Book Image

The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book

By : Barbara March
Book Image

The Microsoft Outlook Ideas Book

By: Barbara March

Overview of this book

Microsoft Outlook, in tandem with Microsoft Exchange Server, provides a powerful environment for sharing information. This book will show you how to take advantage of that to construct solutions for your business or organization from the features of Outlook. This book is a collection of scenarios that incorporate and link many Outlook components to produce surprisingly powerful functionality. Without the need for code or specially-written applications, you will be extracting information from your Outlook Calendar, Contacts and Tasks folders to create solutions like these: Monitoring staff leave and printing schedules Managing meeting rooms and printing invoices Managing fleet vehicles, their records, and servicing Managing a school class calendar, student records, attendance, assignments, and reports
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Chapter 2. The Contacts Folder

The conventional use of the Contacts folder is to store the details of people with whom you communicate. However, with a little imagination, Contacts folders can be used to store and manipulate the details of almost anything.

In this chapter, we will look at the following examples of useful, unusual, and practical customizations of conventional Outlook contact data:

  • A table of Distribution Lists that displays the dates on which they were created

  • A Business Directory of Suppliers

  • A Staff Contacts folder that calculates length of service and leave entitlement

  • A Contacts folder for Company Vehicles

A Distribution Lists View

Distribution Lists are created to make it easy to send one email to several recipients. These recipients would all have a common interest in the email that you are sending and are often therefore members of specific groups, regular meetings, committees, etc. But these groups can have finite life spans and you can find that you accumulate Distribution...