Author Bill Dyszell dedicates much of this book to electronic mail. Though readers get a thorough overview of how to configure Outlook to retrieve e-mail from a mail server on the Internet, the author (perhaps unfairly) assumes that users on a local area network (LAN) have access to an organizational guru to configure their mail for them. Once you get connected, you can count on this book to explain how to filter, sort, store, track, and otherwise use Outlook to get the most out of e-mail. You'll also find explanations of related features, like the Contact List and Tasks List.
Dyszel pays a fair amount of attention to the ways in which you can customize Outlook. That's important, because customization can significantly improve Outlook's usefulness and it's one of the program's least intuitive capabilities.
Microsoft Outlook 2000 for Dummies also shows you how to fix up the button bar to your liking, as well as how to add and delete columns in tables and modify sort sequences. The book also shows how to add custom fields to Outlook's forms. --David Wall