Subtitles of the Movie

One of the truly great innovations with Outlook 2007 is the ability to go into an e-mail, or just about anything else for that matter, and give it a category, as opposed to giving it a follow up action, or flagging it as a to-do item. So these two things are now separate entities, before if you're using Outlook 2003 right now, you may have flags in your inbox that are yellow, that are orange, that are blue. And so you've got this organization system based on your flags, but, what you end up with in your things to follow up, maybe you have a search folder for items you have to follow up on, you have a hundred things in there. And so you're thinking, well I don't really have to follow up on a hundred things or I'd be fired by now, but there really are one or two things that you should follow up on but you've categorized them and so it's an easy way to kind of have information slip through the crack. And I want to help you utilize Outlook; in other words, I want to help you leverage the information that this program manages. So this is a big benefit right here. And what I'm going to do is, look at an e-mail here, and I've got the categories listed in my view; if you remember back to the last couple modules that's part of the default view that we use. So even though it's not in a list at the top here, it's still part of the information in the e-mail itself. Well, I can categorize it by using this little button, or this little empty space here, and either giving it a right click or a left click. A left click sets the Quick Click option, which is hard to say, it sounds like a Dr. Seuss rhyme; but I'm going to give it a right click for now. And let's say this has to do with birthday, or business, or customer visit. So there's the categorization, and you'll notice that also this categorization holds true no matter where I use this piece of information. So, watch this, if I do something that we saw in earlier module, if I click and drag this on my To-Do Bar, to the Calendar, to turn this into an appointment. Customer Visit, wow, bingo, I see this, this is my next appointment that's coming up in my calendar here. It still holds that category for me, so I know exactly what that appointment is going to be about. In this case it's going to be a customer visit. So to set a different category, I just use the right click again, and I can use, and you're not going to see this list that I have here. You're going to see things like green, orange, blue, red, and so on. Another nice thing about this is that Outlook seems to know, or seems to take a guess that you don't really want to call things Orange, that doesn't really have any meaning. So the first time you use a category like Green Category or Orange Category, you should see this very dialog box. Rename Category; this is the first time you've uses Orange Category and you want to rename it. Well sure. So we'll call this one VTC Stuff, and you can even assign a shortcut key if you want to, I'm not going to do that now. And you can even pick a different color if you want to, so it doesn't have to be orange just because the category is orange. So those Orange Category, Blue Category, those are just placeholders really, and you want to make this as productive or as relevant to your particular situation as possible. I want to rename it, click on Yes. Is it possible to have one item belong to two categories? Of course it is, and you're seeing the evidence of that right here. So this one particular e-mail belongs to both the VTC stuff and the Customer Visit categories. I can change that of course if I want to. Notice that I have highlights behind VTC Stuff and Customer Visit. So if I wanted to change it, all I've got to do is toggle it back off with a click. If want to manage my categories, I click down here, at all categories. And now I see my list of all categories, and if I don't need his category anymore, or if I don't need the Customer Visit category for example, I can just get rid of it by clicking on delete, I get a little dialog box confirming it. If I want to rename it, I can just rename it. If I want to create a brand new category, I click on new category, and I can pick the color, I can pick the name, just type in the name: New Category, and again I can assign a shortcut key. So anything that you see here you can change all you want to. You can assign different categories even by just clicking any of these check boxes here, but for the most part using the categories is not all that complicated. Now, the last thing I want to show you here as we categorize e-mail, is the ability to set a Quick Click, when I right click and go to the bottom of our Contacts menu, here is the Quick Click. So if I want to set this to VTC Stuff, and click on Ok Anytime I click with a left click now, it automatically sets that category for me. So whatever I use most commonly is going to be Quick Clicked, and it's very easy to set that category. Now, you can sort your e-mail by your categories, and really start to leverage that information.