Microsoft Outlook for Writers — 7 Tailored Uses

Today I’m starting a seven-part series on Outlook for Writers, that I’ll spread over the next few weeks, in between other posts.

I could have used the title “Personal Information Management programs for writers,” but it doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, and most of what I’m going to point out to you can’t be done in other PIMs.

Hackers tend to ruffle their feathers when I say I like Microsoft products, but I’m an über user, not a hacker, and Microsoft is written for users. I’ve been using Outlook for nearly 20 years. My first version was for Windows 3.2. I’m currently using 2003 at the day job, and 2007 at home.

I’ve tried other programs (Eudora, ACT!, DayRunner for Windows), but I always come back to Outlook, because even though they’re very good programs in their own right:

1) Outlook syncs with most hand-held devices, and everything is all in one place. Whereas if I were using, say, Google Gmail, a project manager, a professional Contact Manager, and some other journaling program, most of them won’t sync with the Palm Pilot, and I’d have to open up six programs just to get at the information that Outlook provides at one glance.

Synching ability is very important to me as a writer with a day job because I need to take as much information about my writing affairs with me each day as I can manage. Having much of that information in Outlook, and hot-syncing to the Palm Pilot each day, provides nearly all the information I need to deal with my writing affairs while I’m away from the home office.

2) Outlook is infinitely tailorable. You can change all sorts of settings, filters, and views to display the data in whatever way suits you. You can also create macros to complete repetitive tasks. Neither of these abilities is available in most of the on-line free suites, such as Google, nor many of the pay-for varieties.

But I’m not on a mission to convert you to the glories of Outlook. What I would like to do is get you thinking about how you use whatever program or system you use to keep your personal information straight.

I’m going to offer some tweaks you can use to make your system work better for you as an anchored author.

The terminology may change slightly from program to program, so I’ll use Outlook’s standard terminology, which most people understand. Adapt according to the program or system you use.

1) Create a Contact for each of your finished manuscripts, and use this as the master file for the book.

Put the book’s name in the Company field, so it isn’t split up into first and last “names”.

Before the book is published, you can use the Notes section to record your marketing efforts, and the steps it goes through with your editor.

(The Contact entry for DIANA BY THE MOON)

Always record the latest development at the top of the Notes section, such as: “July 7 – final line edits turned into editor.”

You can format text, drop images, files and shortcuts to files into the notes section, plus create live URLs. As Contacts are permanent files, though, don’t be tempted to drop whole files (like the manuscript itself) or big images. I put a thumbnail of the cover in sometimes, as I have with the Diana by the Moon sample used here. Use shortcuts, if you must link back to source files. But you’re better off using the Contact as just the master record, and if your hard drive is well organized, you should be able to find all the supporting files with little effort.

Once the book is sold, record the various ISBNs in the telephone fields. The fields take alpha and numerical characters, so you can put “ISBN” in front of the number, and the format (”hard cover”, “trade paperback” etc), behind it.

Add your Editor’s name to the “spouse” field. (Or if that’s too ironic for you, you can use the “Assistant” field.)

Using the Spouse field for your editor

Add the book’s “buy” page to the “website” field, for a linkable URL (such as the Amazon or B&N page, or your publishers’ website page for the book). You can add multiple URLs where the book is available to the Notes section, too. You’d be surprised how often you need to quote these URLs, and you’d be amazed how many times you need to quote the ISBN for all your books. It’s handy to have ISBNs listed somewhere sensible, because the other alternative is to comb through Amazon, or physically flip your books over to write the number down.

When you open up your Contacts, select the “Detailed Address Cards” as your default view, as this shows all

(The Contact navigation pane, showing the Detailed Address Cards view selected.)

the top level fields in the main window, saving you having to open the individual Contact to see the data.

The advantage to creating a “book” Contact is that the information is always hot-synched to your mobile device, and that makes the history and ISBNs always at your fingertips. When you hit conferences or when you’re schmoozing agents and editors, having that information to hand can be very convenient indeed.

If you’re comfortable screwing around with User-Defined Fields in Outlook, and the Forms tool (where you create your own forms), you can make customized fields in each new Contact for all these elements. Be aware, though, that customized fields are often not synched to hand-held devices, so one of the major reasons for keeping the information in Outlook is lost.

