New and Web Microsoft Outlook Tutorial: Home Screen Features, Tips & Customization for Productivity

Hi everybody, Randy Dean here, Email Sanity Expert. This is video 2 in the triplet. I'm making all 3 of them here back to back to back tonight, trying to post them all out, uh, in quick order. Uh, this one is going to be for the new and web Outlook users. I just dropped, uh, the recording for the classic Outlook users. I'm going to basically do the same treatment. I'm just going to go in, open up the screen and show you a bunch of really useful little tools and setup options. So let's do that right now. Let's pop out of here. Let's go into new in Web Outlook. All right. Now, if you were on the previous video, you will already notice a big difference. Notice that the functions which are up here, upper left corner, now they are rounded edges with a little bit of color. I think it's a little bit friendlier, honestly, not, not too bad of a look. I I also explained in the previous video that wherever you see one of these, it's called a waffle. You want to click on this and open it up to see what's hiding in here. And here's why. Let's say you find that whenever you're in your inbox, you're always opening up Word to create new documents. It's just happening a lot. You can come into your waffle, right-click, and hit pin., and then Word becomes part of your sidebar. So you don't even have to leave Outlook to open Word, you know, saves you a click or two. Um, and you can actually come in here and right-click, um, and then unpin if you want to move it back. If there's anything over here that you don't really want to see, you want to move it back in, you can make that change. One little thing I want to show you here is a feature that's in new Web Outlook that is not obvious in classic Outlook. It's called Groups, and this is where you can build like group distribution lists and set those things up to make it much easier if you're trying to send email communications out to specific sets of people pretty regularly. Uh, so keep that in mind. I mean, even if you're still using classic, as, as long as you can open new Outlook, you could go use that Groups feature even if you're using the classic Outlook primarily. Um, one of the other things that I wanted to show you up here is notice that I've got sort of the wider toolbar up here. But watch what I can do. I can come over here to Ribbon Display Options. See that little caret right there? Whenever you see one of these, that means there's something hiding in here. And the option it gives me is to go back to Simplified Ribbon. Um, I think this is the way it usually is when you first start using it. And if you like to see your entire set of tools with bigger descriptions, I like that. I sort of like seeing in my workshop all my tools like hanging up on pegs because it makes it easier to find them. So I actually much prefer to keep the classic ribbon view. But I also wanted to show you, notice that they have this little side arrow. That means there's probably some more stuff hiding in there. Not much this time, but in some of the other places you might find that there's more options going over to the side. So let's click on the View tab. No, see this one? Everything things here, um, and you can actually get in and take a look at all of the different stuff. Notice also they've added in the Copilot button, so you can come in here, uh, do a chat, set up a reply, go check out your Copilot settings. I haven't even got into there yet. I'll probably have to make a video about that. Um, the other thing that I wanted to show you here is notice that here down the side panel I have my Favorites bucket. These are the folders that I have selected as favorite. How did I do that? Well, I just come down to any one of the folders down here. Um, let's do my e-newsletter Timely Tips, and I can right-click. And notice it was already in Favorites. Remove from Favorites. But let's say it wasn't in Favorites. I could then add to Favorites. And this is specifically really nice for the folders you find yourself going to a whole lot of the time. Now, one little issue with Favorites though, it doesn't give you the drop folders inside of these folders. So like if there's a folder that the reason you're going to it all the time is to get to a folder inside of that folder, Favorites isn't going to help you too much. Of course though, if you just want to see your folder directory, you can collapse this and just get to where you're in that inbox. And if you've— if you're managing multiple inboxes, you can collapse and go to your other inboxes. And even some of your calendars. All right, so you can get in there and take a good look at these things and get it set up just the way you want it on your sidebar if you'd like. And a little something to notice here, let's say you'd like to see even more stuff about your folders. Well, you can create a little sizing bar right there and you'll have some options to move it back and forth a little bit. One of the other things that I wanted to do, let's go back to the Home tab. Um, notice that if I click on this, watch what this does. It hides the folders. So if you've ever— where the heck did my folders go? Just click on this, you'll have your folders back. Some people may not know that that's even what was going on, and then they're calling like IT, where I lost my folders. You know, it just— you gotta, you gotta hover over things and see what's going on in here so you can find your stuff. Of course, they've got the search bar up here with options to expand the type of search that you want to do. And Notice this over here to the side is what they call filters, where you can do some filtering to get even more specific in your searches. So it's easier to find what you're trying to find. And, um, let's close this because I want to show you a couple other features up here, upper corner. Um, notice this button right here. Not a lot of people that have used new Web Outlook have found this button yet. This is a really valuable button.. It's called the My Day button, and look what it does when you click on it. It basically allows you to get peeks of both your calendar and your task list. Now I was doing something a little funky there. Let me click on calendar one more time. Hey, there it goes. That's the way it's supposed to look. I don't know what that was that was going on up at the top, but this is my task list. This is my calendar. Keeps bringing in a little piece of the, of the to-do list at the bottom there. Let me do it one more time. Yeah, okay, you know what it's probably doing? No, that's bringing in tasks. That's interesting. There, that's what I wanted to see is the calendar. Um, so, you know, weird little things happen now and then, especially in new and web Outlook. Uh, one other thing I wanted to show you though is look at this. See this little button right here? That's a pop widget. And so if you go up and click on that little thing when you're in your My Day button that opens up full page calendar. And if you go to To Do, you've got a pop widget there too. You can open up full page Microsoft To Do inside of your Outlook. Now that I'm bringing this up, I want to share something that's pretty cool though. I