Home Office: Tools and Tips to Brighten Your Outlook

Everybody uses Microsoft Outlook, right? Except you cheapskates using Outlook Express, of course. Well, here's a scoop for you: Outlook stinks. There--I said it, and no lightning bolts have struck from Redmond (I put my rubber-soled boots on, though). For those of you who do use Outlook for your e-mail, I have some neat utilities and add-ons that make the program work the way I think it should.

I live in e-mail--often receiving 150 or more messages a day--and I regularly access my archive of roughly 15,000 messages. Outlook's meager skills at organizing and searching incoming e-mail leave me, well, unorganized. An Outlook buddy turned me on to a minor miracle: Caelo Software's $40 Nelson Email Organizer.

I think of NEO as an Outlook-as-it-should-have-been e-mail interface. The program lets me arrange e-mail by critical--or hypercritical--people (my editor waiting for a past-due column, for example), by frequent correspondents, or by date. NEO catalogs and indexes everything without messing with the actual messages. A button on Outlook's toolbar lets me instantly jump between Outlook and NEO for access to my calendar, tasks, contacts, and notes. NEO's automatic indexing makes searches startlingly fast.

Undoubtedly, many of NEO's most useful features will eventually be built into Outlook. But until then, buy NEO. The utility works with all versions of Windows and Outlook. Click here to download a 30-day trial version.

Quick tip: Instead of typing a due date for a task in Outlook 2000 or 2002, enter a description of it, such as the last Friday of the month. Outlook will automatically convert that to numerical format. Try some: the first Monday in March, 30 days from now, two months from last week, or Cinco de Mayo. Qué cool, no?