Here are two other author-related uses for Contacts.

Use the Follow-up Flags to remind you to nag editors and agents.

If you’re wooing agents and/or editors, Contacts will do the job, and it gets carried on your handheld, while programs like ACT! may not. Set up a new Contact for potential agents and editors, and use the Notes field to keep track of where you are with that person.

Use the Reminders function to set up follow-up dates, such as enquiring after your manuscript once three months has elapsed.

2. Contacts is a good password manager.

Create a new Contact for each of your passwords and site log-ins. Put the name of the site or program in the Company field, and the password and log-in information in the Notes field. The URL can be added to the website address, so when you open up the Contact, you note the login, copy the password, and jump to the site itself with one click. Once you’re there, you type in the log-in, paste the password (CNTL+C), and hit enter. Not nearly as much of a fuss as you might have thought, right?

Having the passwords and log-ins with you wherever you go is a sanity-saver – a good example is when you get hot news (my new cover is out!!) and want to spread the news out to readers straight away. If you don’t remember all your logins for the forums and reader sites, and so forth, you’re screwed.

There are stand-alone password managers out there, that can generate the most complex passwords based on algorithms, and keep a list of your logins, etc, but none of them can be carried with you on your handheld.

If you’re using the same passwords and login for all the forums and reader sites, you’re running a major, critical risk…and that password doesn’t also access your PayPal account, does it? Coz if it does, I’ll just slip over and steal your latest royalty cheque right out of your account….

Password management might sound trivial, but for a writer on the go, it is a major headache. In the last two months I’ve given a promotion company access to my MySpace and Amazon Connects pages to do some promotion work there. I changed the passwords to unique and temporary ones, and thank god I wrote them down, because when I wanted to access the pages myself, do you think I could remember the password?

Yeah, you can usually get the password mailed back to you, but some sites will change your password, send you a new temporary password, and ask you to reset your password as soon as you login. For me, that would have denied access to my promotion company these last two months, or for as long as it would have taken to let them know about the new one.

Easier to remember all the passwords and logins, and by using Outlook, the information is always with me, and always current.

Use the Journal function to build a database of writing statistics.

Journal entries can also be customized to provide user-defined fields to suit your work, but using the standard fields, and the Notes section will provide you with powerful, sort-able information.

It is here that you can record rejections, acceptances, sales, foreign sales, royalty statements received, beginning a new manuscript, finishing a first draft, beginning editing a script, finishing the editing of a script…anything that happens in your writing career that you may later want to recall the date and time for.

All journal entries can be sorted and displayed in any way you want (by defining “views”), so you can ask to see just sales, or just rejections, or only rejections for a certain book, or how long it took to write one book, or how long you spend writing first draft compared to editing, or plotting….

This journal function is a redundant one if you’re already keeping the information in the Notes section of your book’s Contact file, so chose which way you want to store the information before you get too far along.

I actually prefer to use the Journal function to keep track of book-related events because you can sort and rearrange the data to spot trends, etc. However, I use the Contacts method, because my journal entries are not synched with my Palm Pilot. Make your decision based on similar criteria. It’s good to make as much of your writing career, and the files that goes with it, as portable as possible, so that you can carry it with you to the job, and elsewhere.

Record the book’s name in the Subject field, and in the Categories section, select/create your book’s name as a category, and any other appropriate categories (think of Categories as “tags”, if you’re used to Del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, or Digg). The drop down “type” field is limited and un-editable, and I rarely use it – I use Categories, instead.

A Journal entry.

Outlook’s Journal function

Use Categories to tag everything in Outlook.

When I first started this series, I said I was an über user, as opposed to hacker. Over at Productivity 501 (one of my regular blog reads), they phrased it another way, defining technology users in two categories. My devotion to Outlook is very much related to this dichotomy of users. I keep looking for ways for Outlook to do the job for me, while others will buy new software, new gadgets.

Outlook is almost universal, too — nearly everyone has got it, and (at a very rough estimate!) I’d guess that 95% of all office jobs in the world provide Outlook as an email client. (I’d be interested in hearing statistics on this if anyone knows of any). For this reason, too, it pays to know how to make Outlook work for you.

