account settings on the social network.

We believe that the information you share through social networks is a matter of personal choice. You should decide whether to share very little, or reveal a lot about yourself. You might decide to share information only with your friends, or share details with everyone. You might decide to have a strong division between personal networks and professional ones, or between social networking and email. The Outlook Social Connector respects what you decide to share through social networks. Other people using the Outlook Social Connector can only see information about you based on what you have made public to them on social networks and the email address in your profile on the social network.

You can review our privacy policy here. You can also review those of our partners by visiting their sites to understand each option and help make your personal choices to protect your privacy.

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How is social networking and Outlook working for you? We look forward to your comments.

Randy Byrne, Program Manager, Microsoft Outlook

Alessio Roic, Program Manager, Microsoft Outlook

Paco Contreras Herrera, Group Product Manager, Microsoft Office

Choosing the right communication modality with the contact card

A few weeks ago, I posted about the new contact card in Outlook 2010 and how useful it is when you want to find out more about someone in your organization. Perhaps even more useful is the way that the contact card enables you to contact people quickly from Outlook.

In order to use these features your organization must be using an instant messaging client that integrates with Outlook using the Microsoft Office 2010 Presence Integration API.

You may remember Jed from my first contact card post. After helping Jed with some design research, we worked together on a few new prototypes for his project. Earlier today Jed sent me the final prototypes that he was sharing with his team’s management at a design meeting. I looked at the designs and found a few serious issues I wanted to correct before Jed’s presentation. However, his meeting was less than an hour away! Because of the short amount of time to make changes I decided it would be best to use IM to tell Jed.

I saw his name at the top of the email message and noticed his status was green, indicating he was available. Hovering over Jed’s name opened the contact hover card. I clicked the chat icon to start an IM chat.

After a minute or so I hadn’t received a response, which means Jed probably wasn’t looking at his computer screen. Going back to the email I hovered on his name again and this time chose to call him using Office Communicator which uses the speakers and microphone on my computer. Jed answered and I was able to share the problems that I had caught in the designs so he could incorporate changes before presenting the prototype to his group’s managers.

In today’s workplace we often need to move seamlessly between communication modalities like email, IM, and phone. When you combine the Outlook 2010 Inbox with the power of an IM and voice client that uses our presence APIs for seamless integration you can always choose the right way to communicate. The next time an email conversation drags on over an endless argument try switching to a real-time communication. With Office Communicator you can have a video call or share your screen so other people see what you see.

Office Labs: Forgotten Attachment Detector now supports Arabic, German, and Japanese

Our friends in Office Labs have recently released a new version of the Forgotten Attachment Detector. This Outlook add-in reviews your email message before it is sent to make sure that if you’ve mentioned an attachment, there actually is one.

The Forgotten Attachment Detector can be used with Outlook 2010, 2007 and 2003. This updated version includes support for Arabic, German, and Japanese.

To try the Forgotten Attachment Detector, check it out on the Office Labs blog.

Alessio Roic
Microsoft Outlook Senior Program Manager

Outlook 2010 Available Today!

Over the past few months, we have shared our excitement about the new features of Outlook 2010, such as Quick Steps, Conversations, and the Contact Card.  Our team is proud to announce that Outlook and the rest of Office 2010 are available in retail stores and online today. Thank you to the millions of you who downloaded and tried our Beta and provided feedback. Get a trial or buy it today at www.office.com!

The Outlook 2010 Team

Announcing the PST File Format SDK

I am pleased to announce the availability of the PST File Format SDK. The PST File Format SDK provides a cross-platform C++ library for reading files using the Outlook Personal Folders File Format (.pst) Structure Specification. This announcement represents another important step in the Outlook team’s commitment to the Microsoft Interoperability Principles.

Why does this matter to me?

If you are a developer building a solution that accesses Outlook Data Files (.pst), this SDK provides a source code library to jumpstart your application development. Happy coding!

Otherwise, if you use Outlook in a business or organization setting, this announcement helps developers create solutions for email archiving, backup, and legal discovery. With the PST File Format SDK, Outlook does not have to be installed on a computer for applications to access Outlook Data Files (.pst).

Randy Byrne
Outlook Senior Program Manager

Using the contact card to learn who someone is

Have you ever received an email message from someone that you don’t know and struggled desperately to figure out who they are? Luckily, when your organization upgrades to Microsoft Outlook 2010 you’ll have quicker access to information about your co-workers without leaving your Inbox.

The other day, after lunch, I returned to my desk and found an urgent email from another Microsoft employee, Jed, asking if I could pass along the design research data from an Outlook study I conducted last week. The problem was, I had no idea who this guy was, and the research is confidential. At a big company like Microsoft, it’s not uncommon to get messages from people that you don’t know, but I still didn’t want to forward the research without knowing exactly who Jed is.

Using the contact hover card in Outlook 2010 I hovered my mouse pointer over Jed’s name at the top of the message and saw that he is a Program Manager. Program Managers design new features for our products, so his need for design research data could be appropriate. Still cautious and unsure how Jed got my email address in the first place, I expanded the hover card to reveal Jed’s full contact card, and then clicked the Organization tab, which allows you to see people in the organizational structure if your organization uses Exchange and Active Directory. From here I realized the he works for Ryan Gregg, a good friend of mine, which was probably where he got my contact information for this research.

Still wanting to know more about Jed, I clicked his name in the contact card to open his SharePoint My Site, an internal Website where employees can list current projects and information about themselves. After seeing Jed’s projects, I was confident to reply to his request and forward him the data he wanted.

I use the contact card all the time to look up people who email me as well as people I have meetings with. If you have Outlook 2010 at your organization, try using the contact card to learn about your coworkers and then let us know what you think.

Josh Meisels

Outlook Program Manager

My Favorite Feature: Quick Steps

Editors’ Note: The following is a guest post by Microsoft Outlook MVP Diane Poremsky as part of the MVP Award Program Blog's series "10 Days for Office 2010".

One of my favorite timesaving features in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps. You can use Quick Steps to perform tasks you need to do frequently that involve multiple steps, such as filing messages in specific folders or flagging messages for follow up and sending a reply. You can assign keyboard shortcuts to your most frequently used quick steps or click the quick step buttons using your mouse.

Outlook includes a list of predefined Quick Steps to get your started and you can add new ones, modify existing Quick Steps or delete ones that are not useful. To create a new Quick Step, click on the scroll bar in the Quick Steps command and choose New Quick Step. It's easiest to start with one of the predefined steps and customize it, or you can choose Custom and start with a blank quick step.

If you pick one of the standard Quick Step types, you'll get a simple dialog and can press Options to expand the dialog and add additional steps.

Choose Manage Quick Steps from the Quick Steps menu and you'll be able to edit and delete your quick steps, create new quick steps, and rearrange the order they appear in the ribbon so the most used quick steps are listed first in the ribbon.

Diane Poremsky
Microsoft Outlook MVP

Cross Posted on The Office Blog