Boost your productivity and email management skills with these Outlook rules. From mastering search to minimizing distractions and leveraging advanced features, these tips will help you optimize your Outlook experience.
Some people are really good at using Outlook search to find the emails they need, while others have a hard time. Searching for emails can be a real struggle, sometimes you want to find emails from months ago but you aren't sure exactly what to search for.
Being able to find an email quickly in Outlook is an important skill. Here are some tips and tricks about how to find that email buried in your inbox...
Getting in the zone is pretty challenging in any work environment. Outlook in particular likes to offer as many distractions as possible to ensure you can never forget you've got it open. Set your options so that Outlook:
You just received another email from a client asking for your company's Terms and Conditions. Instead of navigating through your files or searching your website to find the link, wouldn't it be more efficient to simply type a shorthand code like #+ T and have Outlook automatically insert the URL for you?
This is where the Autocorrect feature in Outlook can become a huge time-saver.
How many times have you clicked “Send” and within a minute or so realized you made a mistake and wished that email had not sent yet?
Microsoft Outlook has the option to "recall the message", but this is not recommended mainly because you cannot guarantee the recipient hasn't seen the message already. If your recall does work, then the recipients don't know the reason the email was recalled as there is no spot for an explanation.
Also, it's not a good experience for the users who receive a recall, as it does not even send it on the same thread.
What you need to do is to set a rule to delay sending your emails in 15 minutes for example, which gives you time enough to correct it in most of the cases. If you only realize your mistake after this amount of time, just use "reply to all", mentioning your changes or send a v2 when changes are too substantial.
Sometimes you will need to send a new version for an email. This often is due to 2 main reasons:
Do you know it is better to send a v2 rather than recall the email, see SSW Rule Do you know when and how to send a v2 of an email?
Even though you may check your emails before sending, use SSW lookout to help you avoid mistakes, and even if you send/receive manually, there will still be times where you will send out an email with mistakes or incorrect content.
Sometimes it can be useful to have multiple copies of the same email.
If you want to duplicate a particular message in Outlook, place the cursor in any of these fields: To, Cc, Bc, or Subject, and press CTRL+F.
Note: This works on Outlook for Windows only. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on Outlook for Mac nor Outlook on the web.
It will open a new draft message with the very same information as the original one.
Some people make extensive use of the rules wizard so that as email messages arrive they already appear in the appropriately created folder.
If you use Exchange Server, Auto-Archive moves the archived items from the Exchange Server to a local drive on your notebook or desktop. While this keeps your Exchange Server nice and small, if you happen to use email to store legal documents, or want to search for emails you've sent a year ago, Auto-Archive is like throwing data away.
You may be involved in different tasks simultaneously every day. The best way to organize your tasks and follow each task individually is grouping your emails by conversation. By default, Outlook sorts the emails by Date.