25 January 2009
Curing the Microsoft Outlook Blues
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to... .
Wow! It must be in the air or something! In the past 5 days I have had no less than 5 requests for help on how to do various chores and tasks in Microsoft Outlook. Normally I go for months without someone asking about Outlook, so this is a bit of a surprise.
I thought about doing some tutorials myself, but after taking a quick peek on Google and YouTube for tutorials I decided that I wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel. Instead, I’ll share the results of my search with you and let you decide which ones you want to use.
Video is huge these days. In fact, YouTube video is about as mainstream as you can get. Not sure about that? If President Obama can give his weekly address to the nation via YouTube (Click here to watch) then I think it’s safe to say that video on YouTube is mainstream. Here is a “playlist” of Outlook tutorials on YouTube from a self proclaimed email expert. His videos are actually quite good, and if you can get past him promoting his book and entreaties to hire him at the beginning and end of each video, I think that you’ll learn a lot. Pick a topic that you want help on, or start at the beginning and watch them all!
Don’t like video and would rather read and print a step by step tutorial? No problem. This site was written by a university and claims that their tutorials were written at the third grade level, but that they had been used successfully in K through 12 schools. Sounds perfect to me! They have a large selection of very easy to follow step by step tutorials on all aspects of using Outlook. (Don’t let that K-12 thing put you off, it just means that any one can benefit from reading them)
Or maybe you want to get trained by Microsoft itself. As it turns out, the software giant has two pages of tutorials that you can access by going here or by going here. As with most things Microsoft, they can be a bit hard to follow, but if you are willing to give it a chance, you will be sure of getting the straight scoop.
My final choice was from the venerable publishing group that produces the Dummies series of books. These folks have explaining software down to a science in their books, so you can expect the same high level of expertise in their Outlook tutorials.
You can expect to learn how to set up mail accounts, import and export contacts, create mailing lists, create groups and much much more. Spend a few minutes, learn a few things and make your much easier. Do you have a favorite training resource online that you care to share?
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