I founds that the latest holidays are missing from my calendar. I checked for updates but none are there and manually trying to install the latest holiday updates gives an error that the update is already installed or does not apply to my system.

How can I get the latest holidays to show up?

In Windows Vista and Windows 7 there is a Contacts folder in your user directory. When using WIndows Vista, I used Windows Mail and the contacts that I created were stored in that Contacts folder. Now I’m on Windows 7 and I want to use Outlook.

How do I get these contacts from the Contacts folder of Windows into the Contacts folder of Outlook?

Upon using my signature I get additional characters in the message body; 

I thought to edit them out via the Signature Editor but then they don’t show.
Where are these characters coming from and how can I get rid of them?

Outlook has various alerts such as the New Mail Desktop Alert and of course the notification sound. I also have some additional alerts set via rules.

When entering a meeting or giving a presentation, all these alerts are not so nice to have anymore.

Apart from closing Outlook, is there any way to turn these alerts off all at once?

We’ve filled out additional user information in Active Directory.

Is it also possible to select users based on this information from within Outlook?
For instance, select all the users from a certain department.

How can I quickly go to a date without scrolling through the calendar or Date Navigator?

In previous versions of Windows I could minimize Outlook to the Notification Area (or System Tray) and then either relaunch it again via an Outlook shortcut I had in the Quick Launch section or by double clicking the Outlook icon in the Notification Area.

Now, whenever I use the Outlook icon on the Taskbar to relaunch Outlook, it actually creates a new Outlook window instead of relaunching the Outlook window that was already running. To actually close Outlook then, I have to close all the additional windows as well.

How can I stop this and make it reuse the original Outlook window?