Outlook for Windows is an excellent email client by Microsoft that makes it much easier and proficient to manage your emailing needs. It’s simple interface but unique features can add much more to the experience and streamline your emailing tasks.
But there are often some operations that you perform frequently that also take time.
For instance, moving an email from a specific sender to the associated folder. Another example would be replying to certain emails with the same text all the time.
Below are certain tips to help you work productively within Outlook, so you can save time and better focus with Outlook features.
#1 Add rules:
“Rules” in Outlook are very helpful to automate some of the actions that would otherwise take a lot of time to do manually. You can set specific conditions and actions when those conditions are met just once and then Outlook will do the rest every time the criteria are matched.
In “Home” tab, inside “move” category, you can find the option to manage the rules.
Click on Rules à “Manage Rules and alerts” to go to your previously set rules.
Or, click on Rules à Create Rule to create a new rule. In the new ‘rule’ window, specify the criteria and the action to take if the criteria are matched.
#2 Customize Quick Access:
Quick Access is the part of the interface that sits at the top of the ribbon by default. As the name suggests, these few actions are quick steps you can take instead of doing it manually, which is usually a multi-step operation.
To customize Quick Access and add your own quick steps, right click on the ‘Quick Steps’ section and select “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.” You will get the option dialog box as shown below:
Here, browse through the list on the left and select the “action” you want and then click “Add.” The “Action” you select will then move to the right, which means, it has been added to the quick access toolbar. You can also choose the “category” of commands from the dropdown menu and select the one that you need. Or Select ‘All commands’ to see every possible command you can add to the quick access toolbar. This just makes searching the one you want more tedious.
#3 Customize Ribbon:
You can also customize the top ribbon, just like you did with the quick access toolbar.
Go to “Options” -> Customize Ribbon
Again, just as we did with “Quick Access Toolbar,” select the command from the left and click “Add.” You can also create a new group of commands, rename the group, and more. In fact, you can save the entire configuration and save it to be used later by importing the config file in *.exportedUI format.
#4 Make a Reusable Text Block
Save text to be reused later: Go to create a new message and type the text you want to save for reusing later. Now go to “Insert” tab on the ribbon, and inside “text” group, click on “Quick Parts” and then select “save selection to quick part gallery.” Check the images below for reference. Now, specify the name, gallery, category, description, and other options according to your preferences. Next time, you can use this same text block by going to “quick part” without having to type the same thing again. It saves a lot of time and effort and make you more productive while working with emails and replies in bulk.
With these 4 above tips, you can adjust the look and behavior of Outlook in a way that you makes you faster and productivity for the same tasks that would otherwise take a lot of time when done in conventional way.
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