Getting Excited About Outlook 2013 New Features

Microsoft Outlook remains the leading choice of email, contact, and calendar application for millions of users and businesses worldwide. But keeping track of contacts, emails and calendars can slurp untold time out of any workday. Microsoft Outlook 2013 is designed to help you to achieve more by streamlining and simplifying contact and email management. The Outlook 2013 version brings with it some exciting updates: mail and calendar Peek, a streamlined interface, inline replies, an improved status bar, Weather Bar and integration with social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.

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Video transcripts:

Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013.  In the introductory section we looked at the requirements for running Outlook, made sure that you were able to get a copy and I pointed you at the directions for installing it.  By now you should have an installed copy.  You’re probably raring to go with Outlook 2013 but we have a couple of other things to cover first.  And the thing we’re going to cover in this short section is something that will be of interest to those of you in particular who’ve used earlier versions of Outlook and it’s the What’s New in Outlook 2013.

Now there are a couple of sources for this information.  I’m looking at the one that is in the Office section on microsoft.com.  There’s a specific section, What’s New in Outlook 2013.  It begins with a video which gives a summary of the main points.  And then the main points are listed in the same document and I’m going to quickly go through what those new and improved features are now.

Now first of all we have a batch of new and improved features related primarily to email.  So you can know at a glance which messages to read if you get a lot of email by previewing messages in the message list using the improved facilities.  And also if you want to respond to a message with inline replies, that’s a technique that a lot of us use quite a bit, you can reply with one click by typing your response in the Reading Pane, or you can start a link IM, instant messaging conversation for a real time chat.  You also have a facility to use commands in the message list for quick action.  So for instance you can flag a message, delete a message, or mark it as read or unread with handy commands that are actually available to you right in the message list.  You can also with the All and Unread buttons in the Inbox focus on the messages you want.  So by choosing between All and Unread you can either show all messages or just the unread ones.  So they’re a batch of facilities that can really help you with processing you email quickly.

One of the other things that often causes delay when you’re using Outlook is switching between email, calendar, tasks, and so on.  In Outlook 2013 there is a new facility that’s called Sneak a peek which lets you grab a quick glance at your schedule, an appointment, or details about a contact without switching between email and calendar and so on.  So while you’re basically working on one thing, for instance while you’re working on email, you can sneak a peek at your calendar without actually switching into calendar mode.

Nowadays with so many different sources of information about our contacts it’s really useful to be able to see all your contact details in one place and the people card in Outlook 2013 really helps in this sense because you can keep all of the key details about a contact in one place.  This might include phone, email address, company information, and social media related information as well.

Another useful feature of Outlook 2013 is just above the Status Bar and here these links to the various Outlook elements of mail, calendar, people, task can really make it easier to switch between the different modes of operation within Outlook 2013.

In Outlook 2013 you can customize your Inbox, rename the folders in your Inbox, and move them around to support the way that you like to work.  And if you have access to not only Outlook 2013 but Exchange and SharePoint you can give other members of your team shared access to calendars and task lists for example.

Now if you’ve traditionally used Outlook to access you Hotmail account you will have been using the Add-in for that purpose.  Well with Outlook 2013 the support for Hotmail accounts is built into Outlook 2013 and you no longer need that Add-in.

If you’re like me and you have a lot of content in Outlook sometimes finding things can be a real challenge.  Well the improved Find facilities in Outlook 2013 let you search email, attachments, calendar appointments, and contacts to find information more quickly and more thoroughly.

And the last of the new features to focus on is the new Weather Bar which enables you to see a local weather forecast pretty much at a glance.  It’s right there in Calendar View and it also shows the current weather conditions.

There is another page within the Office section of microsoft.com which lists the discontinued features and modified functionality in Outlook 2013.  Now particularly for those of you who are new to Outlook most of this won’t really mean very much.  Some of it is really quite technical and involves Microsoft Exchange and so on.  And at this stage in the course I don’t think it’s necessary or useful for me to go through this list.  One or two of these items will crop up later on.  But if you are interested in the more detailed and technical aspects of Outlook this is a good page to look at if you’ve used earlier versions.  And within TechNet on microsoft.com there is another page also called What’s new in Outlook 2013 that lists from a more technical viewpoint the new features within Outlook 2013.  Now some of these I’ve mentioned all ready within this section but there are some which I haven’t.  They’re much more technical and detailed items.  And also in some cases, let me find an example, let’s say the Weather Bar here which I did mention, there are quite a more details included.  So if you want some more detailed information or to look at some of the more technical changes and additions then this again is a good page to look at.  Although some of it relates again to Exchange Server, to Exchange ActiveSync, and so on.

So that’s it, a lightening quick tour of the new and improved features in Outlook 2013 and some references there to the more detailed sources of information available from microsoft.com.  Most of those items we’ll be covering on the course.

That’s it for this section.  I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!