Microsoft Outlook is an ambitious program that integrates e-mail, address books, scheduling, and task management. In fact, you can organize your whole life with it!

Microsoft calls Outlook a desktop information manager. It’s in part aimed at users of personal information managers (PIMs), which organize contacts, calendars, and to-do lists in much the way that a pocket organizer notebook does. Outlook is also the preferred client for Microsoft Exchange Server — Microsoft’s enterprise e-mail and groupware solution — and can be used as the client for other sophisticated mail systems.

But Outlook is just as effective for the individual user who gets mail from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), keeps separate personal and family calendars, and communicates with family, friends, and colleagues on the phone, through the U.S. Postal Service (aka “snail mail”), or by e-mail.

KEY COMPONENTS

Outlook stores information in folders, using special forms to gather and display different types of data. It’s easy to see how everything is organized when you look at the graphic display of your expanded mailbox. One quick way to see this is to choose View, Folder List.

What you don’t see are the components that help Outlook keep everything in its place — the services, connections,