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Is scheduling your life complicated? Do you have trouble keeping track of all the things you need to do? How about a need to track both personal and business activities in Outlook, without exposing your personal life to colleagues? If you answered “Yes!” to any of those questions, Outlook’s ability to handle multiple calendars simultaneously could be very useful to you. With multiple calendars you can keep track of everything, avoid double-booking yourself, and still keep your personal and work life separated.

Creating a New Calendar

Follow these steps to create a new Calendar:

1. Make sure you are in Calendar view and click File, then, New, then Calendar. The Create New Folder dialog box appears.
2. Enter the new Calendar’s name. Accept all the other default options. This creates the new Calendar in the current Calendar folder.
3. Click OK. The new Calendar will now appear in the My Calendars section of the Navigation Pane.

Telling Outlook Which Calendars to Display

Telling Outlook which Calendar or Calendars you want it to display is easy. Just set the checkbox next to the name of each Calendar you want Outlook to display, and clear the checkbox if you want that Calendar hidden. If you select multiple Calendars, Outlook will display them all simultaneously.

There are two unique ways Outlook can display multiple Calendars, and if three or more Calendars are visible, you can mix and match them to suit the needs of the moment. Outlook can display Calendars side-by-side or one overlaid on top of the other. The overlaid view was added with Outlook 2007 and can be quite helpful at times.

The side-by-side view was available in earlier versions of Outlook, and is more intuitively obvious for most people. In the side-by-side view, the Calendars appear next to each other on the screen, much as they would if you laid two printed calendars side by side on the kitchen table. In this view, it is easy to read each Calendar by itself, but to compare schedules you need to keep looking back and forth between them, which can lead to mistakes.

To picture the overlaid view, imagine that each Calendar was printed on a transparent sheet, and you’ve stacked the sheets on top of each other. They each show the same period of time in the same place, and you can see all the information from each ‘layer’ of Calendar. Because they are physically in the same place, when the Calendars have overlapping appointments it’s easy to see. This makes it easier to spot scheduling conflicts and open times than it would be if the Calendars were side by side. At the same time, with all the information stacked up on top of itself, this view can be confusing, especially if your Calendars are busy, making for lots of stuff all crunched together.

There’s a lot more to working with multiple Calendars, but now you at least know how to create them and view them.

Creating and viewing multiple Calendars is just one of the things covered in the sixth lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. There we talk about how to work with multiple Calendars, along with all other major aspects of using Calendars in Outlook. If strengthening your skills with Microsoft Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, and you like the idea of a structured class with the ability to interact with your instructor, I strongly suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more about the course.

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Keeping track of the many sides of your life is much easier when Outlook lets you maintain multiple Calendars. And the ability to display those Calendars in different ways depending on the needs of the moment makes great sense. So let’s take a look at exactly how to work with all your Calendars.

The Basics

The ‘traditional’ way Outlook displays Calendars is by arranging them side-by-side. So if you want to view multiple Calendars this way, all you have to do is click the checkbox next to each calendar in the My Calendars section of the Navigation Pane. Each Calendar appears with a different color trim, which allows you to tell them apart more easily. Your primary Calendar always appears on the left side. The other Calendars (your secondary Calendars), are to the right of the primary one.

If you want to see your Calendars overlaid on each other, you begin by selecting the Calendars you want to see in My Calendars. They will automatically start out side-by-side. You tell Outlook to overlay a secondary Calendar on the primary Calendar by clicking the left arrow next to the name of the secondary Calendar. Doing this tells Outlook to overlay the secondary Calendar on the primary one. The primary Calendar is always the one that others get overlaid on, but beyond that, you have complete freedom to mix and match overlaid and side-by-side Calendars. Clicking the right arrow next to the name of a secondary Calendar, that Calendar goes back to side-by-side. Clicking the right arrow beside the name of the primary Calendar causes all the overlaid Calendars to go back to side-by-side mode.

Modifying Calendar Options

Most of the time, the default Calendar options will serve you well. Still, there are a few options you might want to adjust to adapt Outlook for your company’s workweek or your personal schedule and habits. For example, I often start writing at 4:30 or 5:00 AM. Some night owls I know, on the other hand, prefer to start their workday at 10:00 in the morning or later. Outlook lets you easily adjust the Calendar view to match these starting times and a variety of other individual schedule variations. Follow these steps to see the options:

1. Click Tools in the Outlook menu bar, then click Options. This opens the Options dialog box.
2. On the Preferences tabbed page of the Options dialog box, in the Calendar section, click Calendar Options. The Calendar Options dialog box appears
3. In the Calendar Work Week section of the dialog box, tell Outlook which days are part of your workweek by setting the appropriate day check boxes. You can also set the First Day Of Week, First Week Of Year, Start Time, and End Time options if these are relevant to your personal situation.
4. Click OK to put the changes into effect.

At this point, you have everything you need to get your life more organized through the use of Outlook’s multiple Calendars.