Today, consider the categories function in Outlook — a feature that is very rarely utilized by the average user.

The Categories dialogue box in Outlook 2007

At a minimum, you should have a Category for each book you’ve ever written, and anything to do with that book should be categorized with the book’s name. This includes Contacts, emails that you’re keeping, Tasks, Appointments, Journal entries, any type of item you use in Outlook that has anything to do with your book. In versions earlier than 2007, when you’ve got an Outlook item already open (such as a Task, Contact, etc), pressing ALT+G pops up the Category box, and you can create and click off what categories the item belongs to. Vista has a drop-down box that expands to show Categories with colour you can tailor:

From anywhere in Outlook, if you sort by category, you’ll have a complete overview of the book’s history and relevant details.

Windows Vista takes this concept of tagging and categories one step close to the social bookmarking level by allowing you to tag everything. Not just Outlook items, but all Microsoft program files (Word, Excel, Publisher, FrontPage, PowerPoint and so on), and any file that you can display in Windows Explorer, including media files. You can search and sort by categories, and display by categories. And you don’t have to open the file to add or change the categories. You can do it right in the footer of Windows Explorer.

The Details ribbon in Vista’s Windows Explorer

The Details ribbon in close-up, showing the tags and categories

So if you consistently tag your book’s support files with the book’s category, then by sorting in Explorer, you will have a complete list of any files related to your book.

You may not have Windows Vista now, but you will in the future – or the next Microsoft OS after Vista – so get used to the idea of tagging and categorizing to sort your data. Combined with the powerful search engine built into the Vista operating system, using Categories becomes a comprehensive data organizer. Might as well get into the habit now.

Use Calendar as a task master.

I rarely use Calendar to record actual appointments, but I do use it to map out my day, and build in reminders to start or stop certain activities – especially writing, as I quite often lose track of time when I’m in the middle of a writing session. I actually have a reminder to go to bed, or I’d be up half the night!

Appointments can be made to re-occur (so can Tasks), so if you want a daily reminder to get to your desk and write, then your computer or handheld can be set up to nudge you to go do that. It’s also a great way of getting out of conversations or situations that a polite “I have to go,” won’t. If your handheld is beeping at you, and you leap to your feet and cry “I have an appointment!”, most people won’t insist you stand around for another ten minutes while they relate mind-numbing details about their daughters’ elementary school concert. You don’t have to tell them it’s an appointment with your desk.

Appointments can act as your personal editor, reminding you to think about certain characters, or resolve plot problems, right when you have a few minutes to spare. The reminders are time-specific, and you can keep delaying them by five minutes or more until you get down to the job it’s nagging you about.

6) Tasks is a good project scheduler.

While Tasks is never going to replace even the most basic project management software, it does get synched to most hand-helds, and it does the job of figuring out what you’re going to write next. It also keeps a list of writing projects.

Using Outlook Tasks as a basic, synch-able Project Manager

You can see that I have already scheduled the first few projects.

One of the things I love about Outlook that no other program does (that I’m aware of), is relative date entering. As an example, you can type into any date field “three weeks from today” and Outlook will convert that to the right date. Same with “2 days ago,” “next year” “next Monday” or even “next mon”, “first wed in sep”. Almost any variation of date you can think of, Outlook will convert to an actual date for you.

So in Tasks, when you’re looking at your list of writing projects, and the end date of the first one is September 16, you can click in the end date for the second project and type “6 weeks from sep 16? and it will insert your second project’s end date for you.

Do that all the way down the list, and you have a basic project scheduler. You could also do a similar thing with Calendar, looking at appointments in a “list” view.

I use Tasks in multiple ways apart from scheduling writing projects.

I keep all my Tasks categorized, for stuff I do at the day job, tasks that can only be done at home, Saturday tasks, Sunday tasks, and evening tasks, before the main writing session of the evening starts. Then, when I’m at my desk (job or home), I can call up the next Task for that location or time, and get going. Instant productivity, because I don’t have to figure out if it’s something I can actually do “here” or not, which is one of the curses of a career that forces you to work in multiple locations and environments, and on multiple machines.

