PROBLEM: Wanting to improve the speed in which you create and send emails
SOLUTION: Use shortcuts!
Category: Outlook
The posts in this category aim to teach you the features in mail, calendar, contacts and tasks that promote a more efficient way to deal with your day to day activities within Microsoft Outlook.
Outlook – select only the days you want to see in your Calendar
PROBLEM: Clicking backward and forward through your Calendar to view upcoming dates. For example, what the next fortnight is looking like.
SOLUTION: Update the Calendar to only show the dates you want.
Read more
Outlook – Quickly add time into your Calendar to complete Tasks
PROBLEM: Is your Task List growing? Not finding the time to get tasks finished?
SOLUTION: Use the Task pane on the Calendar view to quickly allocate time to complete tasks.
Microsoft Outlook customising the options on the To-Do Bar
By default Outlook displays the To-Do bar with pre-set options. In most instances you will be able to see the date navigator, upcoming appointments and tasks.
However you can display or hide components so that it’s displaying only the information you require.
I did this years ago by removing everything other than the tasks I had to complete. Suddenly I found myself focused on the things I had to complete. Read more
Microsoft Outlook – create an email signature
To save repeatedly entering your name and contact details at the foot of a Microsoft Outlook message, create an email signature.
Once you have created a signature it can be inserted into new messages automatically or you can choose to insert it manually. Read more
Why are my Outlook folders no longer alphabetically listed?
If you have recently upgraded to a more recent version of Outlook you may be asking ‘why are my folders no longer alphabetically listed?’. Outlook now offers you the freedom of reordering your folders in any order that takes your fancy.
Now you can simply drag your most used folders to the top of the folder list. No more fussing around placing numbers and zz’s in front of folder names. Read more
Outlook – applying colour to messages as they arrive into your Inbox
Previous versions of Outlook offered the ability to organise your messages by colour. You could quickly turn on Rules that would distinguish messages from an individual Sender or on a certain Subject and then change the colour and format of the message as it arrived into your Inbox. Therefore making it very quick and easy to identify key messages. Read more
Outlook – Creating a Contact Group / Distribution List
If you send messages to the same people on a regular basis you may like to create a Contact Group. Once the group is created you can address messages using the group name and each member of the group will receive a copy. This eliminates the time consuming process of having to add individual email addresses for each member. Read more
Outlook – Creating and using Quick Parts in Outlook messages
My last two Blogs introduced Quick Parts, what they are and how to create and modify them.
In this Blog I want to show you how you can use Quick Parts to quickly drop standard blocks of text into an Outlook message.
Outlook – Importing Contact details from Excel into Outlook
Yesterday I had the pleasure of running an Outlook course for a fabulous group of learners. During the session I was asked if we could cover importing contact details from an Excel worksheet into Outlook. Sadly we ran out of time and I didn’t get to cover this feature. However, I thought it would make an excellent blog entry as this is a common request. Read more