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The more you have in your mailbox, the slower your Outlook will run. However, if you’re in control of the business, are responsible for the maintenance of your own machine, or are an independent user, updating is probably your first major task. You also might not have admin permission on your machine to do the updating. Updating a program when it’s not supported can break a lot of different things you might not know rely on Outlook. I have to make a note here that if you’re an employee working for an established business with its own IT department, you should talk to your support person for improving speed and avoid taking most of these steps on your own. Right now, the most recent major version is Outlook 2016, included in Office 365. Updates are always important they add new features, they streamline code, they patch security holes, they fix memory leaks, and who knows what else. One of the first things you should do when looking to speed up any program is check to see if there’s a newer version available. Some will work for you, others won’t, so just go through the list and see what applies.
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What I’ve done below is compiled a bunch of different tips and tricks you can use to improve how Outlook works. Add on top of this all of the poor practices people have established as habits and you end up with a mess that could use a lot of cleaning up. The knowledge of how to intuitively use Outlook seems to have largely been replaced by institutional memory, knowledge bases, and extended tutorials. At the same time, it’s a horrendously complex application on the back end, with a ton of features that have existed for decades and are almost never used, or legacy systems that exist because “that’s how it’s always been done” and to change it would be to break too many cascading newer features. The program is perfectly fine, it works well enough for what it does, and it has a lot of features that make it indispensible for many businesses. Problems with Outlook are so common that they’re essentially a business meme.
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