Microsoft Office

IFrom the MS Outlook blog: f you read RSS feeds in Outlook like I do, you might notice that the default list view isn’t ideal for blogs written by a single person. Since the author is usually the same for my RSS feeds, I’d much rather have the subject of the article be the most prominent piece of information. So what’s my solution? To create a custom view for my RSS feed folders!

Creating a custom view

1. To define a new view for your RSS feeds, start by clicking View | Current View | Define Views…
2. Click New… to create a new view:
3. Fill out the Create a New View dialog box…

Rename the view (I chose to name mine “RSS”)
Leave the default type on Table.
And change the Can be used on option to All Mail and Post folders.
Click OK.

4. Click on the Fields… button.

5. The only change you need to make here is the order in which the fields are displayed. Click Subject and then click Move Up, then click OK.
6. Now you’re ready to apply this view to your RSS feed folders! In one of your RSS folders, go to the View menu and select your new view (mine’s called RSS) and you’re done!

To use this view on other RSS folders, repeat Step 6 for each folder.

Using RSS Feeds in Outlook 2007

Using Outlook to manage and read your RSS feeds has several advantages over a stand-alone aggregator, including the ability to place flags and run rules on any RSS feed to which you subscribe.

Some of you might be wondering what is RSS? Really Simple Syndication (usually referred to as RSS) is a way to get updates to websites sent to you instead of having to go back to the web to see if any changes have been made. In this way, you can keep up-to-date on news and information from many different sources in one place. For example, you could subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog to be notified when we post a new article. You could also subscribe to the MSNBC Top Headlines RSS feed to keep up to date on top news stories. Many companies are starting to use RSS feeds internally to provide their employees with information that doesn’t need to be e-mailed to the entire company.

In the past, people had to use a stand-alone RSS reader such as FeedDemon or an Outlook add-in such as NewsGator to view their RSS feeds. Outlook 2007 now includes a built-in RSS reader, so now you can treat your RSS the way that you treat your mail (using flags, categories, search folders, rules, etc.) without having to use a separate application.

While Outlook is running, it will periodically check the feeds to which you have subscribed and download any new content. Outlook shows an unread count for each feed next to the folder, so you can quickly see if there are new items you haven’t read yet. Because Outlook downloads the RSS feed data from onto your computer, you can access that data even while offline.

Treat RSS just like E-mail
You can delete posts as you read them or keep posts of interest long after they have been removed from the feed. You can also categorize posts, move them to a separate folder, or flag them for follow up as you please. For example, if you are subscribed to a feed from your company’s website, you can easily keep posts mentioning your projects and discard those that are of no interest to you. Or you can set up rules that move interesting RSS posts to your Inbox to bring them to your attention.

If you decide that a feed is no longer important, you can remove the feed by deleting the feed’s folder in Outlook. Outlook will stop downloading new content for the feed and move all the existing downloaded posts to Deleted Items.

One of the really great things about RSS in Outlook is how well it integrates with some of the other features in the product. For example, I have several RSS feeds to which I subscribe but am not interested in every post they publish. Instead of scrolling through each feed manually, I use a Search Folder that searches my subscribed feeds for posts with keywords on topics of interest.