Note: To see a collection of tips and tricks for working with Calendars, click here.

Learning how to work with multiple Calendars is just one of the things covered in Lesson 6 of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. In that lesson alone we cover all the major aspects of using Calendars in Outlook. If strengthening your skills with Microsoft Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, and you like the idea of a structured class with the ability to interact with your instructor, I strongly suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more about the course.

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The exchange of business cards is a time-honored ritual in the world of business. Starting with Outlook 2007, Microsoft aligned itself with that tradition (and with other email products) by adding simple, user-friendly support for electronic business cards. These cards, created using the industry standard vCard (.vcf) format, not only look good on the screen, but can be exchanged easily with most any other modern email or contact management program.

However, while working with electronic business cards in Outlook 2007 is easy, designing an effective, attractive business card, whether electronic or printed, can be an elaborate production with designers, focus groups, and so on. This puts the art of designing quality electronic business cards outside the scope of an article on Outlook. What we’ll do is talk only about how you create and use electronic business cards. It’s up to you, in compliance with corporate policy, to come up with a design you are proud of.

Creating Your Electronic Business Card

As soon as you create a new contact, Outlook will automatically create a very basic electronic business card for it. These are nothing more than lists of the basic contact information (name, address, and so on) for that contact, along with a copy of the contact’s picture (if you have one). The procedure that follows is a very basic set of instructions for creating more elaborate cards to that replace the plain and frankly dull default ones.

To create an electronic business card for any given contact, follow these high-level steps:

1. Open the contact you want to work on. The current electronic business card for this contact appears on the right side of the contact window.
2. Right-click the current electronic business card. In the shortcut menu that appears, click Edit Business Card. This opens the Edit Business Card dialog box.
3. As you can see, there are many options and controls for modifying and controlling every aspect of the business card. Fortunately, Microsoft has simplified things by including an image of the business card here. That image changes as you make changes to the controls. That means you can see the results of each change as you make it. That also means you can easily undo changes you don’t like and freely experiment with different options.
4. Once you have selected and formatted the fields you want visible on the card, switch your attention to the top of the Card Design section and work your way down. Experiment with the settings to find a design you like, or follow the directions from corporate to give your card the approved look. To include an image other than the photo associated with the contact, click the Image button and insert it. Click Background to apply a background color to the card.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 as many times as necessary to get a design you like. Click OK when you’re done designing.

Using Your Own Electronic Business Card

Your new business card design will now be visible in Business Card view and whenever you attach it to a message you’re working on. To attach the card to a message, first position the cursor in the message at the location where you want the business card to appear. Then go to the Include section of the ribbon and click Insert Business Card. The card appears at the location of the cursor in the body of the message. The card is also attached to the message in .VCF format so the recipient can easily save it.

Learning how to work with electronic business cards is just one of the things covered in Lesson 4 of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your skills with Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, and you like the idea of a structured class with the ability to interact with your instructor, I suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.

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To use Outlook as an email program, you need to configure it to work with one or more email accounts. The best option for that is to use a free Google Gmail account. In case you’re wondering, Gmail is a Web-based email service available through Google. If you have a Gmail account (or get one, which only takes a few minutes), you can connect Outlook to it. Once you have that connection set up properly, people can send email to your Gmail account, and you can read it in Outlook. Going the other way, you can use Outlook to reply to your Gmail messages, or compose new messages that get sent using the Gmail account.

Why use Gmail? There are certainly lots of other free email accounts out there, for example Yahoo! Mail & Hotmail. But connecting them to Outlook for free is the rub. Some of the email accounts you can get for free are set up so you can view them using your Web browser, but they don’t allow you to connect to them with programs like Outlook. Other email accounts (Yahoo! Mail & Hotmail, for example) allow you to connect them to Outlook, but they charge you a fee for the privilege. Their free versions won’t help you at all. There’s only a small number of Web-based email accounts that allow you to connect Outlook for free. Google’s Gmail is the biggest and best of this elite group.

With Gmail, you get a massive amount of space (measured in Gb) of mail storage right on Google’s servers. Gmail also provides powerful search capabilities (basically doing a Google search on your own email). It supports this service through advertising, but you only see the ads when you view your Gmail account using your Web browser, not when you use Outlook. Gmail is clearly the free email service of choice for connecting to Outlook.

The directions for making the Gmail Outlook connection are moderately difficult, but in my experience, most people can make the connection on their own or with a little help. If you want to try setting up a Gmail account & connecting it to Outlook 2007, the instructions are posted here.

Configuring Outlook and Gmail to work together is just one of the topics covered in the first lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your skills with Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, I suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.

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One great new feature of Outlook 2007 is the ability to zoom in or out on the text and images in the bodies of e-mail messages, calendar entries, tasks, and contacts. If you’ve ever had trouble reading stuff in Outlook because the text is too small, you’re going to love this. The Zoom command is simple to use, and the benefits are obvious to anyone who has spent a day squinting at their computer screen. It only takes a moment to learn how to Zoom, and doing so will let you eliminate one minor annoyance from your life.

