Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 > Reviews > A Powerful Email Management Suite: Outlook 2007

Author's product rating:   

Instructions / Help	Good
Ease of use	Easy
Ease of Installation	Excellent - very quick and easy
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	Classic look but some new tab interfaced areas, Easy to set up, Extra Features
Disadvantages:	Tasks can be given to you by anyone, interface needs modernizing .

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

Microsoft Outlook is Microsofts email management program, the previous versions were so good that nothing has come close, is this version improved enough to be worth buying?

Look
Unlike most of the other Office 2007 programs Microsoft Outlook 2007 hasn't been given a facelift, you still get your menus, not a handy tab in sight! I can only imagine they did this to save you from having to relearn all your Office programs. You can still skin the program in one of three skins, default XP blue, Vista black or a stylish silver. The effect of the skinning is less than on previous programs as it only colours the outer border. The rest of the program is rather unremarkable looking with your standard menu bars, pulldown menus and folder lists, nothing is going to wow you but its organised well and that counts for something.

The New Outlook
The first thing you will need to do is set up your email account so Outlook can receive your mail. Thankfully Microsoft has not been idle and this process has been dramatically simplified so absolutely anybody can do it, in previous versions you would need to know your pop3 server what your SMTP was and all sorts of things that would leave you clueless. In Outlook 2007 simply enter your email address and password and the program will do the work for you, after you have done that your email account will be fully accessible from Outlook, top marks for this as I was not looking forward to setting up my email accounts! Notice I said accounts, with Outlook you can manage all your email accounts in one place, which is dead handy.

Once your account has been set up you simply hit the Send/Recieve button to send or receive your mail, you will be able to see the status of your mail in the lower right hand corner as it downloads to your PC. When it is done you will find it in the inbox folder, unread mail is marked by a closed envelope and is very distinguishable from read mail which will appear with a (you guessed it) open envelope icon. If you can't find your email Outlook has a really handy search bar which you can type into to find the email you are looking for, this works really well and you can search in each independent folder. Outlook has multiple folders which are Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Outbox, RSS Feeds, Sent Items. All are self explanatory apart from RSS, here you can set up feeds to places like news sites so get your news delivered with your mail, great! You can also create custom folders to place your emails in and create rules so emails from certain senders go straight into them, you can even have a custom sound play when you receive mail from a certain sender. Creating and sending messages is really easy, you simply hit the New button and a blank mail message will pop up, all ready for you to type in. Here we actually get some changes as there are some helpful tabs at the top with helpful actions such as Save, Categorize, and you can even assign people tasks! Once you're done simply hit Send/Recieve and away your message goes.

As well as providing a top notch email client Outlook 2007 can do some other pretty neat things, it is not only a mail client but a Calendar, an address book and will notify you if you have to do anything important! The calendar feature is pretty handy and has a clever feature so that you can view just the working week, which is very handy. It is also viewable by day, week or month so you can get as much detail as you would like. When you zoom right down into day you will be able to plan the individual hours of your day (however if you did do this you probably wouldn't have time for much else!). Your contact list is your basic address book which you can customize fully with names, addresses, multiple phone numbers, email addresses, IM names, photos, the lot. You also get a handy bar with all the letters of the alphabet so you can easily find and view your contacts, if that wasn't enough you get a search bar too. Tasks are useful yet rather annoying as now you can receive tasks from the internet, so for example I now get tasked with buying stuff off Amazon.co.uk every time I receive an email from them. You can create your own tasks and they are integrated with the calendar which is useful. You can also search through your tasks if you cannot remember what to do.

Price & Conclusion
Microsoft Outlook 2007 is available in many bundles. If you are getting it from a version of Microsoft Office you will have to go with at least the standard edition as the basic Student and Teacher edition doesn't include it. Microsoft Office Standard edition will cost you around £150. If you just want Outlook you will be able to find an individual Outlook license for around £80, my advice would be to go with the Microsoft Office suite as it offers much better value for money. Outlook 2007 is one of the best mail clients you could use, the interface hasn't been brought up to speed in all areas but that means if you have used either Outlook 2003 or 2000 you will be familiar with it and be able to get going right away, in fact anyone will be able to get going easily as it requires hardly any effort to get configured and started. I highly recommend Outlook 2007. If you are still unsure about Outlook and Microsoft Office you will be pleased to know you can download a 60 day trial at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/office/newofficenewday /try/default.aspx 4/5 

Pictures for the review

Display pictures

Outlook 2007 in the Vista Black skin.