Microsoft Outlook is commonly used as an e-mail program, but it’s actually a lot more than that: it’s a personal information manager. Used properly, Outlook lets you keep track of the many things in your job that can become “too big to remember”, like your complete appointment list, or all of the people you interact with professionally. As well as taking our Outlook courses if you want to learn the basics of e-mailing, consider learning more about Outlook if any of these sound familiar to you:

You’re comfortable enough with basic e-mailing, but need to know more about some of the complex possibilities such as mailing documents (“attachments”), mailing out to the same group of people on a regular basis, or sending formal e-mails for co-ordinating meetings that hook back into Outlook’s calendar features.

• You’re comfortable enough with basic e-mailing, but you’re getting overwhelmed by the number of items coming in—whether it’s something as simple as the IT department getting down on you for letting your in-box get too full to that sinking feeling you get on the first day back from vacation (or even just a sick day!) and you’ve got literally hundreds of e-mails waiting for you.

• You want to keep better track of your work tasks or appointments (tasks that happen at a particular time), so you don’t forget anything coming up or if you want to keep a log of what you have done.

• You need to organize meetings between several people, and want to be able to check their schedules, pick a time when everyone is available, and then send out invitations to everyone.

• You have lots of information you want to track about people—not just e-mail addresses, but other things like phone-numbers, real-world mailing addresses, free-form notes, and even pictures.

• You have groups of people you contact that you’d like to keep in separate categories, such as personal/business, internal/external, customers/suppliers, and so on.

• You’re a manager who needs to assign tasks to employees, and keep tabs on how far everyone is progressing, even when they—or you!—are not physically present.

Upgrading from an Earlier Version? If you’re an Outlook user of whatever level of skill who is moving from version 2002/2003/2007 to the latest version 2010, you’ll be interested in some specialized training. Outlook 2010 has eliminated old-style menus and button bars in favour of the new Ribbon interface. Even the most sophisticated user of Outlook can benefit from breaking things back down the basics in the new environment and coming to understand the newer, more efficient ways of approaching old tasks.