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Add Outlook to Windows Live Tiles

Adding email, calendar and contacts Live Tiles to the Windows Start Menu would seem like an obvious thing to do.  Here’s how you can workaround to do it.

On the Windows 8 and 10 large Start Menu are ‘Live Tiles’ which are updated to show the latest information.  Some of them are setup to show calendar, email and contacts/people details.

You’d think that the calendar/email/contacts live tiles would link to Microsoft Outlook.  After all, Windows and Outlook are made by the same company and Outlook is Microsoft’s main program for email etc.

But no … there are no Outlook Live Tiles and there’s no sign there ever will be.

Outlook Live Tile workaround

There’s a way to make ‘Outlook’ Live Tiles.

It works if your email/calendar/contacts are stored ‘in the cloud’ using a service like Outlook.com, Office 365 hosting, Exchange Server or Gmail (among others).

You need to setup Windows to use the same account that you have setup in Outlook.

Go to Settings | Accounts | Email & Accounts (in the latest Windows 10) and choose ‘Add an account’.

Then setup the email account with the same settings as in Outlook.

Once that’s done the three Live Tiles, Email, Calendar and Contacts will start showing information.

The downside

It works thought it should not be necessary.  Having two Microsoft products accessing the same information is wasteful and makes a mockery of Redmond’s hype of product integration and the ‘Microsoft Advantage’.

To just show Live Tiles it’s using up more bandwidth, computer resources and disk space than is worth it.

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