Microsoft Office Outlook 2010

While the primary function of Microsoft Outlook 2010 is to send and receive e-mail, it offers a host of useful tools to manage tasks, meetings, contacts, and more.

The interface of Microsoft Outlook 2010 is nicely designed, but it is packed with options. Users new to Outlook should expect to spend some time with the Help file to take advantage of all it has to offer. For the basics, including e-mail, the calendar, and tasks, one-click access minimizes the learning curve. While it continues to allow users to receive e-mail from multiple accounts and easily switch from one to the other, this version greatly expands its social media integration. There's more information tied to the people in your contact list than just the typical information of name, e-mail, and other basic contact information. Microsoft Outlook 2010 has also beefed up its spam filtering and we found it to be more effective at blocking phishing e-mail attempts.

Overall, we liked the upgrades and additions to Microsoft Outlook 2010, but this also increases its learning curve and complexity. It's more than the casual user might need to just send and receive e-mail, but for busy executives it's a great tool to manage multiple e-mail accounts, appointments, and tasks.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Microsoft Outlook 2010 14.