Quick Video Tip: Get to Your Folders Faster in Outlook, Windows, and Even Gmail

Hi everybody, hope you're having a great day today, and please excuse me, I got the sniffles a little bit. Of course, it's February, time to get those colds. But what I would like to do is give you a quick video tip today on how to get to your folders faster in Outlook, Windows, and even Gmail. So there's a few quick tips. Once again, my name is Randy Dean. I am popularly known as the Email Sanity Expert, and I lead programs all over the United States, Canada, and occasionally Europe. On programs on how to better manage your time, your email, your distractions, and your related technology. So let's dive right into this one. I'd like to share with you a few quick tips on ways to get to your stuff faster. First thing I want to do is pop into my Outlook, and yes, you can be jealous. There is my inbox today. I just got it to zero. That's why I decided to create and do this tip. And what I wanted to show you was a few things here real quick. The first thing I wanted to show you is if you have certain folders that you're using quite frequently. Like notice, for instance, my Accounting Finance folder for my business. Watch what I can do right here. I can do a right-click on the folder, and then you can do this thing right here called Add to Favorites. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit Add to Favorites, and notice up here there's a dropdown menu, and it just moved Accounting Finance up here to Add to Favorites. And you can even take this once it's here and move it up if you'd like to change its location. This is a great place, the Favorites area, for folders that you go to quite often to find information. And so you see I've got my book, I've got my video programs, and I've now added Accounting Finance. I've got my Drafts folder where I save, you know, certain repeating messages, and I can get to all of those folders very quickly from regardless of wherever I am at. And now what's nice about this too is you can actually collapse it so that if you're working in your mainline folders, you can actually get down to this menu very quickly. Now, notice this additional little tip though. Notice what I did with these top few folders in my folder directory. Instead of just making it the name, I put a special character in front, exclamation point. You can use pretty much any special character, including numbers, to allow yourself to basically move folders that you use more frequently to the top of your folder structure. And what's interesting is this little tip doesn't work in Microsoft Outlook. Let's take a look at something here. I'm gonna pop out here to one of my folder directories, and let's see, let's go up to the top level in my RD Consulting folder packet. And notice that you can also use special characters inside of here. And then if you sort by name, watch what's going to happen here. I'm going to take this a little bit and I'm gonna move up to the top. You can actually get to your folders, special character Same capability. So basically, using special characters is something that you can also use in your Windows Explorer file cabinet, as well as in your Microsoft Outlook file cabinet, as well as in your Gmail file cabinet. Now take a look at this, uh, let's take this email right here, select it, and now let's go up to my folder list and look. Once again, you can do this, and under labels, same thing. Notice that under any of these you can use a special character to supersede the, um, listing that's there. And so that way you can basically move in here and start putting your folders or labels near the top of your list. So that's just one of those little tips that helps make it easier for you to find stuff. And then of course when you come down over into this list on the side, it's going to give you the folders you've used quite a bit recently. But if you hit more Now what's going to happen is you're going to see that you're going to get a lot of your folders in that organized order, and the ones that have the special characters will be moved up to you at the top of your structure. Okay, so that's quick, that's fun, but wait, there's even more. Let's go back to that file cabinet and notice this— there is this thing here called Quick Access. Now if you go down below this, you'll get down to Your PC, and you can go into all of your folder structures including Desktop, Document Cloud Drive, ShareDrive, etc., blah blah blah. But what I've done is I take the folders that I'm using all the time and I add them to Quick Access. And so let's go in, I'm going to go into my folder for this one right here. And what I'd like to do is notice that I've got some more folders that are inside of here. Once again, let's just use Accounting Finance. Watch what I can do with Accounting Finance. I can do a right-click on this folder and take a look right here, Pin to Quick Access. This is almost just like the Favorites capability. Hit Pin to Quick Access, and now take a look. You come up here, Accounting Finance is part of my permanent dropdown. Now what I've noticed Quick Access is doing is pretty cool, right? Here's your little Quick Access bar in Windows Explorer, and if you page down, you'll see several folders have been pinned. These are the ones I've specifically said I use these all the