Microsoft Outlook's Best Automation Tools: Rules, Quick Steps, & the Quick Access Toolbar: A Mashup!

All right, hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. Hey, this is an interesting video. It's actually 3 microlearning videos sort of stitched together because these 3 different tools are all sort of related in what they can do in your Microsoft Outlook. And so I thought I would take these and put them together. It was actually part of a series that I've been building for one of my clients who wanted to basically set it up so that their employees could get little snippets of information separated by a little bit of time. Something like that sounds interesting. Contact me. I'll give my contact information at the end of the video and we can discuss this. But the format of this is 3 videos, each of which are 5 to 6 minutes long that I've sort of stitched together. And what I'll do for you is I will put timestamps in the description so that you can jump to the content if you'd like to for each of the segments. But the 3 tools, and the reason I wanted to put them together, are Microsoft Rules in your Outlook, the Quick Steps in your Outlook, and the Quick Access Toolbar. The rules basically you can set up so that they're sort of always running in the background and they can automate certain things, especially with email, you know, like auto-filing, auto-categorizing, auto-deletion, even, you know, special notifications. Quick Steps is similar to rules with a very critical difference. In Quick Steps, you can actually set up actions or even multi-step actions that you can make easily available push button. And then the Quick Access Toolbar is actually the toolbar that you can customize that's up on the top corner of your screen. To make some of the tools that you use quite frequently available for you. And you can customize that in different parts of the functions, you know, say like, you know, certain ones for email, certain ones for calendar, certain ones for task. And you can even have specialized quick access items within specific emails. And so because these are so closely related and they're so useful in terms of Enhancing productivity. I thought I'd splice the 3 of them together into a single video, but I'll give you the timestamps so you can jump if you'd like. This might be a really good video to sort of watch on a second screen with your Outlook on screen 1 and have that finger ready to hit the pause and rewind button so that you can practice and set these things up. Because once you get them set up, they can really help with your automation. So without further ado, let's dive in and dive into the first one, which is Microsoft Rules. All right, hi everybody, time for yet another microlearning video in our Outlook Excellence series, especially on managing your email. And this one I'd like to focus in on something that I, I don't think I've shared yet much at all, which is the rules capability in Outlook. It's really helpful for automating certain kinds of things. And I'm going to try to keep this video reasonably short, so I might even make a couple videos on rules. But let me, let me explain to you what these rules can do, which is sort of cool. Best way and easiest way, I think, to basically set up a rule in your inbox is to take an email that sort of is one that you'd like to automate something you're doing with it. And go to that email and right-click on it. Because when you right-click on it, one of your options down here is Create Rule. So see, once again, all I did was a right-click on the email, Rules, Create Rule. That brings up your rule management tool. I'm going to make myself a little smaller off to the side so you can see how this thing works. And notice that on the top screen it gives you from whatever the email address was, what was in the subject line, who was it sent to. Right off the top, let's say the person sending you the email is one of your most important people. Well, take a look what you could do. You could say, well, if it's from so-and-so, I'd really like to know when they're sending me an email. You could come down here and display a new item alert window. Why did they use that phrase? Microsoft should be called a popup. Display a popup. That's a popup. Okay. I swear somewhere in the corporate headquarters is the department of not very intuitive. Or look at this though, you can not only have a popup, you could also play a selected sound, which means you could change the sound. You could browse your computer, go out and find a different sound under your media files. These are all sort of the dummy sounds that have been installed into your computer, and you could just sample one of these sounds and change the sound for that particular person. And look at this, they've actually added this recently. This is a new add. You can even auto-file their emails right into a folder. So let's say it's a person who emails you stuff that you never, ever, ever have to look at the first time. You could auto-file those. Why did I say it like that? Because if they send you 95% of the stuff they send you is stuff you don't really need to look at, but that 5% of the time it is something you need to look at, don't turn on auto-filing. You're going to miss something important. All right. So, so that's just one of the things you can do from the top screen. But now notice this. If you go to Advanced, you get even more options. You can do it by what's in the subject line, who it was sent to, was it marked high importance? Now let me show you something about this. When you do marked high importance, you see how it looks like a web link. You actually have to click on this to tell it what level of importance— low, normal, high. And so like, let's say if it's from this person marked high importance, Now you can set it up so that it does something different than a normal email. And, and I hope that you see what this means. This means that what you could do is you could talk to your team members and say, hey, listen, sometimes our emails truly are more important. Other times they're just normal. When they're truly more important, we'll mark them important and Maybe you could set up a rule so those ones pop up on your screen or make the special sound. Meaning maybe you don't have to jump right now at every single email from that person, but you can certainly look at the most important ones more quickly. And by the way, you could do basically sort of the same thing down here with specific words in the message header. Maybe you could have a meeting with your team members and say, hey, listen, if it's truly on fire, truly urgent, Maybe we use the word urgent or ASAP at the beginning of the subject line, and then we could