can now close the My Day button. Of course, I've got full page tasks here with all my different views. But watch this, I can come up here to Calendar and I'm not going to click on it to open it. I'm going to right-click on it. I can open in a new window. Wait, what? Yeah, see, if you've got multiple screens, you could put your calendar on one screen and your to-do task list on another. Notice what's not open? Email. Because I got my email under control. Now I'm going to switch to Calendar and Task mode to get some actual work done. What a crazy concept. But yeah, you can, you can basically just open up separate screens of a lot of your primary functions so that you can customize if you've got multiple monitors to have exactly what it is that you need when you need it. All right, now, um, I have to do something here real quick. I'm gonna go in and let me see, uh, what I want to do is go into Google and this time I'm going to go into my outlook.live.com. Okay, now I've already been signed in, so it should log me in without me having to do a login. It did. And the reason I'm showing this to you is look at how similar Outlook.live.com, Web Outlook, looks to new Outlook. They're remarkably similar. There's a couple little things in Web Outlook that might make you interested in maybe considering using it. Yes, it still has the My Day button, which I can collapse. But what I wanted to show you is this. Notice there's a waffle here, but there's a second waffle up here. And a lot of the web versions of these Microsoft 365 tools, they have that waffle also. The second waffle, look what this does. It allows you to go in and launch a whole bunch of your other Microsoft 365 tools. You can get in there, you can find them fast, you can launch them very quickly in browser mode. The other thing that I wanted to show you up here is, of course, you could open up and start a Teams meeting basically right now. Here's the little button to basically open Teams and right here is the little button to open OneNote. So a lot of these features are sort of right there. And these— a lot of these little extra bonus buttons are not in new Outlook. So if you prefer to have those little bonus buttons, might not be a bad idea to open up and use your web Outlook instead of new Outlook. When you need those capabilities. Um, the other thing that I wanted to show you here is— see the bell? The bell is about notifications. And if you click on this, you can see if there was any notifications. But how do you find how to set up your notifications? Well, those are in your settings, and I believe they're under General. Yes. And so right here is where your notifications are, and you can actually When you have the bell, click the bell, you can go down and see how you have your notification set up. And wherever you see drop menus means you have choices. So like, look, one thing I did here in my mail, I only want it from favorite people. So I have to go into my contacts, identify who my favorite people are. You can do that by going into the contact, clicking on the little three dots when you're inside of a contact, and one of the drop options will be add to favorites. Do you see what I'm doing there? I'm going to get the notifications, but only when it's from my most important people. That means I'm not getting constant notifications every time any email comes in, including junk and spam. So that's a nice little capability and feature there. And of course, right next to it is right here is where you launch and open all of your settings. And if you haven't done this yet, if you're still pretty new, I would recommend going in here and going one by one through these and looking through all of these little side columns right here. Right there. One more thing that I want to share with you is just something that you should know. In most Microsoft and Google products, this works. Did you know that almost any place you go in here, you do a right-click, you'll get options? There's the options for if I'm over Calendar. Now let's do right-click over deleted items. Wait, that was not a right-click. That's a right-click. Okay, so I'm going to go back to Inbox. Let's do that one more time because I want you to see it again. Right-click. These are all the things I can do with my deleted items. I can create a subfolder in deleted items, even more deleted items. This is the one that you really want to see— empty. So you can empty your trash can. Um, and, uh, also on your individual emails, you can do a right-click and you'll get a whole series of options. Now, if you just watched the classic Outlook video and you jumped right into this one, I did not show that in the classic Outlook video, but I do have a whole video about my favorite right-click options for classic Outlook users. But notice there's a lot of capabilities. You can right-click on an email, you can reply to it, you can forward it, you can move it to a different folder out of your inbox. You could make a copy of the email. I'm not a big fan of mark unread or flag. I would actually prefer you turn it into task or calendar. But you even have the option to snooze it. So let's say I don't need to look at this email till tomorrow. You can snooze it till tomorrow. If they're junk or spam, you can report or block. So, and if you come down here at the bottom, you can do find related. And let me move myself out of the way because I want to show you this. And find related, find related, you can do it either by the sender or by the conversation. Okay, so you've got a lot of cool little tools inside of here. Always look under each of your tabs to see what other capabilities that you have, and do that for each of your functions, because depending on the function, you're gonna have different options. All right, all right, so, um, I think that's pretty good. I think I gave you some pretty good stuff here to help you navigate your screen a little bit better, use it a little more efficiently, find your stuff hopefully a little bit better, easier, smarter. So why don't we go ahead and end this one? I'll pop into here. And like I said, what I'm going to do next is the Gmail video. I've already done the classic Outlook. I'm going to be posting all 3 of these. And so with that, once again, I'm Randy Dean, email sanity expert. Obviously, if you like these videos, please like, please consider subscribing to the channel. Please share with coworkers, friends, if you think they're going to find it useful. You can learn more about me at my website, randaldean.com. I do have some productivity PDF tip sheets, including my YouTube channel guide, which will give you links to a whole bunch of my other YouTube videos. If you want to get those, just send me YouTube PDF to randy@randaldean.com. I also have an e-newsletter, does one tip a month, and if you're interested, you can sign up. There's no obligation or cost. You can unsubscribe at any time, but I'm doing a little special deal right now. If you send me an email that says subscribe, I will sign you up for the e-newsletter and you will get a complimentary copy of my ebook on Taming the Email Beast. So if you're interested in that, send me the note. Hope you found this useful. Thanks again and watch for the next video. Bye now.