Outlook Tip # 1 Quick Steps Outlook’ s Quick Steps( found on the home ribbon) are a fast, uncomplicated way to take multiple actions on an email or series of emails all at once. An example might be to mark an email as read, file it away in a folder, forward it to your legal assistant and create a deadline task based on the email simultaneously.
Quick Steps are on the home ribbon in Outlooks 2013-2016. Select the small corner arrow to build a new and / or modify an existing Quick Step.
There are sample Quick Steps that you can utilize and / or select custom and build your own. The process is intuitive and when completed you simply highlight an email in your list and select the quickstep to apply to it.
Outlook Tip # 2 Drag and Drop to Create Appointments, Tasks and Contacts Often, when we receive an email, that email prompts us to do something else. For example, you may have an email from a new contact and you decide it would be useful to add the senders contact information to your Outlook contacts list. Or, an email may prompt you to create an appointment and you need to preserve the text of the mail as a reminder to be associated with the appointment. Simply take your mouse, select the email and drag it to the shortcuts bar in the lower left corner of Outlook.
When you release the mouse, a new appointment, contact or task will result which includes the body of the email in the notes section of the resulting contact, appointment or task.
Outlook Tip # 3 Clean Up Your Conversations Many times, emails come in and go out multiple times on the same immediate subject. Multiple parties may reply all and you could end up with 30-40 emails that have gone back and forth among multiple people. One way to consolidate the emails is to use the built-in clean up tool found on the home ribbon in Outlook in the delete section. When you select Clean Up, the option that will consolidate those 30-40 or more emails on the same subject into the latest one in a chain is called Clean Up Conversation.
Once you decide on the behavior of your clean up conversation function, simply then select multiple emails( and by the way, you can select your entire inbox if you like) and Outlook will clean up conversations based on the criteria you set forth. The result – those 30- 40 emails may be reduced to just 4-5 depending on whether a chain of emails includes other emails you’ ve already received. To activate the clean up function, select a group of emails or your entire inbox and then choose Clean Up > Conversation.
Outlook Tip # 4 Categories Outlook categories are a simple, yet useful management tool. Most users use the colors to visually identify items by people, topic, priority, and so on. However, categories can do much more. You can use them to perform quick sorts, populate search folders, and even narrow a mail merge to a specific category. Understanding category basics is the first step.
You can use categories for emails pending, contacts categorization, to group types of appointments( i. e. court) etc. The categories list transcends all Outlook functions. For this writer, I have my email categories prepended with a“*” so it stays at the top of my categories list. The rest of my categories are ways of grouping types of contacts in my contacts list.
When an email comes in and I am unable to reply right away, I categorize the email, so I can filter the list later by, for example,“ Follow Up Required” or“ Delegated to Mary.” By the same token, my contacts list is permanently categorized( I changed my contacts view to the Address List view to make the best use of categories). This is particularly useful when, for example, I’ m searching for an accountant or a court reporter, etc.
Outlook Tip # 5 Customize Your Views Customizing the way that data is presented to you is an easy way to make Outlook work for you in-
28 March 2018