Tips And Tricks About Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, available as a part of the Microsoft Office suite. Although Microsoft Outlook is often used mainly as an email application. It also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, journal, and web browsing.
Microsoft Outlook is still used in many offices even now. There are a huge number of things to know completely about Microsoft Outlook. So, here are some of the tips and tricks to make you an expert in Microsoft Outlook.
1. Keyboard Shortcuts:
As there are keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word, Excel, and other Office apps, Outlook also has its unique keyboard shortcuts. These shortcuts will decrease the time being spent on completing a task. You don’t have to keep on moving your mouse around to go through the menus. Here are some of the Outlook’s keyboard shortcuts.
- Ctrl+R: Reply to email
- Alt+R: Reply to all in email or switch to the work week calendar view
- Alt+W: Forward email or switch to the weekly calendar view
- Ctrl+M: F9 to Send/Receive all
- Alt+S: Send email
- Ctrl+G: Open the “Go to date” dialog to jump to any date in the calendar
- Ctrl+(the place number of the menu): Switching between the menus in that place number
2. Outlook’s Quick Step:
Quick steps is a killer feature introduced by Microsoft in Outlook 2010. Quick steps are the shortcuts to any multi-step actions like moving emails to a specific folder, forwarding an email, marking emails as read emails. These quick steps can be more useful and easy in case of repetitive tasks. You can even create your own Quick step actions.
3. Limit desktop notifications to only most important emails:
It feels distracting and sometimes even irritating that we are always told, “You’ve got a mail!”. What if we get a useless mail while doing some important task? We feel annoyed and the continuation in the task gets disturbed. So we usually expect to get notified of only important emails. For this, you’ll have to turn off all the desktop alerts under the Mail options. Then create an Outlook rule to display messages from only a specific people.
4. Gets emails that aren’t sent to you directly:
One of the best tips is that you can get all the emails that aren’t sent to you directly. You can achieve this by using special “Inbox – CC” folder. So that you can get notified for only important emails. To get this, go to Rules > New Rules > Advanced options. Now a rules wizard appears in which you have to select, “where my name is not in the To box”. Then move it to the specified folder in the following screen.
5. Use email templates to avoid writing repetitive emails:
There are some emails that are used more frequently. But writing them always whenever required is a bit bore. So if that email is saved in the templates, you can select and send it easily without rewriting it. For that, go to File > Save As > Outlook Template. Then how will you use the template in your email? Go to New Items > Choose from > Use templates in the File system. Here you can browse and get your saved templates. Double-clicking the OFT file from Windows Explorer will let you create a new message from that template.
6. Create Search Folders for most important emails:
You may have some important emails from a specific sender or on a specific subject. You perform searches for any important mail received long back. While searching, just save the search for quick access. Click on the Search Folder in the left navigation menu and select “New Search Folder”. Then either uses the wizards or customize the search to your specifications manually.
7. Quickly Save emails as files:
We usually save individual emails through File > Save As. But simply dragging the email to a folder will easily get you the email saved and it’s much faster too. You just need to drag the email to the desktop or the Windows Explorer. This will save the email in the Outlook’s proprietary .msg format with the subject as the file name.
8. Group tasks by custom priority:
You can add a custom priority along with adding a start date to each task. Then you can group your tasks according to the customized field. This will be easy to glance at the tasks to be worked on at that time.
These are some of the tips and tricks to make you a Microsoft Outlook expert. You can make use of the Microsoft Outlook account for more than what you do now.
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