15th January 2001

Coming from the "Brighter Outlook" Department, Lockergnomie Mitchell Sharp sharpens his contact searches. We all know how a PST file can become unwieldy in a heartbeat, storing everything from e-mails to tasks to scheduled meetings to anniversaries to journal entries to... infinity and beyond. I find it rather comforting to know that the data is all in one place (instead of scattered about my hard drive). Not convinced to move to Outlook 2000 yet (even though you probably already have Microsoft Office 2000 installed)? Let me ask this: if you needed to find all electronic documents (e-mails, appointments, notes, etc.) pertaining to a certain contact, how would you go about doing it? Cleanly, quickly, and without much effort? Aha. Outlook is smarter than you think! Open up a Contact's property sheet and flip to the Activities tab. That's all you need to do; this powerful PIM will automatically start flipping through your Outlook folders -- looking for and providing links to related data. I'm sure you'd much rather waste your time doing it manually, though.