These five simple customizations of Microsoft Office Outlook mailbox view will save you a lot of time and improve the overall productivity.

E-mail communications is not plain text anymore and people want to send/receive well-designed email messages. There are many paid services that allow you to create a visually appealing e-mail template, but you can create it yourself using only Outlook.

If you frequently sign your messages using not only by your name, but also add an extra information such as your job title and contact information, you'll appreciate Outlook's Signature feature. Also, you can add to the signatures icons with links to your profiles or personal pages in Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites.

Outlook can display either the number of unread emails or the total number of emails in a folder alongside the folder name.

This option controls which address book you see when you open the Address Book (via clicking Ctrl+Shift+B) and when you click the To, Cc, or Bcc buttons when composing e-mails.

This tip shows how to delete holidays and events from your calendar. See also How to add country holidays to the calendar and How to add custom holidays to the calendar.

If you have Exchange, Microsoft 365, or Outlook.com account, you can permit other people to view all or some details of your events, edit events, and delegate permissions. Though, you cannot distribute schedules to the email group or distribution list. External users who are not part of your organization and those who do not have Outlook also become a problem that the standard sharing method does not address. Instead, you can email a static copy of your agenda for a specific date range as an attachment.

This tip shows how to open the Calendar sent to you.

There are several Outlook startup switches. The most common switches are listed in this tip.

This tip shows how to create and add custom holidays, for example, of your company to the Outlook calendar.