I also have an “anywhere” category (as in, “can be done anywhere,”). When I have a few moments, such as standing in a line, I’ll look at the next Task in the “anywhere” category, and see what progress I can make on it. These sorts of Tasks are often brainstorming-related. I need to come up with a better opening line, a book title, a character name, or a back cover blurb. I use the Notes section of the Task to jot down thoughts. When I hot-sync the handheld, the updated Notes section is passed over to my computer, and I can cut or copy the notes to a Word file, or more permanent location. I don’t even need to hook the Palm Pilot up to the computer. I can sit anywhere in the house or yard and hot sync via the wireless network.
Three more uses of Outlook for Anchored Authors

Outlook handles ALL email.

I have multiple email accounts because I own four domains, have a cable address, a Yahoo address and a Gmail account.

I have a dozen RSS feeds that I like to stay right on top of – so they can’t linger in Google Reader until I have a spare minute. I want to know when new posts are posted, pronto.

I have email notifications arriving from half a dozen different social networks, that are my only prompt to keep those pages current.

All of the above gets sucked down into Outlook’s email In-box, and from there filtered into appropriate folders, with various automatic actions happening, according to the filters and macros I have set up to automate frequently occurring actions.

All these critical RSS feeds and emails get synched to my Palm Pilot, so I can deal with them on the go. I don’t want to have to visit six different webmail accounts, and in some cases, I can’t visit the sites, because the IT department at my day job has banned access to them.

Any Outlook item can be used to create any other Outlook item.

By picking up an email with your mouse, dragging it to the Task button on the bottom left of the navigation pane, and dropping it, you’ll create a Task that has the contents of the email in the notes section, and the subject of the email in the subject field. Add a due date, and a reminder, if you need it, and hit ALT+S, and the task saves itself and shuts down, and you’ve spent 15 seconds on something that can take infrequent users of Outlook up to three minutes.

The whole dragging-and-dropping functionality in Outlook makes a huge difference when you’re trying to clear out your in-box of today’s three hundred emails.

Experiment with this. You can also drop emails into Appointments, Journal entries, and Contacts. You can drop Tasks into Appointments…well, you get the idea.

You can also drag Outlook items outside of Outlook, and save them as individual files. So you can drag your fan mail to the fan mail folder and delete them out of your in-box. You can drag the Contact for your editor and publisher and line editor and publicist into your book’s folder in Windows Explorer. It creates a copy so the master file is still in Outlook. But the information is right there on your hard drive, too, if you want it.

Archiving your writing affairs is easy.

The drag-and-drop method is also a good way to archive your information in a format that is permanently accessible. You should work very hard to keep your Outlook PST file (the file on your hard drive that stores all your personal information) relatively small. A PST file bigger than around 3Gb (and opinion varies on the size) will start bellyaching. Missing files, lost emails, directories imploding. Fun stuff like that.

Everything in Outlook except your Contacts you should consider to be short-term records that need to be archived on your hard drive. Depending on how much information you handle daily, and how many emails you don’t delete as soon as you’ve read them, work on keeping two or three month’s worth of emails, completed tasks, journal entries and past-due appointments inside Outlook. At the end of each month, select, drag and drop all items three months or older into appropriate files on your hard drive, and permanently delete them from Outlook (that means holding down the shift key as you click on “delete,” forcing the files to by-pass the recycle bin inside Outlook).

You could set up a Task or Calendar item to remind yourself to archive each month.

Contacts should be permanent records, which is why I recommend NOT adding really big files to the Notes section of Contacts.

Being able to store individual Outlook items outside of Outlook reinforces what I said before about using Categories for everything. The categories you assign an item in Outlook stays with it when you drag it to the hard drive. You can open the item just by double-clicking it, edit it as you would normally and shut it down again, all “outside” Outlook.

Therefore, the new Vista way of displaying categories for everything and allowing tagging means that it’s possible to sift your whole hard drive for any item at all that has your book’s category, and you end up with a search results window that will show Outlook items next to Word files, next to cover images, next to emails from your editor, the book trailer…. And you can search and sort within search results, further defining your hunt.

First appeared on Anchored Authors on August 7, 2008

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