Five Tools You Should Be Using: Microsoft Outlook
Whenever you’re a self-taught user of a program, certain tools slip through the cracks. I’d like to focus on five tools that you may have missed in Microsoft Outlook, and what interesting functionality they add.
(1) Advanced Find:
Outlook is pretty decent at finding things most of the time, but sometimes you need something a bit more detailed. If you find yourself only with the knowledge ‘the person who sent it to me had a GMail account,’ you can find that. Click Tools – Find – Advanced Find in Outlook 2003; click Tools – Instant Search – Advanced Find in Outlook 2007. Once there, you can search by the normal criteria: ‘Who sent it to me? When?’ but also, you can go to the Advanced tab and search based off any field in the email (or contact, or meeting). Then, you can search not only by the actual value in that field (date is 12/31/07), but by a part of that field (email address contained ‘@gmail.com’).
In my example picture, not only did I search based off the ‘From’ email containing ‘@gmail.com’, but I also remembered that some guy named Bob was CC’d on the email. That can go into the search as well.
Finally, as you can see at the top of the box, you can also search all the subfolders of your Inbox. A very powerful tool!
(2) Search Folders:
Most people who see Advanced Find in action immediately hope for something quicker. In fact, one of the most-repeated requests I get is – ‘can I see all the emails from my boss quickly?’ Absolutely – the secret tool is the Search Folder.
Search Folders can also be called ‘Saved Searches’, because that’s all they are. If you create a Search Folder, you’re creating a search based off particular criteria that can be repeated in an instant. Here’s the steps:
Go to the left-hand panel in your Outlook and find the section labeled Search Folders. If you look in that section, you’ll see Flagged For Follow-up, Large Emails, and possibly a couple others. These are searches Microsoft thinks you need. To make a search that looks for your boss’s emails, right-click the Search Folders section, and choose New Search Folder. Then, find the option to search for Mail From Specific People. Simply click the Choose button and put in your boss’s email address!
(3) Categories:
Categories are powerful for one, specific reason – they are the only way of organizing your emails, meetings, contacts, and tasks based off the same criteria. They’re a little different between Outlook 2003 and 2007, but here’s the general gist of the tool:
When you right-click an email, meeting, contact, or task, you’ll see an option that says Categorize. Use this to set a Category (with or without color-coding) on your item. Then, repeat the process for anything else that falls into the same category. Finally, when it’s time to search out the items related to the same category, open your Advanced Find feature (discussed earlier).
First, click the drop-down at the top of the screen that says Mail (or Contacts…) and choose Any Type of Outlook Item. This will search your whole Outlook system. Then, choose the More Choices tab, and select the Category that you applied earlier. Just like that, you’re bringing together a whole history of emails, meetings, and contacts that are related to the important project you’re working on.
(4) Automatic Formatting:
Automatic Formatting is the option to apply color or fonts to an incoming email based on things like who the sender is. This can be a real joy for anyone who sits at their computer waiting for that ONE email to come in. To set up Automatic Formatting, first go to your Inbox.
Once in your Inbox, click Tools – Organize. Select the option to organize yourself By Color, and you should be given the chance to choose the color that you associate with a particular type of email.
(5) Rules:
The final tool is a real doozy – Rules. The way I always explain rules to my students is: think of anything you do that could be repeated by a robot. Now, get the robot to do it.
Click Tools -> Rules and Alerts. Then, choose to create a new rule. You’ll see that you have the opportunity to choose a preset template, or to start from scratch. Let’s say that you wanted to move all emails from a special client to your Special Client folder.
Simply choose the template that says ‘Move messages from someone to a folder.’ Move down the screen to your Step Two section.
Click the link for ‘people or distribution list’, and choose the appropriate address(es). Then select the ’specified folder’ link, and choose the folder you want to move it to.
This post was intended to open your eyes to a few tools you should be using – to get real experience with them, and to be able to ask an expert how they work, check out our classes. Our Outlook and Outlook 2007 courses are very popular, and the Manage Your Everyday with Outlook class really helps a lot of people.
Thanks for sharing this amazing article post. Sharing is caring! From time to time I look back what I had experienced in the past few weeks and what I did. I want to check if I have tried to stay organized and in which areas I had difficulties to stay organized. That helps me a lot to adjust a few things in order to run my daily life even smoother. Since I use Outlook to download my emails from my various online accounts I have the advantage that I can use the add-in Email Sorter Wizard that helps me to organize my email. One can define rules to make Email Sorter Wizard sort and file incoming and outgoing emails. Great article and I’m sure people will profit from it.