Randy Dean shows how to set up Outlook's Out of Office autoreply, including where to find it under File and how to set start and end dates. He recommends creating a reusable Word template for your message and copying your email signature into the reply body.
Chapters
Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, the Email Sanity Expert. I am going to do another microlearning video for you today, which is a pretty straightforward one. It's how to set up your out of office auto reply in Microsoft Outlook. And I'm doing this one because I actually got a little bit embarrassed in a recent client session because it was so easy, it was hard. Somebody said, well, when you don't do this, that, and how do you do your auto reply? And I was like, oh, I think that's under Signatures. Wait a minute, let's go in here and take a look. Under— you go into New Email and then click on Signature and then go all the way to the bottom to Signatures, and it'll bring up your Signatures Wizard. And it's not in here. Oh shoot. Well, if it's not there, then you know where else it might be? No, I'm not going to save my changes. Maybe it's up here under the File menu, under Options. And mail. No, it's not in here either. Where did they put it? Now, what's funny is I haven't used it for years because I sort of check my email— don't tell anybody— most of the time, even when I'm on vacation, because I run a small business, I got to see what's going on. It was so easy, it was hard. They moved it from the last time I used it several years ago. Just come up here to the File tab and it's right there. See, once again, wait, wait, let me show you how easy that is again. File is right there, Automatic Replies. Click on this and then you'll see it says Do Not Send, but if you want to send them, you can click on this. And now let me give you a really good tip on doing this. Set up a Word document with your template for being on vacation. Now notice I made this template and I say fix the dates. Because the dates are going to change every time you go on vacation. And notice also my other little tip. I took basically a copy of my standard signature and I dropped it in at the end of the text. Now I can highlight that, do a Ctrl+C, come back over here to my out of office tool and do a Ctrl+V, which is a paste. So Ctrl+C, copy, Ctrl+V, paste. And see, now I've got this set up. Now notice this. It says I will be out of the office Wednesday, September 29th. So notice right here, you can even set the time range. Let's make this Wednesday, September 29th. Start time, let's make that 8 AM. And end time, Monday, October 4th. Let's put it on October 4th. End time, 9 PM. That's good. There you go. Or I could even put it into Tuesday morning, 8 AM. Um, so that's how you can set up with a date range. Or if you just want to make it, you know, always on, just do send automatic replies and hit OK. Now obviously I don't want to do this. I'm going to do something a little bit different here. Let me show you another option since we're in here. I'm going to delete that text because let me show you a separate option you may want to consider just if you're going to have a really busy day in the office. Out of office meetings template. Once again, little note to myself, fix the date. Well, look what I've done here. Let's grab this. Notice the signature from one of my standard emails. I dropped it in. And let's copy this one, Ctrl+C. Once again, that's a copy. And let's go back to the out of office right here, Ctrl+V. And now look what this one says. I will be leading several client sessions and may be slow to respond to email messages. I have more availability the following day. Expect a reply by the end of that day if you don't hear back from me tomorrow. Thanks for your patience. And once again, I could come here, turn this on, and say start time 8 AM, end time 9 PM. That easy. It's that easy. Easy peasy. Like I said, it's easy. I hope you like the idea of though making a template in a Word doc that you can save so you can use it whenever you're going to turn on your out of office. And I hope you also like the idea of dropping in a signature. So this is a little bit of a slightly longer microlearning lesson, but it's still a microlearning lesson. And so with that, let's finish this thing up. Like I said, I want to thank you for your time. I am Randy Dean. There I am right there. Here I am right here. Start new haircut. If you'd like to learn more about me and what I do, give me a check on my website, randaldean.com. If you like the video, please like, please maybe consider subscribing to the channel. And if you want to get my productivity PDF tip sheets with a whole bunch of tips on time, email, Outlook, Gmail, distraction, smartphone, tablet, and other stuff management, send me an email randy@randaldean.com. Put YouTube PDF in the subject line and I'll send you some self-study stuff. Hope you had fun with this one. Good luck using your out of office.
