Outlook has a rather ambivalent attitude to the new Office 2007 interface. The main window still sports the traditional menus and toolbars, and yes, you can customise them.

If you create a new message, appointment or contact, however, you’ll be in a ribbon-bedecked environment.

Although Outlook had a major overhaul in 2003, there’s still a lot that’s new with this version. First up is the To-Do bar. This summarises items from your task list, appointments from your calendar, mail messages flagged for follow-up and items from other sources such as SharePoint Services .

Colour categories provide a rather elegant way to tag disparate items, be they mail messages, contacts, appointments or tasks. Right-click on any of these items, select Categorize and choose a colour. The item will then appear with, for example, a blue blob next to it or a blue highlighted header.

This makes it easy to identify items associated with a particular project or person. You can also create a mail search folder for each colour – all messages categorised with that colour will be moved to the corresponding folder.

You can now also integrate RSS feeds into your mail folders, either by subscribing through Internet Explorer, or directly by typing the URL into the RSS tab on the Account Settings dialogue. Unlike Mozilla Thunderbird, which has had RSS capability for some time, when you click on a RSS feed title it opens in the default web browser rather than in Outlook itself .

As with mail messages, RSS items can be marked for follow-up and thus shown in the To-Do bar. There’s now a one-click preview of most email attachments, including Office documents, Visio drawings, text files and most image formats.

When we tried this by sending attachments from another email account and client, Outlook was rather cagey – first it decided the message was junk and wouldn’t show the attachments at all, then when we moved the message to the Inbox it issued a warning before previewing a DocX file. Still, better to be safe than sorry.

Finally, it’s not entirely true to call Instant Search a new feature of Outlook 2007. First, it isn’t installed with Office – you need to download version 2 of Windows Desktop Search, and second, you can use the latter (or older versions) to search your email in older versions of Outlook or in Outlook Express. What is new, however, is the integration of the search bar into the mail folders, contacts, tasks and calendar.

This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review
Microsoft Office 2007 overview
Microsoft Word 2007 review
Microsoft Excel 2007 review

See also
Microsoft Windows Vista review
Video review: Windows Vista

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Zoho Virtual Office productivity software
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