"Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 Inside Out" from Microsoft Press is geared toward intermediate and advanced users of the latest version of Outlook, which has become a bloatware office tool that surpasses Lotus Notes in functions and complexity. If you want to become a true expert at using Outlook, or plan to deploy and manage Outlook at your enterprise, or have to take some MS Office certification exams in order to advance your career, you'll find this book immensely useful. In fact, this is simply the best advanced treatment of Outlook 2003, bar none.

Ok, I say this partly because I'm a fan of the Inside Out series, which is not only informative and helpful for those who want to master Microsoft's increasingly monstrously complicated software, but also highly accurate and authoritative. These latter features are very important and beneficial to the reader. "Inside Out" books don't claim to give you "inside secrets" or "Easter eggs" or "undocumented tweaks" -- even though they do offer such gems here and there -- instead they focus in giving you every iota of detail you'll need in order to power-use and troubleshoot each program.

"Outlook 2003 Inside Out" continues this well-written, well-edited tradition of the series. It's thick and heavy at over 1,000 pages -- with another 100 "bonus" pages on Visual Basic and other topics on the accompanying CD-ROM, in addition to the complete e-book itself -- but it's quite easy to navigate thanks to a well thought-out organization. Almost no stone is left unturned in the coverage of Outlook 2003's vast amount of features (but I'm sure there are minute details that even a book this size and scope has left out), and each feature is treated in great detail, sometimes to the point of overwhelming. Thankfully, lots of screenshots grace the pages to illustrate various dialog boxes. Throughout the book you'll also find lots of genuinely useful tips, set apart from the main text in boxes and a different font.

I don't meant to sound pretentious, but this book is not a good one for newcomers to Outlook. Its coverage and content will simply overwhelm someone not already familiar with the basics of Outlook 2003. A better guide for beginners is the excellent "Microsoft Office 2003 Inside Out" which introduces all the programs in the Office 2003 suite. While that book is by no means a prerequisite for reading the present volume -- many other books will do, or just explore Outlook on your own the way genuine geeks do without reading a manual -- it gives the reader enough grounding in Outlook fundamentals that he'll find migrating to this present book a joy in his journey to conquering the beast of Outlook 2003.

This book has excellent coverage of Outlook 2003. It is extremely thorough, covering every menu option in detail. My favorite part of the book is that it covers tips and tricks that are undocumented in Outlook's help. For example, it will tell you how to go to the filesystem to make a change to an Outlook file to fix a problem.

There are also excellent comparisons between previous versions of Outlook and 2003. The author obviously knows Outlook "inside out".

This book is probably a little too much for a complete computer beginner, but if you've used Office products before even somewhat, then you should be able to understand the information in this book.

Overall, excellent reference material and a great source of tips and tricks for Outlook 2003!