all set up a rule so that those emails will pop on our screen or make a unique sound. Pretty cool. And I'll give you one last one here to make this— keep this video short enough. Take a look at this. What if so-and-so is a spammer? Well, then you could hit next. And permanently deleted automatically. I bet you that's the majority of the rules that I've set up is just permanent deletions of people that are just bugging me and I don't want them to bug me anymore. So use these capabilities to automate this. I recommend you read through these dialogues when the first time you look at the rules because there might be some stuff in here that you could find super useful, you know, both in terms of the conditions you want to set and the actions you want to take. So it's a really good way to help both make more important stuff pop and not important stuff disappear. That's good on both sides. All right. Hope you found this one useful. All right. Hi, everybody. Time for yet another microlearning video in the series. This one is actually interesting because it's about this thing called Quick Steps. Which are very similar to the rules that we've been talking about in previous videos, but with one very critical difference. So let's dive right in and talk about another cool way to speed up some of your productivity and basically automate some of the things that you regularly do. So let's go into my Outlook, and what you're going to see here is Quick Steps are located right up here. And you can actually click this little arrow thingy right here, the little caret with the line to open this up and come down and quickly hit New Quick Step. And depending on what you're doing, you might see what you want right here. But if you want to, for example, move to folder, you could set the folder that you're always putting stuff in. And you can do it from right there. But most of the time you're going to want to come down here and do custom. And a good example of custom, here's one that you can do, and it's this simple: add to calendar. So that's the quick step that I'd like to create, and I'm going to come down here to choose an action. And as you can see, if you just start paging down, these are all the actions that you can set. And, you know, so if you take a look, you'll see that there's a number of different things that you can do. And you can do create an appointment with text of message. So that's perfect. That's exactly what I want to do. I'm going to add to calendar from my email. And then if I do this, what I can do is I can come down here and hit finish. Now before I do, take a look at this. You can actually set up a shortcut for some of these quick steps. So you don't even need to go up to Quick Steps to create, to push the button to make the Quick Step happen. You could do it with a, with a keystroke combo. But with that, take a look at this. I'm going to hit Finish. And then let me show you how this works. I can actually click on this and now you'll see the Add to Calendar is up here as one of my Quick Steps. And I just click on the button. And when I click on the button, boom, that's exactly the same. As drag and drop to your calendar. So that's a single quick step. And you'll notice that in the past I had already created a quick step for add to tasks too. So you can actually make push buttons for add to calendar, add to tasks. But what's neat about quick steps is they can be multi-step actions. And here's a good example. One of my previous clients, one of my university clients, one of the people in the room said, you know, we get these purchasing card updates like in our email every day. And you only really need to look at it maybe a few days before the day you have to do the reconciliation report. But they come in every day automatic and it has the same text every single time. And so, you know, it's a purchasing card one. And he said, is there a way that we could either make a rule, which you could do a rule if it's got the right you know, subject line that you can always base it off of, or a quick step to automatically file these into the purchasing folder. And so let me show you what I would do in that situation. I'm going to click on this and I'm going to come down here to new quick step, and I'm going to come down here to custom. This brings up the quick step screen— uh, quick step screen, easy for me to say. And then what you do is you put in Purchasing card file to folder. So that's the name I'm going to give to it. Now, this is going to be a two-step. Watch what I'm going to do first. Choose action. First, I want to mark it as red. Okay. So that way it's not showing it as a, as an unread item. Then I'm going to add action and watch this. Choose action, move to folder. Now, when you do move to folder, you'll see a second line will drop in. Choose folder. And in this case, what I'm going to do is come down here to other folder and let's open up my inbox and put accounting finance. Perfect. And I'll hit okay. And so now that I've done this, I've just created a two-step quick step purchasing card file to folder. Now watch this. I will hit finish. And now I've just created that quick step and you'll see it's right here at the top of the quick step screen. Now what I can do is notice here I made a little bogus purchasing card email and now I can click on this, come up here to purchasing card file to folder and go boom. And then bam, it's gone. And I will tell you this, if I come up to my folder list and I come down here to accounting finance, there is that item right there. I just moved it over into my accounting finance folder. So that's how it works. And so what I would always just watch for are there certain actions that you're doing often enough that being able to make it a push-button process could help with your productivity and your automations. And like I said, you know, think sometimes maybe it's a rule, other times maybe a Quick Step's better. You know, maybe a Quick Step's better in that situation where emails from a certain person almost always should be filed automatically into a folder, but every once in a while you need to look at them and see them in your inbox. That might be the perfect situation for a Quick Step of filing to that folder. So whenever the email comes in from the person, you quickly, quickly click on it and then hit that Quick Step, put it in the folder. But then when you get that occasional email that you do need to look at, you don't miss it. All right. So I hope that this makes this something that you can understand and incorporate in part of your toolkit. With that, I'm going to go ahead and finish this one up. Alright, hi everybody, time for yet another microlearning video. This time what I want to