The bar is customizable, but by default shows a calendar called the Date Navigator which you can use to move through your calendar. It also shows a list of your next few appointments and a list of tasks you need to attend to. At a glance, you can tell where you need to be next and what you need to be doing. Figure B shows what my To-Do Bar looked like as I was typing these words.

FIGURE B

The To-Do Bar lets you see and manage your upcoming activities from anywhere within Outlook. Click picture for a larger image.

I love being able to glance at the bar and see what's on my plate for the near future. The To-Do Bar has become indispensible to me.

Calendar and task integration
Outlook 2007 makes it really easy to work with your calendar and tasks together. Calendar views include a Daily Tasks List that displays the tasks that are due on a particular day right beneath that day on the calendar.

You can see at a glance what tasks are due each day, along with your schedule for the day. That's helpful, but what's even more helpful is the ability to schedule time for tasks on the calendar by dragging and dropping. When I need to ensure that I have time scheduled for specific tasks, I simply drag the task out of the Daily Tasks List or the To-Do Bar and drop it in the right place on the calendar.

Similarly, you can drag appointments out of the calendar and into the Daily Tasks List or To-Do Bar so they don't get lost or forgotten just because they need to be rescheduled.

This is one of those things that didn't seem like such a big deal to me until I started playing with it. In the crazy start-up company environments where I usually work, this ability to move tasks and appointments around without a lot of effort is really valuable.

Daylight Savings Time
If you use Outlook 2003, you've probably know all about the headaches caused by the change in the starting date of Daylight Savings Time.

You may have updated Windows and Outlook to deal with the change, or you may have found meetings mysteriously shifting around on your Calendar. Or you might have found yourself sitting in an empty meeting room wondering where the heck everyone is, only to discover that your copy of Outlook thinks the meeting starts at a different time than their copy of Outlook because not everyone in the group their copy of Outlook upgraded properly.

Well guess what. This whole Daylight Savings Time complication isn't over yet. The ending date of Daylight Savings Time has changed too. That means you're going to go through a (hopefully fainter) echo of this chaos again in November.

What does all this have to do with Outlook 2007? Outlook 2007 knows all about the change in Daylight Savings Time right out of the box and doesn't require any updating to deal with the change.

While you can't guarantee that everyone you deal with has their act together, if you use Outlook 2007, you'll know that you have done your part to set things right.

Performance considerations
We're still early in the Outlook 2007 upgrade cycle, so we're still learning what's good and what isn't. These new features are good, but we're also hearing some serious complaints about performance.