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I run my own small online business and I get many, many hundreds of important emails each week from customers and suppliers.

Outlook 2007 really didn’t make life easy in terms of searching and tracking emails. I might get a customer email saying “A few months ago you said you’d give me 20% off” and finding the original email to verify this was not easy with Outlook 2007s rather poor search facility that often failed to find the right email and often gave a long list of wrong emails. Often I’d give up and manually try and find it – not a quick task with so many emails.

In Office 2010 the search facility has been massively improved. The search is much more effective at bringing back what you want. It also has advanced options like “all emails in the last week”, “Emails with attachments” and so on. This alone really has made my life easier.

But in addition to that it has the “People Pane” – though with some of my customers maybe it should be people who are a pain! Anyway this handy little window hides at the bottom of the email and lets you click it and see at a glance past emails between you and the person. Again this is very, very useful as often my customers might email once 6 months ago, then again a few times a month ago and finally lots of times recently before buying my product. Now I can easily track what they said to me and I to them.

The new “Quick Steps” functionality is also handy for automating simple jobs. For example I put any emailed bills in a “Payments Made” folder. Normally this means dragging and dropping over from the inbox to the payments made folder. Sometimes I’d accidently drop too early and then have to work out where it went. With the Quick Steps I just press the “Payment Recived” quick step button I’ve created and its marked as read and moved to the payments folder. Obviously the more steps you do with an email the more useful the quick steps can be.

There’s also a conversation view but other reviews I’ve seen suggest this is less than useful so not something I’ve used.

I’ve not really used any other new features but the search and email organising features of Outlook 2010 have definately made it worth the money for me.
Rating: 5 / 5