Do you feel like Outlook is something that “you can’t live with it, can’t live without it?”  I confess to being completely attached to my Outlook program.  It’s the first and last thing that I look at every day, and countless times throughout the day.  I use it for my 6 email accounts, contacts, calendar, and tasks.  I even use it to monitor my productivity by scheduling my appointments in categories and exporting a report to evaluate how my time is spent.  You could say that I eat and breathe Outlook!

But I’ll be the first person to say that it’s not perfect.  Microsoft has a nasty habit of isolating its programs so that they are not compatible with any other platform, and is often behind the times with certain features.  One of the most frustrating cases of this is the way that Outlook sorts and stores emails.

Gmail, and several other web and offline-based email clients are smart enough to sort emails by conversation.  So, I may have 145 emails stored from a particular person, but they all correlate to only 5 subjects that we are discussing.  It’s extremely helpful to be able to see an entire thread of a conversation without all of the mess of other emails in between.

Although Microsoft has yet to include this seemingly obvious feature in its program, there is a great third-party add-on that you can download to utilize this (and many other) wonderful features.  Oh, yeah, and did I mention that it’s FREE??

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) is a free outlook plug-in that sorts emails by conversation, searches your Outlook files at lightning speed, and even integrates social networking profile information such as Facebook and LinkedIn to your contacts.  What’s more is its statistics feature, allowing you to analyze things like email traffic at certain times and with certain people.  Download Xobni absolutely free at www.xobni.com/download.

And as always, if you need help with this application, or anything else at all, call us and we’ll take care of you, and leave you with a smile.  :)