I sometimes receive an email message that I don’t need to respond to directly but do have some thoughts about which I want to write down and refer to it later.

Is there any good way to add a note to a message that I received?

My Contacts/People folder almost looks like it is sorted randomly. It’s a mixture of being sorted by first name and last name.

In the People section in Options, I’ve set it to display in the “First (Middle) Last” and “Last First” format but this did not seem to have any effect at all.

How do I make the sorting order of People consistently?

Today I received a Meeting Invitation that was received as a normal message but contained the following attachments;

• not supported calendar message.ics
• ATT00001.htm
• c120414.ics

The ATT00001.htm attachment contained the same textual content as the meeting message, but trying to open either ics-file resulted in the error;

The operation failed.

How did this meeting invitation end up broken and how can I fix it so I can accept it and add it to my Calendar?

The Task module of Outlook isn’t one of the prettiest or most modern parts of Outlook and probably also one of the lesser used modules by most.

Creating and managing tasks in Outlook can sometimes be a task of its own and there isn’t really a way to manage your Tasks when using a smartphone or tablet. Until now…

Have you already used the Microsoft To-Do app?

I would like to create a rule that will allow me to filter all of the meeting receipts where people have typed in a message to me.

This is to prevent me from reviewing the meeting receipts that don’t have any verbiage contained in the body.

I see where I can look for specific words, but don’t know how to examine for the presence of text.

How can I filter out these empty responses?

When looking at the received dates of the messages in the Message List, I see the first messages have a day and date specified. When I scroll further down my list of messages, only a date is shown.

How can I set Outlook to always display the name of the day that the message was received on in the Message List?

I organize and attend quite a few meetings with somewhat larger groups and I therefor receive a lot of “Calendar messages” like meeting requests, accept, decline, canceled messages, new time proposals, etc…

I tend to ignore these during the day to get some work done and because Outlook processes most of them automatically anyway.

However, at set times, I still want to go through these messages, especially to process the feedback that some people give in their reply and to process the new time proposals.

Is there any way I can quickly filter or otherwise search my mailbox so I will only see all these “Calendar messages”?

Often times, I receive invitations for recurring meetings that have no end date set so they will go on forever in my Calendar. It’s actually not that surprising considering that “No end date” is the default selection.

I really would like the organizer to put more thought into this. Sometimes the original organizer has even left the company and we still have these recurring meetings left in our Calendars.

As this is such a problem for us, I actually have multiple related questions about this;

• Can I change the default recurrence pattern for meetings and appointments that I create in Outlook? Currently it is always set to “No end date” and sometimes even forget to change it myself.
• Is there anything I can do against this as a recipient of these invitations?
• Is there anything our administrator can do to prevent these meetings from being send out?

I’m trying to sort my Contacts a bit more effectively but I’m a bit at a loss to determine what the best approach is.

There seem to be various options such as creating additional Contacts (sub) folders, creating Contact Groups and using Categories.

Which approach is the best or which one would you recommend?

Over the years, I’ve created many archive files (I used to archive by month and then later by year as space became less of an issue).

I still use them as a reference sometimes and I’d like to combine them into one big archive as it is easier to manage and simplifies searching as well.

How can I merge them together?