Outlook 2013

The book I read to research this post was Outlook 2013 For Dummies which is a very good book which I read at http://safaribooksonline.com . Outlook is primarily a personal organiser software that is part of the Office 2013 suite of programs from Microsoft and of course gets a regular update every couple of years or so. It also integrates with your email account although that normally can’t be a web based one like yahoo or gmail and most businesses use a personalized corporate email accounts system that works fine. It also has things like calendar and notes features. Apparently the average office worker spends 28 hours a week answering emails and things like spam and phishing are major problems, one feature in the program is you can block a user directly or based on a criteria like country suffix if you get a lot of spam from a certain country for example but bear in mind it might prevent legitimate customers from contacting you. There are some slightly different variants of Outlook mainly Outlook.com & Outlook Web App or OWA. Outlook.com is what Microsoft is upgrading all its email accounts to and this will share the Outlook interface and if you have ie a hotmail account the address will stay the same but it will be upgraded. New email accounts will have the Outlook.com suffix. OWA is a web based version of Outlook that works with Exchange Server 2013. It has a similar interface to Outlook. New users to Outlook are often surprised when they open the program they aren’t presented with a blank screen like the other Office products but it has quite a lot of information like emails and to do lists. You can color code to do lists so you can see at a glance what is the most important. Some things are quite simple like you click reply to open a replying message type you email and click send. There is a reply all feature which you wouldn’t normally use and is if you get a message sent to you and several others you can send the same reply to the other recipients which would probably be bad etiquette. It also has an RSS reader where you can subscribe to blogs and podcasts. It can also translate your messages to and from another language. I really enjoyed reading this book which does a good job of explaining this program.