For a while now, I’ve been thinking about switching from Gmail to Outlook.com as there are so many features in Outlook which Gmail can’t support because it is using IMAP.

For instance, synching my Contacts and Calendar folders, synching my message rules, using Categories and Follow Up Reminders, Skype Contacts integration and so much more.

I’ve been quite reluctant to actually switch as nowadays so much depends on and is connected to your email address, it feels like I’m tied for life to use Gmail.

How can I switch from Gmail to Outlook.com as painless as possible?

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We have a group of users which prefers to be on the newest release of Office. However, our admins prefer to validate each release (especially with our custom solutions) before they roll it out to all users.

This is why we have chosen for the Semi-Annual Channel and have put this group of users in the Semi-Annual Preview Channel.

Since we rarely find anything major, we’d now like to offer these users with the option to switch to Monthly Enterprise, Current or even Insider releases.

However, they need to be able to switch back to Semi-Annual when they run into issues, preferably without the intervention of an administrator.

How can we achieve this?

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The date on my emails is now dd/mm/yyyy, but I want it to be mm/dd/yyyy. Also, I want Outlook to use a 24 hour clock rather than the AM/PM format.

Where do I change the time and date format?

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I’ve recently deleted a couple of emails too many but as I’m using an Exchange account, I should be able to recover them via the Recover Deleted Items feature.

However, due to the amount of spam, the Social Connector and a plethora of other messages I’ve deleted it is almost impossible to find back the messages that I want to restore.

Is there a more convenient way to find back my deleted items?
Also, once recovered, which folder does it go to?

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Is there a way to use Windows Desktop Search only for Outlook and not use the rest of the searching capabilities?

I find it usefull for Outlook but have no need to index the rest of my data on my machine.

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With Conditional Formatting, I can highlight incoming mail from a specific person.

Is it also possible to do this for all emails coming from a specific domain?

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In a previous tip, you explained how to create NOT rules. What I’m still missing is how to create a “Do not Download it from the Server” rule.

This was possible when I used Outlook Express and then Windows Live Mail but I can’t find it in Outlook.

I need this rule because I share a POP3 account with different people who all have their own email address. We then used the following rule to get just our own emails:

Where the To or CC line does not contain <my email address>
Do not Download it from the server.

How do I set up this rule in Outlook?

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Is there a way in Outlook to create Note items which also have some text formatting and include attachments or pictures?

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I have a couple of old pst-file archives which I don't keep actively connected to Outlook as I don't use them on a daily basis. On occasion I still need to access one of them and I connect it to Outlook via;

• File-> Open-> Outlook Data File...

If I then want to do a search within the archive, the results are always incomplete as the archive has not been fully indexed yet.

Is there any way I can directly search within the archive directly without needing to wait for it to be indexed?

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When looking at the time and date notation of my emails I noticed they are inconsistent.

Within a single folder I can see the following formatting;

• 21/04
• 20/04 15:23
• 22/04 Wed

How can I make them show all in the same format?

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