do is show you yet another set of automation tools that you have right there on your home screen in Outlook. This is called the Quick Access Toolbar, and so let's go out and take a look at the Quick Access Toolbar. When you go to your Outlook inbox, you will notice that the Quick Access Toolbar is actually right up here at the top, and I've already done some customizations to it. Notice that up here in the corner you have the little send/receive icon. This is the icon to reply to a message, empty trash, block sender. I'll show you that one in just a second. I found that a funny little story on that one. You know, print preview or print, add attachment, and even this one right here, add blind carbon copy. Now, what's interesting about this is that the way that this thing works, they give you a few choices right here, but notice this, you have this little caret dropdown. And when you click on the caret dropdown, it gives you the option to customize your Quick Access Toolbar. And what they do is they put up here on the front several of the tools that they believe are more common. So like this one's not a bad one. I could add Forward. And if I do that, you see it just brought it up here and put it onto this so I can do a Forward. Now what's interesting about this though is there's a lot more choices. And if you come down here to More Commands, right, what you will get is a list of the popular commands. Definitely look at those closely. But what I'd really like you to maybe consider is coming down here and hit All Commands, because when you do All Commands, let's try. Okay, there it goes. It brings them up. You'll see there are bunches of commands in here. And what I was doing was showing this at one of my client programs. And as I'm paging down, showing them how many are in here and that I just got to the letter B, I went, wait a minute, Block Sender. Well, I would like that one. And so what I did is I added it to my Quick Access Toolbar. Now watch, I'll click on Block Sender and watch what it does. Hit Add. It's already on there. But that's all you have to do to add something new to your Quick Access Toolbar. And I would recommend paging down through these to see if there's anything that's in here that would be really helpful. But wait, there's more. So let's say you've added a couple of things that might be useful from your inbox homepage. Notice this one right here. It's, it's sort of grayed out or darkened. It says 30 minutes. Let me show you what this one's for. If I switch to Calendar, now that is turned on. And so what this means is that in that set of possible commands are some commands that are specific to different functions. This is the one that allows you to very quickly and easily change from a 1-hour view to a 30-minute view on your calendar. Now, and if I click off of it, it actually will stay on there, but you can always come down here, right-click, and then go back to your 60 minutes. But that gives you the option to do that kind of thing. And then wait, there's yet more. Notice this. If I come in and open a new email message, That also— let's make this full size so you can see this— has its own toolbar, and you can once again customize the quick access toolbar. Now what's interesting, notice that this is right here. This allows me to quickly show the BCC field, which sometimes is not showing very easy. You can actually add a button to add BCCs to your messages, or if you turn that off, then it's just normal with the to and the CC. Click that, boom, now I can add a BCC if I'd like. And so this is a really handy tool to allow you to put certain things that you're sort of probably diving through directories to find where these tools are at. You could take the tools you're using most to make sure that they're in your Quick Access Toolbar, in your inbox, in an open email, in your calendar, in your task list, in your contacts. So that you've got true customization of the top of that bar when you are actively using these tools. And I would definitely recommend watch what you're using a lot, especially if you're searching for it, and then go see if you can add that to your Quick Access Toolbar. Now, one last little thing I wanted to show you, which is sort of cool. I'm not going to save the changes here. I want to come up to this one last time and wait, let's go to my inbox to show you this. One last time, and then I'm going to come down here. Notice at the very bottom, Show Below the Ribbon. Watch what happens when I hit this. It moves it to down here, and I sort of remember, I think that at one point this was the location of this in an older version of Outlook, but I just wanted you to see that you do have this capability. I actually do like it up on that top corner. So once again, I can come down and hit Show Above the Ribbon, and now it moves back up here. But it is truly a very cool little tool. And, you know, it's one of those things where if you set it up right and you take that few seconds when you know you're looking for something, it's probably going to save you a lot of time over time because now you don't have to go find that thing. Sort of like making all your tools right where you can see them. So you're not spending too much time standing at your workbench looking through all the drawers. So I've been doing a lot of work around the house lately. I guess that's the analogy that came to my head. All right, I hope you found this video super useful. Um, as you can see, it was a splicing together, uh, but, um, I hope that you see why I decided to do that, because I really felt like these tools fit well together. If you found this useful, please of course like, subscribe to the channel if you can. As you can see, we've gone over 5,000 subscribers, which is super cool. Possibly share this one with your coworkers or friends and colleagues because I think that this one could be particularly helpful for getting a lot more productivity and efficiency in your Microsoft Outlook. Obviously, if you'd like to learn a little bit more about me and what I do, my name is Randy Dean. I'm known as the Email Sanity Expert. You can learn more at my website right there on the screen, randalldean.com. And if you'd like to get my series of productivity PDF tip sheets, which includes a channel guide to this YouTube channel so you can jump to the different content, click the link and launch the videos for even more training, send me an email randy@randallldean.com and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll go ahead and get you that series of productivity PDF tip sheets with active links to some of my better video tips. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for your time and attention today. We are done.