Obligatory Preamble
The first time you open Outlook 2007 you might be disappointed to see that, on the face of it, Outlook does not display the new ribbon and new interface that you will see in the other major applications in the Office 2007 suite such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Dig a little deeper under the surface, however, and you'll see that the Ribbon and new interface are there in places, but more than this, Outlook is significantly improved both in terms of both functionality and features. There's a lot to like about Outlook 2007 and plenty of new tools to help you be more productive. Here are our ten best tips for working with the new Outlook 2007:

Add a New Quick Style for Email Messages
One of the new features in Office 2007 is style “galleries” that give you a preview of how the text will look once you apply the style. On an Outlook message, you’ll see the Quick Styles gallery on the Format Text tab. What is not so obvious is how to make changes to the styles or – better yet – add your own styles to the gallery. What you will need to do is customize the template that holds the styles. The template that Outlook 2007 uses for email messages is NormalEmail.dotm, which is located in the default templates folder for Office – usually C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates. Once you find this file in Windows Explorer, follow these steps:

• Shut down Outlook
• Right-click the NormalEmail.dotm file, and choose Open
• Use the commands on the Home tab to change the formatting to what you want to use for your new Quick Style
• In the Styles group, click the small down arrow to the right of the gallery, and choose Save Selection as a New Quick Style, and click OK
• Close the NormalEmail.dotm and say Yes to the prompt to save changes
• You should now be able to restart Outlook, create a new message, and see your new Quick Style in the Format Text tab’s gallery

Add a New Quick Part for Email Messages
Quick Parts are a new Word and Outlook 2007 feature for text fragments and other building blocks, replacing the AutoText feature in previous versions. Here’s how you can create a Quick Part to hold boilerplate text for insertion in an email message.

• Open a new Outlook message
• Write the boilerplate text you want to be able to reuse
• Select all that text, and then choose Insert | Quick Parts | Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery
• In the Create New Building Block dialog, give the Quick Part a name and set the other options. Do not change the gallery from Quick Parts to something else
• Click OK to save the new part

To test your new Quick Part:

• Choose Insert | Quick Parts, and select the name of the part you just created
• Outlook saves the Quick Part in the NormalEmail.dotm file, a template used for email messages that also can contain your custom Quick Style settings

Download Full Messages from an IMAP Account
The default setting for an IMAP account in Outlook 2007 is to download only headers from the Inbox, but you can change that setting to make it download complete items instead. Follow these steps:

• Press Ctrl+Alt+S to bring up the Send/Receive Settings dialog
• Select All Accounts (or the group that contains your IMAP account’s send/receive settings), and click Edit
• Under Accounts, select your IMAP account
• Under Receive mail items, select Use the custom behavior defined below
• Under Folder Options, select Inbox, then select Download complete item including attachments
• Click OK, then Close
• The next time Outlook performs a manual or automatic send/receive for that account, you should see full items download into the Inbox folder