outlook

You trust Microsoft Office with your most important documents, spreadsheets, e-mail, and presentations. Unfortunately, many of the default security settings in Office applications may not provide a sufficient level of protection for your data, your system, and your reputation. Follow these steps to fine-tune the security settings in Office 2003; tomorrow I'll cover the new security options in Office 2007's Trust Center and elsewhere.

Office 2003 lets you encrypt files so that you need a password to read or edit them. In Word 2003, open the document and click Tools > Protect Document. To restrict the styles that … Read more

There's something about Microsoft Outlook that reminds me of the old Soviet Union: the program wants to centralize everything and store it in one big PST file that only it can access. There may be advantages to this approach to managing your e-mail, contacts, tasks, and calendar, but you know what can happen when you put all your eggs in one basket.

That's why it makes sense to move copies of your important Outlook files to folders that live outside the Office system. Saving messages and other data to local storage is relatively easy, whether you move them … Read more

I've always been leery of Microsoft Outlook's autocomplete feature. That's the one that guesses who you want to send the e-mail to by looking at the first few letters you type.

It's right most of the time.

But with e-mail used to send everything from jokes, to family photos to corporate secrets, "most of the time" seems like far too low a bar.

Eli Lilly and its outside lawyers found out this the hard way this week when one of the esquires sent a note intended for a colleague to a New York Times … Read more

I'm a stylus user from way back, so I was really looking forward to using Vista's Tablet PC features to control apps on my touchscreen notebook. What I didn't realize was how much fun it is to mark up documents in Word 2007, and to send handwritten notes in Outlook 2007.

You can use Vista's pen features on a touchscreen laptop or tablet-equipped PC to do much more than simply mark up Word documents or write e-mail as handwritten graphics, but after many attempts I remain unconvinced of the usefulness of the OS's handwriting recognition. … Read more

I was all set to write about handwriting in Microsoft Office 2007 today, but a funny thing happened on my way to open Outlook 2007: The program vanished. Gone. Without a trace.

I started to wonder whether somebody had slipped me one of those medications that has the unwanted side-effect of sending people sleepwalking, and sleep-driving, and maybe even sleep-application-deleting. I wouldn't doubt that if I were acting out unconscious wishes as I slumbered, uninstalling Outlook would be at the top of my to-do-while-somnambulant list.

No, I turned off the PC on Friday evening--closing Outlook before I shut down--and … Read more

On Wednesday, the Danish security company BullGuard announced it will offer its spam filter product as a free download. The BullGuard Spamfilter (download) integrates with Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, and Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail clients. It runs on Windows 2000, XP, and Vista.

The BullGuard product relies upon fellow users to identify spam; once e-mail is marked as spam, all other Spamfilter users will no longer receive that e-mail in their in-boxes. It will be available within the spam folder instead.

According to Google's Postini, 2007 saw record spam levels, with as much as 90 percent of all … Read more

This is sort of handy: OutSync is an app that will compare your Outlook and your Facebook address books, and then take the photos of people you know in Facebook who are also in Outlook, and copy them into your Outlook contacts.

It gets really cool if you use a Windows Mobile phone to connect to your Exchange server, because once it syncs the address book, the photos will then show up when people call you.

I'm not completely sure this app honors Facebook's terms of service, but it seems pretty innocuous. And it only applies to people … Read more

Since I started synchronizing my e-mail inboxes a few months ago, I rarely even open my Outlook mail client. I much prefer seeing the messages sent to my ISP's POP account and those sent to my Gmail account together in my Gmail inbox. But I still have to open Outlook to view my calendar, which I've been using for years, even though I now put many of my nonwork appointments in Google Calendar, which I can access from my iPhone or any Internet-connected PC.

I thought I found a free program that would let me synchronize the two … Read more

Xobni, the Microsoft Outlook do-it-all analyzer opened up to "several thousand" more new users yesterday. Its creators aren't unleashing the plug-in to the masses until "early spring" so they can scale up their software, but we've got 50 invites that have been made available for Webware readers. Just like last time, go to the beta signup page and enter the invitation code, "Webware."

As a tip: If you signed up to be a part of the beta late last year be sure to check your e-mail before using our invite code. I … Read more