For me, this book is the journal of an exciting voyage of discovery—and it all began with a request for some training in Microsoft Outlook.
Unlike most of the training sessions I had conducted previously, I knew the students very well—the work they did, the environment in which they worked, and the constraints that they worked under. They were not only my students but also my work colleagues. So, knowing that I could direct the instruction to address their specific needs, I began to look deeper into Outlook, hoping to find some useful solutions to the challenges that I knew that my colleagues faced every day.
I was already a proficient Outlook user, but the more research I did, the less I found that I knew and one of the biggest revelations for me was that Outlook could perform calculations! However, how these calculations and other capabilities could be used by ordinary users (i.e. not programmers) seemed not to be documented, anywhere—until now!
I have had a lot of fun putting together these solutions and this book had to be written; these powerful Outlook features should not remain the sole realm of the programmers; we can use them too!
Chapter 1 discusses the Outlook Calendar folder and demonstrates ways in which calendar items and folders can be manipulated and presented to provide a valuable and professional, timesaving management tool.
In Chapter 2, we customize the view of Contacts records to produce an efficient client‑business directory and a detailed and comprehensive personnel database. We also take a huge leap of imagination and explore the use of the Contacts folder to store the details of and manage objects such as company vehicles and meeting rooms.
Chapter 3 looks at Tasks and how they can help us, not only manage the day-to-day jobs we have to do, but also monitor time and cost in service processes. Tasks are also linked to Contacts to provide personalized records.
Chapter 4 presents two rounded solutions that bring together techniques from the previous chapters and are where all the Outlook components integrate into an efficient machine that belies any belief that Outlook is simply an email client.
This book is about Microsoft Outlook and not Outlook Express. There are differences in functionality between the versions of Outlook, and where this affects the examples these differences have been noted and alternative instructions included.
If the reader is familiar with functions in Microsoft Access and Excel, he/she will have no difficulty understanding the functions used in the examples and their syntax. For readers without this experience, the instructions are clear and easy to follow.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
Sub cmdPrint_Click()
Set oWordApp = CreateObject("Word.Application")
If oWordApp Is Nothing Then
MsgBox "Couldn’t start Word."
Else
Dim oWordApp
Dim oWordDoc
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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