Initial Thoughts On Outlook 2007

I’m very impressed with the improvements in Outlook 2007.

The ToDo bar is proving a real godsend – it can (optionally) display a calendar (one or more months), appointments (fill the remaining space in the ToDo Bar or a only a fixed number of appointments, and Tasks.

Left is a screen shot of mine with one calendar month and the rest filling up with appointments.

It can get to be a bit too much data, especially if you have a couple of days with just one or two appointments then the eight or ten it displays (on my 1280 * 800  12.1″ laptop screen) can cover a whole week and it’;s not easy to see how it splits down into days – be nice to see this somehow color coded so that each day is a different color…

I am also loving the category features – tagging a mail with a articular category is now a simply right click in the ‘category’ field (if you have it displayed) or a single left click to tag it with the ‘default category’

I use categories to do all my filing (in a Frankenstienish Getting Things Done kind of personal prductivity scheme) so this really speeds me up.
I used to have about 12 common categories as macro buttons to allow me to do this, thats all superceded now… My whole custom filing/ GTD scheme is a single macro to explore the categories of an item and move the item into a folder of that (category) name – much easier.

You do lose a lot of real estate to the ribbon bar when composing messages though..

Do people really need that level of document editing / markup when composing messages ??