• George Doyle/Valueline/Getty Images
  
  Outlook 2007 is an email management program that was released by Microsoft as a part of Microsoft Office. The program can monitor and manage multiple email accounts simultaneously, and it updates in real-time so you know immediately when you have incoming mail. For all its conveniences, Outlook 2007 can freeze at times, resulting in numerous problems.
  
  

Lost Time

• Outlook is frequently used for multiple functions at once, which is one of the purposes it was designed for. The disadvantage of this type of multitasking is that when the program freezes, you lose functionality in more than just one process. You email, calendar and various other tasks are all frozen simultaneously and you have to either wait for the program to start working again on its own or you need to close the program and reopen it to get it functioning again.
  
  

Lost Information

• If Outlook 2007 freezes while you are in the process of writing an email or inputting other information, you may have to restart the program to regain functionality. In the process, you could lose the information you were working on because the program froze before the data could be saved. This could cause serious work-flow problems if these freezes are happening on a regular basis.
  
  

Morale

• It is enormously frustrating when a program like Outlook repeatedly freezes because the program is one that is so frequently used and needed for a variety of functions. If the problem repeatedly occurs, the morale of the person using it will likely be negatively affected and this can affect work performance in a business environment. If information is repeatedly getting lost during these freezes, the re-typing of it is likely to be less detailed and proficient as the initial draft prior to the freeze.
  
  

Solutions

• Ensure you have downloaded the latest patch updates from Microsoft for Outlook 2007, which will help minimize program freezes and fix other operating errors. If you have a large PST folder, divide the contents into multiple folders and this can greatly reduce the freezing problems because the program is not trying to access as much memory at one time. Likewise, deleting old or unnecessary files from Outlook can help reduce freeze times and therefore improve program performance and user morale.