Ms Office Tune Up

Although email seems to have replaced the telephone as the contact medium of choice, it’s still often useful and necessary to call the people you work with. If your computer has a modem, then you can get Outlook to initiate the call for you and even make a note of the call in Outlook’s Journal folder. For this to work, you need to have a traditional (that is, not wireless) phone on your desk and your phone cables configured as follows:

• Run one phone cable from your modem’s “Line” jack to the phone jack on your wall.
• Run another phone cable from your modem’s “Phone” jack to your telephone.

Outlook gives you all kinds of ways to initiate a call, but the following two are the easiest:

• In the Contacts folder, right-click the contact and then click Call Contact.
• If the contact you want to call is already open, choose the Contact tab and click the top half of the Call split button (it’s in the Communicate group).

Outlook displays the New Call dialog box, shown in Figure 1. Before starting your call, you can use the following options in this dialog box:

• Open Contact-Click this button to open the Contact window for the current contact.
• Dialing Properties-Click this button to select or change the dialing properties for Windows.
• Create New Journal Entry When Starting New Call-Activate this check box to create an entry in Outlook’s Journal for this call.
• Dialing Options-Use this button to set up speed-dial numbers, discussed later in this section.

Figure 1 Use the New Call dialog box to configure and ini­tiate the contact phone call.

When you’re ready to dial, click Start Call. When the Call Status reads Connected, pick up the phone and proceed with your call. When you’re done, click End Call.

TIP

Outlook keeps track of the last seven calls you dialed.To redial one of these numbers, choose Actions, Call Contact, Redial or drop down the toolbar’s Dial list and then click Redial. Click the number to redial from the menu that displays.

NOTE

If you want to phone someone not in your Contacts list, choose Actions, Call Contact,New Call (or press Ctrl+Shift+D) to display the New Call dialog box.Type the phone number into the Number text box and then click Start Call.

You may find that you have several contacts that you call the most. Rather than always right-clicking or opening these contacts to call them, you can place them on Outlook’s Speed Dial list, which enables you to initiate calls to those contacts with just a few mouse clicks. Here are the steps to follow to set up a Speed Dial number:

1. 1 Press Ctrl+Shift+D to open the New Call dialog box. (Actually, you can use any method you want to display this dialog box. Unfortunately, Outlook gives you no direct method of defining a specific number as a Speed Dial number. It would be nice if we had an Add to Speed Dial command, but there isn’t one.)
2. 2 Click the Dialing Options button. Outlook opens the Dialing Options dialog box, as shown in Figure2.
3. 3 Type the person’s name in the Name text box.
4. 4 Type the person’s phone number in the Phone number text box.
5. 5 Click Add.


Figure 2 Use the Dialing Options dialog box to add a number to Outlook’s Speed Dial list.

6. 1 Repeat Steps 3-5 to add other numbers to the Speed Dial list. You can add up to 20 entries.
7. 2 Click OK to return to the New Call dialog box.
8. 3 Click Close.

To start a Speed Dial call, you have two choices:

• Choose Actions, Call Contact, Speed Dial (or drop down the toolbar’s Dial list and choose Speed Dial). In the menu that appears, click the person you want to call.
• Display the New Call dialog box, pull down the Contact list, and then click the person you want to call.

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