These five simple customizations of Microsoft Office Outlook mailbox view will save you a lot of time and improve the overall productivity.

E-mail communications is not plain text anymore and people want to send/receive well-designed email messages. There are many paid services that allow you to create a visually appealing e-mail template, but you can create it yourself using only Outlook.

This option controls which address book you see when you open the Address Book (via clicking Ctrl+Shift+B) and when you click the To, Cc, or Bcc buttons when composing e-mails.

This tip shows how to create and add custom holidays, for example, of your company to the Outlook calendar.

This tip shows how to add holidays of your country or any other country to the Outlook calendar. See other tip how to add custom holidays to the calendar.

By default, if Reading pane is opened, Outlook opens replies and forwards in the same window, but you can fix this behavior and open them in a new window.

For replies and forwarded messages, you can choose to attach the original text, to include and indent the text, or to add a prefix to each line of the original message or reply without including the original text.

Usually Outlook users are using folders to organize messages, but you can also use colors. For example, you might apply a special color to all messages from a particular person. You can then see at a glance which messages are from that person.

Sometimes you just need to have a quick preview of an email before deciding whether to open it. Outlook provides a feature called AutoPreview that shows the first few lines of your emails.

Suppose you'd like to add a couple more commands to the Quick Access toolbar. Also, say you want to work with every e-mail in new window. You can add the Open in New Window button to the Quick Access toolbar.