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Want to become an Outlook expert? Here are the 18 best Outlook tips that can make handling your email and appointments quicker and easier
Millions of people use Microsoft Outlook to manage their email and calendar, at work and at home. That's a testament to its usefulness – but the truth is that few of us really know how to make the most of its features. Learning a few simple tricks can save you time, help you work more efficiently and synchronise home and work life. These tips are geared towards Outlook 2007, 2010 and 2013, but many also apply to Outlook 2003 and earlier.
Best Outlook tips: 1. Spare yourself repeated typing with Quick Parts
If you regularly need to trot out a standard passage of text, you can save it as a Quick Part for easy insertion into your emails. Simply highlight the text in the composer window, then switch to the Insert tab, click the Quick Parts dropdown and select "Save selection to Quick Parts gallery". In future, when you start typing the phrase, you'll see it pop up as a suggestion – hit return to insert it in full. You can also select your text with the mouse from the Quick Parts dropdown. Right-click on it for placement options, or to edit and manage Quick Parts and other "building blocks".
Best Outlook tips: 2. Write a message to be delivered at a future time
If you have some news that you don't want to share immediately, Outlook lets you defer delivery until a specified time. Write your email, then switch to the Options tab and click Delay Delivery. This opens a requester with a "Do not deliver before:" field; enter a date and time, then click Close. After you hit Send, the message will be held until the specified time for sending. If you're using an Exchange server, you can now close Outlook; if you're using POP or IMAP you'll have to leave the application open until the specified time for delivery has passed.
Best Outlook tips: 3. Create a folder for common searches
You can always search the current folder by typing into the search field above the message list. If there's a particular search you frequently carry out, you can simplify the job with a Search Folder. Go to the Folder tab and click New Search Folder to create one: you can choose from a variety of templates (such as finding mail from specific people, or mail marked as important) or set up your own criteria using the "Create a custom Search Folder" option. Your new search folder appears in the folders pane at the left-hand side of the Outlook window; click on it to see messages meeting your selected conditions. Right-click and select Rename Folder to give it a convenient name.
Best Outlook tips: 4. Automate recurring tasks with Quick Steps
If you find yourself regularly performing a particular task – such as forwarding an incoming email to a colleague or inviting a group of recipients to a meeting – then Quick Steps can save you time. You'll find a set of predefined Quick Steps in the middle of the Home tab, but the real power of the feature comes in defining your own. Click the dropdown arrow and select New Quick Step to create a custom sequence of actions that can categorise, move, flag and delete messages with a single tap of your mouse. Clicking on "Manage Quick Steps..." opens a dialogue from which you can duplicate and edit shortcuts, so you can create a range of variations on a theme.
Best Outlook tips: 5. Sort your mail with Rules and Conditional Formatting
The Rules dropdown in the Move section of the Home tab provides options to create and manage rules for automatically processing messages as they arrive. If you select a message before clicking, it will offer to create a rule affecting similar messages. Select Create Rule and you'll be given the option to set all sorts of criteria to check for – sender, recipient, size, date and more – and choose what should happen to match emails.
A similar feature is Conditional Formatting, which you'll find under View Settings on the View tab. This doesn't move or process messages, but it displays emails matching certain criteria in a specified font and colour, so you can instantly spot them in your inbox.
Best Outlook tips: 6. Automatically clear out unneeded messages
If you want to save space or tidy up an unwieldy email trail, the Clean Up tool in Outlook 2010 and 2013 can help. It analyses a complete email conversation and deletes any messages that have been quoted in their entirety inside a subsequent message – the logic being that you can still see what's been said by checking subsequent messages.
To use Clean Up, click its dropdown on the Home tab and choose whether you want to tidy up a single conversation or a whole folder. Click the Settings button in the alert that opens to choose what sort of messages should be culled and what should be left alone.
Best Outlook tips: 7. Delegate access to your mail and calendar
If you're going away, you can temporarily let someone else manage your inbox and appointments. To set this up, open the File tab (or the Orb in Outlook 2007), then click the Account Settings dropdown and select Delegate Access. Click Add and enter the name of the person (or people) to whom you want to grant access. You'll see a set of dropdowns for permissions: by default, your delegate can access and update your calendar and task list, while email and contacts remain private.
Note that your delegate must be using the same version of Outlook as you, and the items you want them to access must be stored on an Exchange server: they won't be able to get at a mailbox that lives on your hard drive.
Best Outlook tips: 8. Manage read receipts
Thankfully, Outlook is well-behaved enough to ask permission before sending a read receipt; you can customise its behaviour further by clicking on the File tab, opening Options, selecting the Mail view and scrolling down to the Tracking section. Here you can choose whether receipts should be sent always, or never, and you can also configure your own receipt request settings. One useful option is the ability to request a delivery receipt, which confirms your email has reached the recipient's mail server, without insisting on a notification when it's actually opened.
Best Outlook tips: 9. Time zones
If you travel for work, you'll know the frustration of finding meetings and appointments in Outlook show up at the wrong local time. Under File | Options | Calendar you'll find the option for setting your local time zone: once you've done this, email timestamps and calendar entries will be shown with the appropriate offset.
You can also configure a second-time zone to be shown so that (for example) you can keep track of what time it is back home, or see what time it is for your colleagues overseas, to ensure you catch them during office hours and don't contact them at an inconvenient time of day. Click Swap Time Zones to easily switch from one location to the other.
Best Outlook tips: 10. "Post-it" notes
Outlook includes a built-in sticky note feature. Press Ctrl+Shift+N from anywhere in the Outlook interface to create a new note, which can be dragged and positioned anywhere on the screen. By default, notes appear in pale yellow, but you can assign them to categories, which causes them to switch to the associated colour. To manage your notes, click on the Note icon at the bottom of the View pane: From here you can copy, organise and print notes, and also search, via the field at the top-right of the window, for notes containing specific text.
Best Outlook tips: 11. Encrypted email
If you want to prove your messages are really from you, Outlook can cryptographically sign your emails. You can even go a step further and encrypt the text and attachments so that only recipients with whom you've shared the key can read them. To set this up, open the Trust Center Settings (you'll find the button under File | Options | Trust Center) and click on E-mail Security. Enabling digital signing and encryption is as easy as ticking the relevant boxes, but you'll need to create and import a digital ID if you don't already have one. Click "Get a Digital ID..." to see links to a range of providers, including Comodo, which offers free email certificates.
Credits: https://www.itpro.co.uk/email-providers/34638/the-11-best-outlook-tips-for-increasing-productivity
