Introduction to Microsoft Outlook 2013

In this lesson, you'll dig into the section of Outlook 2013 where most people spend most of their time: Mail view. Not surprisingly, Mail view is the place where you work with email messages, and after you go over some of the mechanics of the view itself, you'll spend the rest of your time on the basics of email. The lesson will cover sending, receiving, and replying to messages, as well as how you can use the spell-checker and signatures to give your messages some class.

This lesson will address a few more aspects of working in Mail view and with email messages. First you'll look at alerts, flags, and categories. The alerts notify you when new messages arrive, while the flags and categories will help you stay organized and make sure you don't forget to do something important with your messages. You'll also look at how the mail protocol used by your email service to connect to Outlook can affect the way these features function. Then you'll look at how messages are used to transport files around the Internet (that is, how attachments work), and wrap up the lesson with something that most people never figure out about messages.

It's time to move your attention from email over to the related subject of contacts. By the end of this lesson, you'll be well on your way to mastery of Outlook 2013's new People view and the contacts that reside therein. More importantly, you'll know what contacts can do, and how to use them to keep track of all sorts of information. From there, you'll look at Contact Groups, including their benefits and pitfalls. To wrap things up, the lesson will talk a bit about Address Books, an approach to contacting people by email that you'll likely encounter (even if you don't realize it) when using Outlook in a corporate environment.

In this lesson, you'll complete your study of the People hub by exploring how Outlook connects to social networks, but you'll do more than just look at how you set up this connection. You'll spend a significant part of the lesson looking at the pros and cons of connecting Outlook to networks like Facebook, particularly when you use Outlook for work and Facebook for play. Once you get a connection set up, you'll look at how this information appears in both the relevant contacts and in email messages to and from known contacts.

So far in the course, you've dealt with communication-related topics like email and contacts. Now you're going off in another direction. Outlook 2013 has a flexible and easy-to-use Calendar that helps you track and manage all the stuff you need to get done. In this lesson, you'll focus on the basics of using the Calendar, scheduling appointments and meetings, and tracking events. You'll also look at two powerful tools that make working with the Calendar more efficient: Calendar Groups and Schedule view. By the time you're done with this lesson, you'll know what you need to know to be able to use one or more Outlook Calendars efficiently. This lesson not only gives you all the info you need about using Calendars—by the time you finish, you'll have reached the halfway point in the course!

This lesson is about getting things done. Outlook tasks and to-dos are ways to keep track of what you need to get done. Tasks are pretty much what you'd expect—items that you create to keep track of some particular task. To-dos are somewhat more interesting in that they are Outlook's way of tracking things you need to do something about without creating a special task for them. By the time you're done with this lesson, you'll clearly understand the difference between tasks and to-dos and know how to work with the To-Do Bar and the Daily Task List, Outlook's two ways of constantly reminding you of the things you need to get done next.

Outlook 2013 is all about communication. But it is all about storing and managing information, too. In this lesson, you'll look at three aspects of Outlook that help with these essential tasks. Notes give you a way to keep track of all those little random bits of information that otherwise would end up on scraps of paper all over the place. And speaking of random stuff, you have shortcuts and the Shortcuts Pane. With these, you can effectively create your own custom Folder Pane, one that points to the Outlook items most important to you. Even better, you can use shortcuts to point to stuff that's outside of Outlook, meaning you can organize information that's anywhere on your computer, the company network, even out on the Internet. Finally, you'll begin learning about folders. Folders let you organize the masses of information that you can accumulate in Outlook, while the Folder List lets you find them all again. This discussion lays the groundwork for Lesson 9, where folders are revealed to be a key part of automating your work in Outlook.

One of the great things about Outlook is that you can use it for so much of your communications and personal information. But with so many messages, contacts, tasks, notes, and other pieces of information in one place, organizing and managing it for easy and efficient access can be a big chore. In this lesson, you'll learn how Outlook 2013's flexible category system and rules can help you manage the flood of information that flows into your Inbox every day. You'll also learn how to print from Outlook for those rare occasions where you just have to have information on paper.

As you use Outlook 2013 more and more, you'll eventually reach the point where you need to store old items for future reference. You'll also get to the point where it's hard to find the information you need because Outlook contains so much. In this lesson, you'll learn about the tools Outlook gives you to automatically archive your old items as well as three different tools for finding those items you know are in there somewhere.

Outlook 2013 does a lot of things, and it often gives you multiple ways to do each of them. In this lesson, you'll look at some cool tips that can make working with Outlook 2013 faster, easier, or just more fun!

Outlook 2013 offers several customization options that you can take advantage of without having to learn programming or develop advanced technical skills. This lesson covers several customizations that you may find useful.