Are you a slave to Outlook? Well, if you are like me, then you are and its not going to go away. That being the case, you might be interested in a couple of Outlook tools that can make your Outlook experience a bit more efficient. All courtesy of this company I stumbled across called TechHit.

The first tool I want to show you is EZ Detach. It makes handling attachments in Outlook so easy. Let me show you…

Let’s pretend that the email highlighted below has a resume attached.

I simply click the EZ Detach button (obviously I had already installed it) as shown in the screenshot below.

A smaller window pops up and have the options of:

• Sending the attachment to a specified folder without opening the email itself.
• Sending all of the attachments from every email in my inbox (and subfolders) to a specified folder

If I click the “Options” button, I get even more goodness to choose from. Among my favorites are:

• I can create a naming convention for the file to include Name, Email, Subject and more. So, an attached resume named “my_resume” with the subject line of “Sample Resume” from “Jim Stroud” that was saved on July 8th would be saved under the file name of “2008-07-08 – Jim Stroud – Sample Resume – my_resume” (Me likee!)
• I also like that after I save the attached resume, I can also print it without actually opening it.

How would I use this tool?

1. I would create sub-folders in “My Documents” called “Requisition 123″ or “Client X,” whichever is more suitable.
2. After posting a job to Monster or some other board, I get deluged with resumes. I would simply highlight all of the emails responding to the job and send all the resumes to the appropriate folder.
3. I would later use Google Desktop search to search through them all. (Although Windows Desktop Search is better and Exalead Desktop Search app is formidable, I am used to Google Desktop Search now and like how it integrates into the searchengine UI. But I digress…)

The other tool I like is called “SimplyFile.” Like EZ Detach, its not flashy, but it is useful. This is what it does in its own language.

SimplyFile is an intelligent filing assistant. It helps you move email messages to the right Outlook folder. First it learns about your filing habits and then starts to suggest the right folder. So after a brief training period, filing a message to the right folder becomes literally one click – much more efficient than drag and drop.

Remember to always use the “File Message” button whenever you need to move a message to an Outlook folder. This trains SimplyFile. The more you train it, the better it will be at predicting which folder a particular message should go to.

Okay, I admit to saying to myself (if not out loud, “yeah, right”) but dog gone it if it did not deliver on that. I have been experimenting with it for the past day or so and am impressed by how quickly its learned my filing system. No, its not 100% accurate everytime, but its pretty close to 95% and counting. I think we’ll hit 100% soon enough.

Here are a couple of screenshots to ponder:

So that’s it folks! My recommendation is to add these tools to your bag of tricks. (I did.)

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