The new ribbon interface is the big change in Outlook 2010 and we’re going to look a
t how to access and find familiar commands in now unfamiliar places.
Let’s look at the tool bar when first getting into Outlook. The default tab highlighted is ‘Home’. When I first started using Outlook 2010, I overlooked the tab to the left, the ‘File’ tab. When I clicked on it, I found
all my Account (email account) Information, maintenance commands, rule and alert set up and the additional information section that contains Outlook Connector and Hotmail information as well as license and ways to give feedback to Microsoft.
Account Settings
It took me a long time to figure out where my account settings were in 2010 – I think I had to Bing it to find out. Sometimes I wish they’d quit moving things around! You’ll notice the drop down triangle in the illustration above. Click it and you’ll see the familiar E-mail Accounts screen where you can add or delete another email account, change/check your settings, or click on the tabs to check out other information about your email account. So remember your account settings are under the ‘File’ menu.
Mailbox Cleanup
This is a feature I overlook, but it has some helpful components to it. In the Mailbox Cleanup
you can quickly click a few buttons to figure out if you’re keeping a lot of old emails around, how many of your emails are harboring large attachments and you can also look at how big (in bytes), your various mail folders are.
This is also the place you can change the default on how your mail is archived. Make the time longer or shorter before your mail is archived. I keep the defaults knowing that I can find archived emails in a snap using search.
Rules & Alerts
Do you get tired of getting certain messages and you don’t want to try the ‘unsubscribe’ route because you don’t trust them or other reasons? You can see I’m doing something with emails from eMusic. There is a series of screens to go through to set up the rules you want.
Rules and alerts can be set up for all or just some of your mail accounts – nice feature there.
Additional Information
This section is mainly concerned with Office Live Mail and getting it connected, or integrated into Outlook. I’ve blogged about that elsewhere. Outlook Connector is a great tool and if you’re using Outlook, you can easily add in your Live/Hotmail accounts and have them all together.
There’s a section dealing with Microsoft license information and how to get in touch with Microsoft, if you so desire.
The ribbon interface in Outlook is pretty cool looking and there are so many features under each tab. I’m going to keep looking around and finding more cool features.