Microsoft Outlook - Always Looking Out For Your Valuable Time

Whatever line of business you're in, whether large or small, local, national or multinational, it pays to make the best use of your time. Managing your diary can play a key role in ensuring that you work as efficiently and effectively as possible - and Microsoft Outlook has a wide range of flexible and easy-to-use tools to look after your time.

Calendars tailor-made for you

The calendar section of Outlook gives you an easy solution for storing important appointments, information, and deadlines. Whatever information you'd schedule into a traditional diary can be put into an Outlook calendar, whether it covers a number of days or weeks, or just a single precise time. These events can then be seen at a glance, and Outlook will notify you when they are coming due.

However, Outlook can do far more than a conventional diary, making it as easy as can be to ensure that your schedules are maintained and your days are well used. The calendar you create will be tailor-made for you, specific to you, and will be one that meets your requirements. You might want to see more or less of your calendar - the level of detail you see can be adjusted very simply. You can view individual days, divided up into segments of anything between five minutes and an hour, allowing you to schedule events however precisely you need to. One click of a button, and you can move out to view the whole week - or just the working week (and the week you work, at that - if your working week is Sunday to Tuesday, Outlook can accommodate whichever days you require), with the days off taken out. Another click takes you further out, to view the whole month. And here you can see all your appointments: either you can have the full details of events displayed for each day; or, for easier viewing, Outlook can simply mark on which days you have events that will need addressing. These marks can even be colour coded - as can the appointments themselves - with whatever colour scheme you desire, so you can identify at a glance how your time is going to be spent. Highlighting similar events can make a busy diary much easier to understand.

Keeping colleagues informed

Even though your calendar is now tailored to fit your particular demands, it can still often be beneficial to share it with others, whether colleagues, clients or any other interested parties. It is after all important to make sure that your work is effectively coordinated, ensuring that all concerned work in harmony. Outlook has three means for sharing your calendar and these can be accessed directly from the navigation pane in Outlook 2007.

If your office network uses Microsoft Exchange (as many networks running Microsoft software will), then you can choose to share your calendar at the touch of a button - and the individual or group that you share it with can be sent an automatic request to share theirs too, so that key tasks and appointments can be coordinated between all parties.

Alternatively, you can share your calendar via email. You can choose to send as much or as little of it as you like, and with as much or as little detail; if the recipients have Outlook, they can see the calendar as you see it, and if not, the software will transform it automatically into a html email that can be read by any browser.

Calendars can also be shared using Microsoft Office Online - simply upload your calendar to the site, and you can choose to share it with whomever you want. This way, anyone in the world who you'd like to be able to view your calendar can do so, helping to ensure that diary clashes become a thing of the past.

Managing your calendar with Outlook is not merely fast and effective, but highly versatile as well, providing you with a calendar that fits your particular needs and then allowing you to use it however you see fit. A short training course will help you to make the most of the software, and enable your company to get the best of your time.