time. But look what it's doing down here at the bottom. It's also putting down a few folders that you have accessed recently. So basically it's sort of watching how you're using your file cabinet and it's giving you some choices of folders to get to pretty quickly. Now related to that, let's go back to Outlook and show you one more thing. If you're in Outlook, okay, and you want to basically— you know what, I have to go into my Sent folder to do this. That's actually— I'll go into my Drafts folder real quick. I want to show you something. Let's right-click on this one right here. Notice this, that if you come up to Move, what you can do is with any active email, it's going to give you an option to show you some of the folders that you've been using quite a bit frequently recently. And so therefore, you can also move your stuff more quickly than maybe picking up an email and trying to drag it into one of your dropdowns. See, because if you try to use one of your dropdowns here, that might take you quite a while.. But if you know that you've used a folder recently, what you can do then is just pop back in and get right into one of the folders that you've recently jumped into and used. Alright, so hopefully this gives you some ideas on ways to save some time when it comes to basically managing your stuff in Outlook, in Gmail, in your Windows Explorer. So in summary, like I said, Add the folders that you use most to Outlook in your favorites. Second thing you might want to do is right-click to move the folders that you used recently, uh, so that you can basically set them up, uh, and get to the folders that you've been. You can use the special characters like the exclamation point or numbers to move your folders up in Outlook and Windows Explorer and in Gmail. Oh, and hey, Quick Access, which works just like favorite in your Windows Explorer file cabinet. Oh, and here's one. Hey, hold on a second. We didn't even talk about that. Let's pop back out to our Windows Explorer. And I want to show you one more quick little tip that I do all the time. This is one of the folders I go to quite a bit, Presentations. Now I'm going to right-click on this folder and let's see, I want to come down here, Send to Desktop, Create Shortcut. Now watch this. I'm going to hit Desktop, Create Shortcut. Now that I did that, let me show you something here. There's a keystroke you can do. It's called Windows+D. It's the Windows key in Windows and D. It flashes you right to your screen. And now take a look at this. There's that folder. There's the shortcut. And notice that I've started building a collection of the folders I used most frequently. I put them right up here on the top. And so that way I can just jump to my desktop to get to a certain folder in Windows Explorer that I know I'm using all the time. Now what's interesting, watch this, I'm gonna hit Windows+D again. It takes me right back to where I was. Oh, and hey, guess what? Let's do something else that's sort of fun right here. I accidentally discovered a quick little PowerPoint tip the other day. Did not know PowerPoint would do this. And since I'm in this slide right here, I'm gonna give you a little bonus PowerPoint tip too. If you're making PowerPoints and you wanna insert an empty slide, just click on this, one of these slides over here to the left. And just hit the Enter key. That drops in a blank slide, drops in a blank slide into your presentation. Now I don't want this one in here. Delete. Of course you can also, if you want to use the exact same formatting, come up here to your Home button, come up here to New Slide, and hit Duplicate Selected Slide. That'll bring in the exact same slide a second time, and then of course you can edit and change it. But I discovered the little thing about the Enter key by accident. If you just come over here on pretty much any place. You just hit Enter and boom! Drop a new slide in. Okay, so there, bonus tip. Weren't expecting that one today. And now what I want to do is finish this thing up. So let's go to Slideshow and finish today's tip. Once again, thank you for your time. If you would like to find out more about me and my programs, including options for live conferences, events, workshops, and webinars, as well as see some options for my full-length online streaming and webinar programs, just go out to my website, randaldean.com. Look, click on the programs tab to see the different programs that I'm actively currently promoting and click on the e-learning tab if you'd like to see what available streaming programs are available. If you would like to get a bunch more tips in the future, of course, subscribe to this channel and/or send me an email randy@randaldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line. As you can see right here, I've developed a whole series of little bonus PDF articles and tip sheets that cover time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google and Gmail usage, smartphone/tablet usage, reducing your distractions. And if you'd like, you can go ahead and just send me that little PDF request, and I will send out to you those bonus PDFs in electronic format so that you can have them for your reference and go as deep as you would like on these content and information. And with that, I'm going to say thank you for your time today. Hope you had fun.