Microsoft Outlook 2010 Inside Out

I did not buy this book for the purpose of educating me to day-in/day-out use; instead, I bought the book to learn better ways to use ALL aspects of the M/S Office software. For my purposes, it is a pure benefit. Most of the M/S Office programs are intuitive as to personal needs, but some other potential uses are best clarified via third parties having possessing more in depth knowledge. One can always find something new to learn, and this book has helped me learn many new and exciting options!

Like RAGU if you have a question about Outlook 2010, the answer "is in there". Excellent TOC and index makes looking up a topic easy. Highly recommend this as a question and problem solving resource for your Windows Office Suite library. It is somewhat of an overkill however, if you want a quick and dirty orientation to Outlook!

It is now well documented that Outlook 2010 no longer tracks tasks and journal entries under the activities section of a contact. Whether this a known bug they are going to fix or a change by design that they are not going to fix is completely unclear. The responses from Microsoft are inconsistent according to those who have logged help requests and posted their experiences on forums. Is the elimination of CRM like features in Outlook 2010 a cynical ploy to convert/force users to Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 2011 (at $44/user/month)?Regardless, the features doesn't work, but based on this book I thought Outlook 2010 would give me some nice CRM functionlity for my company. The book provides step by step instructions for using this non-existent functionality (there is a detailed section in the book called "Connecting journal activities to individual contacts" teaching us how to connect journal activities to contacts. Figure 22-11 provides a beautiful diagram of the journal entry, having been associated with the contact, now dazzlingly displayed in the contact's activities section, as if somewhere, somehow, this functionality really did exist. The section ends with "this is just one more way outlook 2010 keeps all your information interconnected"). But its not true, the information is not connected, and if you had the information connected in 2007, it is now disconnected. For many users, it makes Office 2010 a downgrade from 2007, and it makes the information on the topic in this book 100% incorrect.

I received my Microsoft Outlook 2010 Inside Out today and had the same bad experience as Messrs. McGregor and McGuire: no clue in the book itself as to how to get the online version referred to prominently on the front and back covers of the book. Tomorrow I will follow the instructions in the post of December 14, 2010 from Harold Laroux of O'Reilly Media by calling their customer service. I hope this works successfully.In general, customers should not be misled and subjected to inconvenience this way. The book I received was new but not shrink-wrapped. Amazon should insert by hand inside the back cover the information from Mr. LaRoux's December 14 post. Microsoft and O'Reilly Media should make sure that future printings of the book include the "scratch off voucher card" referred to by Mr. Laroux.The book itself is comprehensive and well-written. I have already read a number of entries that will be helpful to me. Mr. Boyce has done a great job. I was a beta user of Office 2010 and my understanding is that the Outlook component was the one most changed in Office 2010 from Office 2007. Many of the functions and features in Outlook 2010 are not intuitive or easy to find. This book will be a major contributor to my getting the most out of Outlook 2010.A few subjective nitpicks: The type face in the book could have been a bit bigger and darker to make the text easier to read. The illustrations are helpful but tiny and hard to read. I hope when I get the online edition I can make adjustments to fix these problems for myself.Walter Healy, New York City

I was hoping to find out how and where the files were kept in this newer version of Outlook. This book had lots of information, but not what I really wanted.

Good book. Has helped me use Outlook more efficiently and productively.

Excellent. I Live it

Excellent