Summary Dashboard: Manage Projects in Outlook

Divided into four panes - Projects, Notifications, Tasks and Actions, and Appointments - the Summary Dashboard provides a control panel for your workday.  Open the Dashboard by pressing the Dashboard button on the main toolbar.  To close it, click on another folder, such as the Inbox, or another area in Outlook, such as the Calendar.

 

Projects

The Projects pane shows a summary of all of your Projects, along with counts of today's appointments and tasks that are overdue, due today or due this week.

• Type a Project name in the filter to narrow the list of Projects down
• Click Open Project to launch the Project Selector and open a Project Dashboard in another tab.
• Select Active Projects Only to display only those Projects that have active items in them.
• Double-click any Project in the list to drill down to a Project Dashboard tab.

Notifications

The Notifications Summary displays a summary of all active notification managers.

• Click the +/- next to the header for each Notification Manager to expand message categories.
• Right-click individual Notification Managers to enable/disable and/or jump to its home folder.

This functionality is being enhanced for v5.2 to allow creation of custom notification managers.

Tasks and Actions

This is a global list of all of your Tasks and Deferred items in Outlook.  Double-click an item to open it.  Mark tasks complete via the check box.  Click a header to sort the information in this pane.  Select Actions to delete a task or create a new one.  Items are color-coded by due date.  Adjust color display options via the Actions menu.  Toggle the display of completed items and/or show only tasks without Project assignment using the links below this pane.

Appointments

The Appointments pane shows all active appointments.  By default, today's appointments are in blue.  The pane will only show the next instance of a recurring appointment.  Double-click an appointment to open it and use the Actions menu to delete the current appointment or create a new appointment.

Buttons

There are three buttons at the bottom of the Summary Dashboard:

• New Task starts a task.
• Similarly, New Appt starts a new appointment.
• The Refresh button reloads all data in the Dashboard.