Now the bad news: released for the first time with Office 97 and since reissued in a number of new versions, most notably Outlook 98, Outlook frequently seems more like it's beta than production software. Whether you're most bothered by Outlook's refusal to deliver your email, its tendency to eat up your free hard disk space, or any of the other numerous glitches that occur from time to time (and sometimes all the time), you're almost sure to feel at some time or another that Outlook is just plain annoying. Someone ought to do something about it.

That's just what authors Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee have done. In Outlook Annoyances, they look at these and other annoyances and show how you can conquer them so that you can actually use Outlook to organize and manage your personal information. For instance, the book will help you:

• Customize the Outlook 98 toolbar so it reflects the way you work rather than the needs of Microsoft's marketing machine
• Walk through Outlook's often deeply buried user interface settings so that you can decide what you want to change and why
• Get data into Outlook from your old email client or PIM, move information from one Outlook module to another, and export data from Outlook to other applications, like Microsoft Word
• Create custom forms that use VBScript and access the Outlook object model to eliminate many of the annoyances of Outlook's standard forms
• Understand the difficulties involved in combining widely disparate data in a single container. Often, knowing where an annoyance comes from -- even if you can't do anything about it -- makes it far less annoying.

Aside from the bug workarounds and customization, you'll find good documentation of all of Outlook's features--much better than Microsoft's documentation. Among this book's handiest features is its strong coverage of e-mail conversion--how to transfer your e-mail archive into Outlook from some other program. Information on getting messages out of Outlook and into some other format is less evident, unfortunately. Overall, this is a fine book that will make any Outlook user's life easier. --David Wall