When my husband and I moved in together, I had no problem sharing a living space and all the items usually shared in cohabitation. Except for one—I couldn’t share my computer. I’ve always been quite attached to the computer I use. I have things set up exactly how I like them, and I don’t like others messing with it. Change, on my system, isn’t always easy for me.

This week, however, I took a leap. No, I’m still not sharing with my husband. But I did do something monumental—I upgraded to Office 2007.

While this isn’t directly tied to educational technology per se, I have learned a few things in this new system that I am finding quite valuable in managing not only my time but also my sanity. I thought it would be nice to share a few of these things with you in hopes that you may also benefit from them.

One caveat, however: these items are for PC users only. Not to turn my back on Mac folks—in fact, I love my Mac as well. But these features just don’t cross over from one platform to another.

Blogs

I am an e-mail junkie. I like everything to come in via e-mail, and I squealed with glee when I learned that my voice-mail messages come straight into my Outlook (oh, unified messaging, how I love thee). Many people know that the best way of reaching me is to fire off an electronic message, and there’s a good chance I’ll get it sooner than any phone call. It’s a push technology where items come to me, instead of me having to go find it.

This push versus pull technology is why I have such a hard time keeping up with blogs. I have so many other things going on that I often don’t have the luxury of going from one Web site to the next to see what, if anything, is new.

Outlook 2007 has changed that for me. For that, I am quite grateful. In addition to making folders for your e-mail and sent items and filing away anything you may need at some point in the future, it will also collect RSS feeds for you.

As a quick overview, RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s a way of subscribing to a blog. So, for example, let’s say you want to subscribe to this blog (which I highly recommend). You would tell Outlook to subscribe to this, and when a new post was created, it would come in as a new message into your IDD Blog folder in Outlook.

You can subscribe to all of your favorite places and catch up on your reading when you’d like—from the very same place that you check your e-mail. And when you’re done, you can just delete it like any sort of e-mail message. You can also forward the message on to others if it was something that a colleague may find interesting, too!

Tasks

Now, tasks are nothing new in Outlook. But, man oh man, has the functionality increased! You can flag an e-mail and it adds it to your Tasks list. In fact, you can even flag it to be done by a certain day. And it adds it onto your calendar in the Tasks list, so you can get a quick snapshot of things you need to do in a day—items that are time scheduled and items that are not.

The crowning glory for me, however, was something I found in OneNote. Thanks to Sharon Guan, I am now a OneNote convert. I’ll let you explore the software yourself to check out its coolness in its entirety. What I want to point out to you is that you can take any item you have in OneNote and flag it—just like you can flag e-mails—with or without due dates. And it automatically adds it to you Outlook Tasks list. If you forget what the task references, it contains a direct link back to the OneNote document so you can reference the cryptic notes you may have typed in.

And with that, I will now not only end this blog article but also mark “Completed” on my Write Blog Article task.