But as always, you do need to be aware of a few things when you use this feature.

When you start using Zoom yourself, you will quickly find that text and images in the body of a message, contact, etc. will zoom in and out, but the menus, toolbars, and the like don’t change. Only the spot in the item where you could enter significant quantities of text and images is zoomable. So the body of a message, calendar entry, or task is zoomable. The notes field of a contact is zoomable. Everything else will stay the same size regardless of what you do with the zoom controls. (But keep reading to learn what you can do to make column headers and other interface elements more readable)

Additional things worth knowing before you start to use Zoom:

• The item you want to zoom must be open in its own window.
• The cursor must be located in an area of the item that is capable of zooming. Clicking in that area enables the zoom ability. So if for example, you want to zoom in on the body of a message, you point the mouse at a spot in the message body and click the mouse button. This selects the area and activates the Zoom command. If Zoom isn’t available for the area the cursor is in right now, the Zoom menu option is dimmed.
• The Zoom command appears in the Other Actions menu for messages, and in the Zoom group of the Format Text tab of the Ribbon for other Outlook items.

Zoom is an easy way to change the size of text and images in Outlook areas that are zoomable. You can’t use Zoom to do it, but you can still modify things like column headings and menus. just much more complicated and time consuming. So a good compromise for improving Outlook readability is to use the Zoom command wherever possible, and just accept minor annoyances like too-small column headings.

If you want to know how to adjust menus and other Outlook interface elements, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/change-fonts.html.

To learn more about using Outlook 2007′s Zoom command, visit http://www.living-with-outlook.com/zoom.html

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The Outlook 2007 To-Do Bar is in my opinion the best new addition to Outlook 2007. The To-Do Bar pulls together key items from both the Calendar and Tasks views into a single bar that you can see in most views. It enables you to see what you need to do next, and often do it, without leaving the current view. Prior to Outlook 2007, you had to dig around to get this information, which is now available at a glance. The To-Do Bar is easy to use, functional, and a definite improvement over older ways of doing things in Outlook 2007.

To get the most out of the To-Do Bar, you have to realize that everything about it is active. It isn’t just a display of information. Click on something in the To-Do Bar and you can manipulate it as if you were in the item’s regular view. In other words, you can:

• Navigate the Calendar with the Date Navigator
• Open and modify Appointments while staying within the current view
• Work with the listed tasks, even create new ones, again without leaving the current view.

You’ll soon get used to using the To-Do Bar instead of jumping all over the place to find the information you need, then resuming your original activity. You’ll see the information you need at a glance, and be able to do it with as little disruption of your work flow as possible.

By default, the To-Do Bar appears to the right of most every view. When minimized, it looks like a strip down the edge of the window; if you expand it, the To-Do Bar by default shows the Date Navigator (a small calendar) at the top, your next three appointments in the middle, and a list of your tasks at the bottom. Click the right or left arrows at the top of the To-Do Bar to expand or minimize it.

Actually working with the items in the To-Do Bar is very easy:

• Click a date in the Date Navigator to open the Calendar to that day.
• Double-click an appointment or task to open it.
• Type into the Type a new task box at the top of the task list to add one.
• Click the header of the task list to change the order the tasks are displayed in.

That’s about as straightforward as things can get!

You can also modify the way the To-Do Bar works to make it work more the way you want.

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The Outlook 2007 To-Do Bar gathers together data from Outlook 2007′s Calendar and Tasks views to show you what you need to do next. You used to have to check the different views to find this information, now it is right there where you can work with it almost instantly.

Everything you see in the To-Do Bar is live. That is, you can use the Date Navigator to control the Calendar, open and modify the appointments without leaving the current view, manage the list of tasks, even create new ones, again without leaving the current view.

Having the To-Do Bar available really reduces the number of times a day you have to jump between views.

By default, the To-Do Bar appears as a pane on the right side of the Outlook window. When the To-Do Bar is minimized, it appears as a narrow strip down the edge of the main Outlook window. When the bar is expanded, it typically shows the Date Navigator (a small calendar) at the top, your next three appointments in the middle, and a list of your tasks at the bottom. use the left and right arrows at the toop of the To-Do Bar to minimize or expand the bar.

Note: You can easily configure the To-Do Bar to change the way it displays information.

Using the To-do Bar and working with the items it displays is very easy:

• Click a Date navigator date to open the Calendar to that day.
• Double-click an appointment or task to open it.
• Type into the Type a new task box at the top of the task list to add one.
• Click the header of the task list to change the order in which tasks are displayed.

This is one place where Microsoft really did a great job of making a new feature easy to use.

By bringing the things you need to do next into any view, the To-Do Bar really makes Outlook 2007 more useful than earlier versions. once you start working with it, you will surely find the To-Do Bar to be one of the most useful new parts of Outlook 2007.

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