Anagram is this really slick tool that will convert generic selected text into Outlook contact records or appointments. I use the contacts feature every day multiple times a day. Here is the scenario - you know the insanely long signatures people put on the bottom of their email message. It's got their phone numbers, email, website, title, company, and inevitably half a dozen other pieces of information. The process of getting all this information into your Outlook address book is time consuming - make a new contact, get each bit of information into the right field, etc. Of course inevitably sometimes you do all this work and Outlook goes "Oh, you already have a contact for this person, do you want to merge?" Anagram converts all this info to a contact object automatically whether it's in an email, webpage, or elsewhere on your machine. You highlight a bunch of text and press F12 and a new prefilled contact form shows up on your desktop. If it's complete (which generally speaking it is) you just hit save and close. It takes all of about 5 seconds from hitting F12 to clicking Save & Close.
My experience with the software has been that it is extremely accurate - sometimes it will mistake the company name for a department or something like that but given the myriad of ways folks lay out their email signatures, it does a top notch job in general. I use this every day a few times a day to catalog folks into my contacts and it makes it SO much easier. You can select text anywhere on the computer, hit F12, and "poof".
As an example I took my usual email signature on my personal account and added a few typical fields to it - title, company, and work phone. I selected the text and hit F12 and you can see the resulting Outlook contact object that got created. Anagram places anything it couldn't parse in the "Notes" field which in this case was my salutation - "Thanks," since I included that in the selection. This is a cool (configurable) feature so you can easily see what it wasn't able to parse if anything.
Anagram also does appointments where if you select something with info about a date/time it will pre-fill a new appointment form for your Outlook calendar. I personally have only used this feature once or twice as I generally get actual meeting request messages. I'm not really comfortable saying much about this part since I never use it but I can only assume that it works just as well as the contact parsing functionality. Their website also talks about compatibility with Palm devices and some other services but I have no experience with this stuff.
I stumbled across Anagram by Textual one way or another probably at least six months ago. I bought it after a few days of using the trial and it's been some of the best thirty bucks I've spent on software in quite a while. I'd highly recommend taking a look at Anagram if the scenario in this post sounds anything like what you're doing all the time. I get one or two uses a day out of the product at least.