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Five nice touches in Outlook 2010

Posted on 23 Oct 2009 at 14:32

Simon Jones picks out five highlights from the technical preview of Office 2010

Here are some of the small improvements that Microsoft isn't trumpeting, but which definitely make my day easier in Outlook 2010.

1. The To-Do bar shows All-Day Events and timed appointments. I've always thought it strange that Outlook 2007 would tell you about a 10:30 meeting in the boardroom, but would neglect to show the big conference you were meant to be at tomorrow.

2. The status bar shows how many reminders you have, and lets you click to see the Reminders window for full details. This is great if you keep snoozing reminders for tasks or appointments, as you can get the reminders back once you find you have a spare two minutes to deal with them, not just when Outlook decides to remind you (which is typically in the middle of an important phone call).

3. Scheduling meetings is even smoother. Type the names of the people you need at the meeting and the Meeting Suggestions pane will show you a calendar of dates when you have a good, fair or poor chance of getting all those people together for the required time. Pick a day and it will show you the possible timeslots when all or most can attend.

4. Accepting meetings is smoother too. The buttons in the Appointment Request message to accept, decline or propose a new time now have dropdown menus to send or not send a response, which cuts out the annoying modal dialog that used to ask the same thing.

5. Also on the status bar is a zoom control to enlarge the text and images in the Preview pane - great for hard-to-read emails - and two buttons called Normal and Reading. The Reading button makes both the Navigator and To-Do panes roll away to give you more space to read your emails. The Normal button brings these side panes back again. This is another example of the Office apps converging to give a more unified experience.