Summary Dashboard: The Day's Control Panel

Divided into four panes - Topics, 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.

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

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

Notifications
The Notifications pane shows a summary of all active Notification Managers.  For more details on this functionality, see FolderContext.

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 Topic 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.