Great Outlook 2007 tip

Melissa Macbeth offers a great tip on how to construct a filter so that Outlook 2007 only displays tasks in the new To Do Bar. The same technique can be used to display only e-mails if that works better for you. It's drop-dead simple and takes about 2 minutes to set up. Kudos to Melissa for making what can be a very intimidating and confusing task and boiling it down to a few easily-followed steps.

There's enormous power in the Customize Views dialog in Outlook. The good news is that with a bit of experimentation, you can radically improve the way Outlook presents your information in virtually every view in the application. The bad news is that with all of the attention paid to the user interface in Outlook 2007 and the rest of the core applications in the suite, tools like this are identical to Office 2003 and are still far too complex and intimidating for most people to use.

I'd really like to see the same approach taken in the main UI applied to complex, tabbed dialogs like this in a future release to make their power more discoverable and easily harnessed.