Microsoft Cleverness

I have a new job and we use Microsoft Outlook for email and calendar. Last night, I was poking around on the Outlook app and saw that on the “Search” tab, it presents sentences that I’ve written in emails and calendar invites that mention “I will” or “I’ll” and suggests them as to do items. They are actually quite helpful and I was surprised by the feature. Anyone actually use this in their task/workflow?

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I’m not a big fan of the Outlook app, mainly because I don’t like combining Email and Calendar in the same place, but I have to tip my hat, that’s a really nice feature. Well done Microsoft. I’ll need to see if I can integrate it into my workflow.

Thanks for sharing!

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I use them for work.
MS also prompts me for reminders for emails that I have not received reply on. Some very clever implementations in MS 365.

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With Outlook, you can open separate windows for calendars and mail. So it can behave like Apple’s stock apps - you can open both simultaneously on the same desktop or different desktops.

I was specifically referring to the mobile app above, although I do have the same gripe on the desktop. I’ve played around with using separate windows but it never stuck and always felt like an add-on feature to me. The issues I faced:

  1. No great way to discern between which window was which at a quick glance in my Windows task bar (haven’t played with Outlook on the mac in over a decade since I need to use Windows at work)
  2. Several times, if I opened 1 window which was wrong (say email instead of calendar), I would frequently just type on the shortcuts to get to change the mode resulting in 2 windows of the same type.

I find myself doing this very same thing. I would be nice if I could make the cal theme different from the email.

One thing you can try, as long as it doesn’t remove a feature or maybe a keyboard shortcut you already utilize, but you could make the 365 website for one of the two (outlook or calendar) a chrome or edge standalone app and then use the native app for the other.

It was automatic on the desktop version under Microsoft Viva’s daily update emails in my last company. A couple of times it caught things I hadn’t added to my task list.

Very worth it and improving.