Outlook Annoyances [Paperback]

Lee Hudspeth (Author), T.J. Lee (Author), Woody Leonhard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 8, 1998

First, the good news: Microsoft Outlook's integration of email, scheduling, and contact information make it a powerful tool that you can use in organizing your work and your life. And as part of the Microsoft Office suite, it integrates with the other Office applications, like Word and Excel. With Outlook as your personal information manager or PIM, your productivity can skyrocket.

Now the bad news: released for the first time with Office 97 and since reissued in a number of new versions, most notably Outlook 98, Outlook frequently seems more like it's beta than production software. Whether you're most bothered by Outlook's refusal to deliver your email, its tendency to eat up your free hard disk space, or any of the other numerous glitches that occur from time to time (and sometimes all the time), you're almost sure to feel at some time or another that Outlook is just plain annoying. Someone ought to do something about it.

That's just what authors Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee have done. In Outlook Annoyances, they look at these and other annoyances and show how you can conquer them so that you can actually use Outlook to organize and manage your personal information. For instance, the book will help you:

• Customize the Outlook 98 toolbar so it reflects the way you work rather than the needs of Microsoft's marketing machine
• Walk through Outlook's often deeply buried user interface settings so that you can decide what you want to change and why
• Get data into Outlook from your old email client or PIM, move information from one Outlook module to another, and export data from Outlook to other applications, like Microsoft Word
• Create custom forms that use VBScript and access the Outlook object model to eliminate many of the annoyances of Outlook's standard forms
• Understand the difficulties involved in combining widely disparate data in a single container. Often, knowing where an annoyance comes from -- even if you can't do anything about it -- makes it far less annoying.

Outlook Annoyances is the definitive guide for those who want to customize Microsoft Outlook. It empowers users who want to take full advantage of Outlook to transform it into the useful tool that it was intended to be.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This book assumes that Microsoft Outlook, a powerful communications and information-management tool, is imperfect because it's meant for mass consumption. The authors show the tricks they've discovered to personalize and otherwise improve the program using Visual Basic for Applications, VBScript, and Outlook's built-in customization features. There's no CD-ROM, but you can download some of this book's customizations from the O'Reilly site. Many of the recommended customizations depend upon personal preference, so you'll probably rely upon the text's step-by-step instructions as much as prewritten software.

Aside from the bug workarounds and customization, you'll find good documentation of all of Outlook's features--much better than Microsoft's documentation. Among this book's handiest features is its strong coverage of e-mail conversion--how to transfer your e-mail archive into Outlook from some other program. Information on getting messages out of Outlook and into some other format is less evident, unfortunately. Overall, this is a fine book that will make any Outlook user's life easier. --David Wall

About the Author

Lee Hudspeth is a co-founder of PRIME Consulting Group, Inc. (Hermosa Beach, CA), a Microsoft Solution Provider. His background is in operations research, financial analysis, and marketing analysis (formerly with Unocal Corp.). He has coauthored several books on Office, including The Underground Guide to Microsoft Office, OLE, and VBA and The Underground Guide to Excel 5.0 for Windows. He is co-editor-in-chief of the monthly newsletter Woody's Underground Office. He's a Microsoft MVP (Most Valued Professional), coauthor of the Microsoft course on application development using WordBasic, and a certified Microsoft trainer in Visual Basic and WordBasic. Along with other PRIME Consulting staff, Lee has developed innumerable lines of VB, VBA, and WordBasic code for the firm's numerous Office add-ins (PRIME for Excel and PRIME for Word), going way back to Word 2.0. Lee also writes and delivers Office usage and development custom courses to hordes of interested parties the world over.

T.J. Lee, a co-founder of PRIME Consulting Group, has a background as a certified public accountant and has done computer and management consulting for years. He has coauthored several books on Office, including The Underground Guide to Microsoft Excel 5 and The Underground Guide to Microsoft Office, OLE and VBA. T.J. is co-editor-in-chief of the monthly newsletter Woody's Underground Office and a certified Microsoft trainer. He has written countless courseware packages and manuals, coauthored the Microsoft Education Services course on Developing Applications in Word, and taught and lectured for thousands of developers and end users.

Woody Leonhard's books include Windows 3.1 Programming for Mere Mortals, The Underground Guide to Word for Windows, The Hacker's Guide to Word for Windows, The Mother of All PC Books, The Mother of All Windows 95 Books, and several others. He was series editor for Addison-Wesley's Underground Guides (11 books) and A-W's Hacker's Guides (4 books). Along with T.J. Lee and Lee Hudspeth he's editor-in-chief of PC Computing's Undocumented Office, a monthly hardcopy newsletter. He's a contributing editor at PC Computing (circulation 1,000,000+), and productivity editor for Office Computing (circulation 400,000), a new monthly magazine from the editors of PC Computing. He also publishes a free weekly electronic news bulletin on Microsoft Office called WOW (Woody's Office Watch), available by sending email to [e-mail]. Woody's software company makes WOPR (Woody's Office POWER Pack), the number-one enhancement to Microsoft Office. A self-described "grizzled computer hack, frustrated novelist and Office victim," by day he's a Tibetan human rights activist and co-founder of the Tibetan Children's Fund. Woody lives on top of a mountain in Coal Creek Canyon, Colorado.

Product Details

• Paperback: 391 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (June 8, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565923847
• ISBN-13: 978-1565923843
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,092,644 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must For All Outlook User, June 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Outlook Annoyances (Paperback)

I wish that I had bought this book last year. It is written clearly and gave me the insight to solve the nagging problems I have had with Outlook. This is a "must have" for stand alone users and especially for networks.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An absolute must for all Outlook (non!) users, December 14, 1998

By 

Martini (Guernsey, Channel Islands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Outlook Annoyances (Paperback)

Woody Leonard's step by step approach is a real eye-opener. Each aspect of Outlook is explained in (almost) minute detail. He did not, however, cover links to Exchange, but did recommend an alternative publication. I think he should have gone further on this as there will be many Outlook problems eminating from Exchange (I have at least three!), and there will be many sites that use the Outlook/Exchange combination. Other than this, this is a key book for any Sys Admin. library.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Outlook Book for Support Professionals, September 24, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Outlook Annoyances (Paperback)

Although this book does have an unfortunate title, I found this full of hints and tips that help desk, IT support professionals, and other MIS types can use to support company-wide Outlook installations. Let's face it, Outlook offers the customer so many different choices, modes of operating, services, etc. that it's only natural that some customers would find this overwhelming and would lead to frustration and annoyance. However, if deployed correctly, in a pre-configured state, Outlook provides one of the most robust and forgiving interfaces for customers. Outlook Annoyances help identify areas of client improvement, as well as showcase tips and tricks to keep customers happy with Outlook. It's more of a manual to find nuggets of Outlook treasure .. "Oh, so that's how I can do [such and such]" seems to be the overwhelming theme of this book. Outlook annoyances is also written at a technical level that surpasses most of the other Outlook user guides (and all of the Microsoft guides on Outlook), but may detailed descriptions of the annoyances and how to solve them may confuse the occasional Outlook customer. So, IT staffs can benefit from reading and leveraging information from this manual for their Outlook customers, while Outlook customers can learn about Outlook with a quick guide, like the 10 Minutes Guide to Outlook.