1. Introduction

Email has always been the killer app of the Internet, and it remains so today. And Microsoft Outlook is the email application with which many users also plan their schedules. Beyond just email for busy professionals and homebodies alike, the calendar and task functions of Outlook are equally invaluable. For those reasons and a few others, Outlook is one of the few applications that is on tens of millions of desktops. It also remains open and running the whole time the desktop is up and running. Yet Outlook, although Microsoft continues to improve it, is not a perfect tool. It can still benefit from add-ins that expand its functionally and make it easier to use.

For this article, we sought out four different tools, each of which offers a very different degree of new of add-on functionality for Outlook users. The functionality ranges from using a keyword to composing an email, to simply highlighting text in any application and having it converted into something that Outlook can use for either a calendar or contact entry. The tools we looked at are ActiveWords, Agendus, ContactCopy and Anagram. Each of them has free trials, so if you like what we’ve got to say, you can then easily see for yourself if one of the applications is right for you. We evaluated what they bring to Outlook and whether or not they enhance the Outlook user experience.

ActiveWords

ActiveWords is a neat little application built on one cornerstone concept - we use too many keystrokes to get things done. What ActiveWords does in a nutshell is enable you do have shortcuts to applications and application actions using words (ActiveWords, get it?). Installing ActiveWords is a simple affair, though there are no setup options in the installation process itself. After you’ve installed ActiveWords the program automatically adds a top menu bar to the whole windows system. You can set it to autohide if you want; it is somewhat annoying if you’re not expecting to see it dock on the top part of your screen, which it does by default.

The top monitor bar, though, is really the guts of the ActiveWords application so it really does need to be on your desktop somewhere. The way it works is that you type a word on your keyboard and that word will show up in the monitor bar. You can then associate that word with an action. So, for example, you can type the words "Toms Guide," and associate the words with an action. That action could be to open the Tom’s Guide site in Internet Explorer.

It’s a simple matter of typing the word, clicking the "add" button and then defining the functionality. It’s an interesting idea and can extend beyond just making it easier to use Outlook.

The program also has a productivity dialogue box. It’s another neat idea that tries to reinforce the value of the product by providing reports on how many keystrokes you’ve saved by using the tool. The idea being that by saving keystrokes you’re more productive.

ActiveWords really is at its core a glorified shortcut tool, but hey, if that’s what you need or want, it’s more power to you.