If you’re anything like me, you probably get a TON of email each and every day. In addition, you probably get emails that span a conversation over multiple days.
Well, Outlook 2010 has this amazing feature called, Conversations. This will transform your inbox to look/feel more like a threaded forum (or, more like your gmail inbox if you have one).
To enable this feature, simply go to the View tab and check the “Show as Conversations” box. You will then get prompted to choose a single folder, or to apply this change to your entire account.
Another awesome part about this feature is that you can customize how it behaves. You can thread messages that are in different folders, if you want. This is important for me, because I use folders like mad; however, sometimes it takes me a while to flush out my inbox and messages appear in different folders.
This is always a great way to avoid the “top-down” reader pitfall. You may be the type of person who reads your email top-down, and not in FIFO (first-in, first-out) order. CAUTION! YOU MAY BE READING EMAILS THAT DON’T MAKE SENSE!
Threading definitely helps you here, because you can see which messages are unread, in that entire “conversation”.
One thing struck me as odd about this new conversation feature…when I was beta testing the Office 2010 package, this feature was enabled by default. It wasn’t until I got a new PC here at work that I realized the released version of Office 2010 did NOT have this feature enabled by default. Hopefully this isn’t another one of those features that gets overlooked.
What are your thoughts? Do you guys know of any other awesome “hidden” features in your favorite MS Office tool?
