Tasks and Time Management in Outlook

Well, Office 2003 (on XP with the default XP blue theme) has always been "more blue than gray."  The whole "blue menubars & toolbars" in 2003 was terrible (I got around it by using the Media Center theme; Office 2003 then used gray like the rest of OS & apps).  It's unfortunate to see the Blue theme extended even moreso in Office 2007.

In XP Blue, blue is the color of your title bars, window borders, and taskbar.  Office's extension of this to "every UI element" is sad.

In Outlook 2007, please add the ability when scheduling an appointment to have an easier way of of a drop down list to select a contact and to have the contact appear then in the calendar instead of just a subject line.

I did see the new B1RT which shows the name under the To Do Bar.  Will the contact appear as well in the Calendar?  

Consider this scenario, after an appointment, it would be nice to click on it as completed and "Time Stamp" notes regarding the meeting.  Also to have an option to Follow-Up.

Link Contacts to a Company, so when Company information is updated, it is automatically updated in each Contact record as well.

Hi,

I just want to drop a suggestion :

- redesign "glass-Vista-like" icons on all the menus (drop the Office 2003 icons)
- about the To-Do bar, change the design of the small calendar, with some glass effect it would be great !

Maybe it's a bit angry, but I'm sorry, that's all I have to say at the moment because I am not a beta-tester.

Thanks for reading.

Hi Melissa,

To be brief, there are my ideas:

-new rule: when a user manually moves the item into a specific folder, it will by marked by a certain category
-new view for a folder: quick access from context menu of a folder to see all outlook items in that folder (emails, tasks, appointments ...). Now it is possible from "All outlook items", but when choosing the criterion for a specific folder - I have to type the name of folder manually.
- send mail: it would be good to have possibility to set a category for a mail, that I want to send and to define the folder, to which the mail should be moved in.  Of course to assign a contact.
- new default fields for contact:  msn, icq, skype numbers … , so that the program (msn, icq, …) can find it in the contact
-notes for email items:  to have o possibility to write some notes for sent and received emails  without using outlook notes or onenote notes. (just define new default field and include it to email form)
-task from onenote: when creating task from onenote - to have possibility to set the category and folder of the new task
- better category view - if there is a lot of categories - it's difficult to find a category (e.g. the size of the form for categories can't be resized, …)
-onenote note  in outlook note folder: to enable to have in one folder "outlook notes" and shortcuts of "onenote notes" - they would exist side by side ->  in "All outlook items" I could see onenote note's shortcut side by side the other outlook items. For shortcuts there would be to edit additional information (date of creation, contact  assignment, …)
-onenote notes for outook items. It should by already implemented but a can't see the button "onenote note" in outlook or is it going to be implemented in beta 2?
-to be able connect all outlook items with each other. (like shortcut - but without inserting the shortcut e.g. to task ...)- something like manual definition of related outlook items (but not using category)
-when assigned appointments to tasks - automatically calculate something like time of actual work for a task upon appointment's time
-task: possibility to set start date of the task with due date set to none

Questions:
-are the categories saved within the .pst file? Are they preserved when reinstalling outlook (or whole operating system)?
-what does the item on "task  form / details / update list" mean?

Can you figure a way to send a meeting request with multiple timeslots for the invitees to choose which one to accept? This is useful for scheduling training sessions that occur on different days so that invitees who cannot attend one session can have the option to choose other make-up sessions without having to re-send additional meeting requests to them.