Manage Time and Organize Tasks

One time-consuming aspect of managing schedules and information is switching among different capabilities within Office Outlook 2007 to keep things organized. Office Outlook 2007 greatly simplifies managing your to-do lists and keeping an eye on upcoming appointments with the new To-Do Bar, which brings all those items together in one place, displaying them along the right side of the Office Outlook 2007 window. As with the navigation pane, you can minimize the To-Do Bar to get more room onscreen for your e-mail list and reading pane. Figure 10-3 introduces the various elements in the To-Do Bar.

The To-Do Bar is visible in all Outlook modules, so you have access to the information whether you’re working in the Calendar, Tasks, Mail, or one of the other modules. And the To-Do Bar integrates more than just the tasks you create in Office Outlook 2007: your Microsoft^® Office OneNote^® 2007, Microsoft^® Office Project 2007, and Microsoft^® Office SharePoint^® Server 2007 tasks can also appear in To-Do Bar, so you can see easily at a glance what you need to accomplish today.

An item is added to the To-Do Bar automatically whenever you flag an e-mail message or contact, or when you drag a message to the To-Do Bar. When you flag an e-mail message in your Inbox, an entry is added to the Today category in your To-Do Bar; when you drag an item to the To-Do Bar, it is placed in the category (Later, Next Month, Next Week, or Today) where you place it.

Adding Tasks to Your Calendar

Here’s another timesaving and organizing feature in Office Outlook 2007: Now you can actually schedule time to work on tasks by simply dragging them to the Calendar. Previously, tasks and the Calendar worked somewhat separately—to keep track of the same event or project in both views, you had to create entries for each, duplicating the effort you spent in organizing one task. Because the Daily Task List displays your tasks in the To-Do Bar according to the day on which they are due, they are already organized so that you can easily drag them to your Calendar to block off time to complete them. Using the Daily Task List, you can also modify the date of tasks by dragging them from one day to another, and the To-Do Bar will update accordingly.

Colorizing Tasks, Appointments, Messages, and Contacts

You can apply a color category to any item you create in Office Outlook 2007 so that it stands out visually no matter which view you are using. For example, if you want an appointment you just created to be easy to spot on your Calendar, you can assign a color to it using the Categorize control in the user interface. When the Appointment window is open, click the Categorize button and choose the color you want from the displayed list (see Figure 10-5).

Color Categories in Office Outlook 2007 help you unify the way you organize and search for information. Because the categories are shared among mail, contacts, tasks, and the calendar, you have an easy way to visually distinguish all types of data relating to one project or one purpose. For example, if you’re working on a business report, all mail meetings, tasks, and contacts you’re working with to create the content for the report might be categories in a green color. You can then arrange and search all your information by this Color Category to gather the relevant information you need, which ultimately saves you time.

The easiest way to assign a color category is to click the Categories column in the list box in your current view. Both the Inbox and the Task List have Categories columns to the left of the flag column (see Figure 10-6). When you’re working with the Calendar, as you see in Figure 10-7, the Categories column appears beneath the Calendar area (more about this in the next section). In Contacts view, the Categories column is included as part of the Contacts list (see Figure 10-8).

If you want to change the color of the selected category, you can do it quickly by right-clicking the item in list view or in the To-Do Bar. Whether the item is a task, appointment, message, or contact, simply right-click and choose Categorize; then choose the category you want to assign to the item (see Figure 10-9).