Outlook 2010 Features & Screenshots

September 15th, 2009 Posted in Betas, Office, microsoft

I have been using Outlook 2010 now since the start of the technical preview, which I was lucky enough to manage to be a part of, and I love it! So, for those of you not currently able to try this baby out, I thought I would share a few of the new bits of Outlook that I really like and I am finding useful.

Firstly, here is a full screen shot of the new Outlook 2010 interface. I suppose I must state that this is only a technical preview and this may still change a lot before the final version is released.

The Ribbon

As you can see from the screenshot above, the biggest change to the Outlook interface is the introduction of the infamous Ribbon, with four main tabs. Lets look at these tabs in a bit more details and see what they bring us;

Home - This contains many of the standard buttons you are used to seeing at the top of an outlook window, such as “New Mail”, “Reply”, “Forward” and a plethora of options relating to email rules and categorising your items.

Send / Receive – As you would expect, this tab contains……the send and receive button! Along with some of the more commonly used items, such as buttons for marking items for download or triggering the download of headers only.

Folder – From here you can control your mail archiving, mark items as read, create and modify your folders and run your mail rules.

View – This is one of my most used tabs. Here you can set different views for each of your folders. The most notable introduction here is the “Conversation” view, which will attempt to group your mail into conversations. This is not for everyone and certainly not for every folder (I switched it on in a folder to receive Facebook messages and it created one huge conversation as all the subjects were the same), but I like it in the right circumstance.

Contact Actions

One feature I really do like in Outlook 2010 is the new contact action popups. If you hover over a name in the from or to fields on an email, you now get a popup giving you several actions you can perform on this person, such as adding them to your Outlook contacts, scheduling a meeting, viewing their stored contact information if they are already in your contacts, sending an instant message or even starting a telephone call.

Quick Steps

Quick Steps are a set of very useful buttons on the Home tab. They include ways of replying to a team of people or your manager, both of which are customised tasks to suit you. There are a standard set of buttons here and you can also create custom quick steps to suit yourself. Very nice!

Quick Bar

Ok, here is something I didn’t even notice until a couple of days ago, the Quick Bar. Until recently, every time I wanted to send and receive my email I have been switching to the Send / Receive tab and click the S & R button. This was ok, but got a bit annoying having to switch tabs every time, as most of the time I use the Home tab for functions like “Reply” etc. Then I noticed the Quick Bar. This handy little addition allows for a constant set of buttons that are displayed either above of below the ribbon (your choice) and by default contains a send and receive button with more being added as you see fit. This is a nice feature, but it is quite small, so that’s why I didn’t notice it for so long!!!

The “Office” Button

The “Office” button sits in the top left hand corner of every Office 2010 application. When clicked, this button allows access to all the features you would normally have seen under the standard menus (file, edit, tools, etc) in Outlook 2007. You can see Microsoft have spent a long time designing this feature and it works well. As you can see from the screen shot below, there is plenty of room for each task, much more space for explanations and it just ‘feels’ like a better way of doing things to me.

The Windows 7 Task Bar Context Menu

Ok, so you have probably seen this before, but I thought it was worth a mention anyway. Outlook 2010 now gets it’s own context menu on the Task Bar in Windows 7, which gives a very nice shortcut to common tasks.

Verdict To Date

So far I have found the improvements made in this latest incarnation of Outlook to be very useful and have increased my productivity, which is always good, especially with an integral everyday task such as email management. But, of course, please feel free to disagree with me as this is just my opinion after all!