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The complete guide to Office 2010: Outlook

Posted on 23 Feb 2010 at 14:14

Discover all the new features of Outlook 2010, including what works and what fails

Outlook was the ugly duckling of Office 2007, the only major app not to be afforded the new Ribbon interface, as Microsoft’s designers simply ran out of time. It’s been given the full Ribbon treatment this time round, as well as more new features than any other Office app – but not all of them are a resounding success.

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Microsoft promised to tackle the age-old problem of information overload with Outlook 2010, helping us to spend less time neck-deep in cluttered inboxes. Judging by the beta software, it’s been only partially successful.

Chief among the timesavers is the new Ignore Conversation feature. This is a godsend for anyone who works in a company where round-robin emails are part of the culture, allowing you to send a message – and any subsequent replies to that email – straight to the Deleted Items folder.

So if you’re copied into an email about a project you’re no longer involved with, or aren’t interested in the office bowling night that people are squabbling over a date for, you can simply opt out of the conversation.

A related feature, Conversation view, is at the other end of the effectiveness scale. This attempts to group messages on the same subject into one thread, in a similar fashion to Google’s Gmail. So, in theory, you can click on the arrow next to a message and get a dropdown menu showing all the related messages. In theory.

In practice, it’s currently an almighty mess. Outlook uses the subject line to decide whether messages form part of the same conversation, which leads to different conversations on the same subject being bundled into one almighty lump.

For example, in the PC Pro office, we have a custom of sending around team messages with a subject line such as “Where’s Barry tomorrow?” to explain where we’re going to be if we’re out of the office. With Conversation view, all of those messages – from across months and years – are bundled into the same queue. Suddenly, we’re being reminded where our colleagues went the November before last.

Even worse, if the sender omits to use a subject line altogether (a surprisingly common occurrence), any message with no subject is assumed to be part of the same conversation.