Outlook 2003 – Two Time Savers

Previewing Mail from Other Applications

No matter what you are working on, Outlook 2003 provides a preview of incoming messages in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. You can see the sender, subject, and the first few words of the email. You can choose to open the email, flag it for follow up, or delete it in the preview box. The preview message slowly fades and disappears if you take no action.

You can turn off or adjust the settings for the mail preview feature by going to Outlook’s Tools menu, specifically: Options/Preferences/Email Options/Advanced Email Options. To turn the feature off, uncheck the Display a New Mail Desktop Alert box. Click on Desktop Alert Settings to adjust the timing and transparency of your desktop alerts.

Arrange by Conversation

A new and useful tool in Outlook 2003 is Arrange by Conversation. This groups all of the emails regarding the same thread or conversation. By default, Outlook sorts emails by date; however, if you go to the View menu and click on Arrange by, and then Conversation, the emails are sorted together according to which ones have the same subject, or are part of a series of replies back and forth. Look closely for a small down pointing triangle in the upper left-hand corner of the line displaying the email. Clicking on the triangle expands that list, showing you all the emails involved in the conversation. You can return to normal View by clicking on Arrange By and then Date. As you may have noticed when doing this exercise, Outlook 2003 offers a dozen useful ways of sorting mail under the Arrange By menu.