Five Little Known Outlook Productivity Hacks

Hi everybody, Shelley here, live on Shelley's Alley. So I am wearing my Microsoft shirt today, there you go, in honor of a friend of mine who was going to be on the show, friend and colleague, and someone I've worked with in the past. Unfortunately, something happened and we've had to reschedule, so, um, They will be on the show later on, don't worry. We're still, we're still going to do that, but we weren't able to go live today. So, you know, things happen and we've got to kind of roll with it. So I decided to go ahead and keep my Microsoft shirt on. And what I'm going to do today is in honor of my Microsoft friend, as many of you might know, I used to work at Microsoft some time ago. I am going to do some Microsoft Outlook hacks. And these are things that I actually use, so, you know, things that I do with my Outlook to help speed up my day, speed up my productivity, get more out of my time. So they're just some simple tips, tricks, whatever you want to call them. They're not real hacks, not hacking anything, they're just productivity tips. I wouldn't even go as far as saying that they're automation because it's not really automating anything, but there's 5 that I want to share with you today. Today. Let me name them and then I'll just jump right into them. The first one, if you already know how to use Quick Steps, great. If not, Quick Steps, major time saver. Major time saver. In fact, there's Quick Steps in Outlook, but there's also similar things to Quick Steps in other parts of the entire Microsoft suite. Outlook in particular, it's very useful. It's kind of like a macro, but a really easy way to do macros. Second one is keyboard shortcuts. There's a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts that you can use. There's probably too many, honestly. There's tons, so I'm going to just kind of highlight a few basic ones that I— the ones that I find myself using pretty much over and over and over again. And then I also want to show you cleanup, clean out folders. It's actually kind of buried in Outlook, but it's something that I use a lot to get rid of clutter in my Outlook inbox, or actually I use it for my inbox, but really it works on any folder. So it's called Cleanup. Then Send Later. So this is when you're writing a message and maybe it's really early in the morning or really late at night, and you know, people check their stuff on their phone all the time. You don't want to disturb them. You know, it's something that you need to get out, but you don't want them to maybe receive it at, you know, whatever time in the evening, you can actually send it later so that it goes out in the morning. At least you still rate it, you sent it, you don't have to worry about putting it in drafts or anything. Just go ahead and get it out there, but it actually doesn't deliver until the time you specify. That's called set delivery. And then my favorite, of course, you know me, I'm all about search, is search. So there's search folders and actually some search commands, some line item commands. I know it's a lot of people don't know about. So let me break these down a little bit one at a time. And why don't we start with Quick Steps? Quick Steps is basically like a macro at the top of your Outlook. When you, when you're using Outlook, you'll see there's a section at the very top. Maybe I can share my screen without, yeah, I can share my screen without showing you anything. You know, private or personal. Let me try that. Here we go. All right, so it's right here. It's called Quick Steps. My screen might be a little bit tiny, sorry about that, but let me open this up and show you what this looks like. So it's a little menu that allows you to create these kind of little macros. I'm going to go ahead and create a new one. You can see here there's quick steps like move to a folder, so whatever email you have highlighted there could be a step that moves that, or that email or collection of emails, directly into a folder. You can of course drag and drop, but you can also select a whole bunch of them and then you can use the quick step or you can right-click. You can categorize it. You can categorize it and move it. So you can mark it as personal, or if you use the GTD or one of the other methodologies, you can flag it for a category that says to delegate or to later, etc. You can flag it, you can forward it, and then of course there's custom, which is my favorite. In custom here, you call it whatever you want and choose an action. The action essentially is the trigger. So in the if this, then that sort of line of thinking, which is kind of basic programming, right? If this happens, then do that. The trigger is the, the part of the equation that's looking for something to happen. For example, it could be, um, it could be whenever an email comes in, or it could be whenever a, um, whenever you're replying or whatever. So let's, let's take a look at the actions that are in here. You can copy, you can delete, you can mark as read, mark as unread, you can even create a task. There's responding, there's appointments, and all that. So what examples of things can we do with this? Well, you can, for example, take an email that comes in and with a click of a button forward it to specific people. Maybe there's something that, you know, requires that a team, you know, they dug into a team or something like that. So right-click and action, and then it forwards it to all of them. By the way, I say right-click, you can right-click with quick actions right here They're called Quick Steps. These are the ones that I've set, or you can also click the button up here. So whether you right-click or that, right? So a bunch of different examples on things that you can do with Quick Steps. Let me give you a couple of other ideas. You could basically flag a particular group of messages. You can make a type of message have a sound alert or forward to a text and so on. The other thing I want to share with you inside QuickSteps is keyboard shortcuts when you're inside of Outlook. So if you're inside of Outlook and you want to go to your calendar, all you have to do is press Ctrl+2. For those of you that use Outlook all day, iPhone or whatever, and I've seen some folks actually right-click on the calendar icon in Outlook and then open as a new window. So basically you'll have like, um, you know, email on the right and calendar on the left or something like that. That's fine. You can also have it as a split screen. Let me show you what I'm talking about here. I guess I probably should have kept the screen on. There we go. So here's the calendar over here and here's the email on the other side. But actually if you just do Control+1, you go to email. Control+2, you go to calendar. Control+3 takes you to the contact section. Control+4 takes you to tasks, etc. So even if you don't have Windows open, the keyboard shortcut navigation, you can keyboard shortcut navigation. Another shortcut that I like to use besides the one that switches screens appointment. So if you get an email or you get a call or something, you have to create a calendar item. Again, you can go to the calendar, you can do Ctrl+2 to switch to the calendar, or if you're in Outlook, no matter where you are, you can hit Ctrl+Shift+A. That's Ctrl+Shift+A. Don't worry, I'll post a little shortcut, uh, hack stick here on my, on my blog afterward. But it's an easy one to remember. Ctrl+Shift+A makes an appointment, so that's Ctrl+Shift+A for appointment. By the way, Ctrl+Shift+C makes a new contact, and Ctrl+Shift+M makes a new message. I know it probably should be easier if it was E for shifting, but it's not. Ctrl+Shift+M for message. Now you can do Ctrl+Shift+M, which creates a new message, write it, and then hit Alt+S and it sends it. So you can stick to the keyboard for all of that. I like using the keyboard a lot because hands don't have to move all the way to the mouse, and also I find that position of the mouse kind of is a little bit more— it just after long-term use, at the end of the day, I kind of feel a little sore from putting my arm in that sort of awkward thing. But once I'm, you know, I have a keyboard. So Ctrl+1, Mail, Ctrl+2, Calendar, Ctrl+3, Contacts. Ctrl+4, tasks, or Ctrl+Shift+A, appointment, Ctrl+Shift+C for contact, and Ctrl+Shift+M for new message. Alt+S to send it. By the way, if you're in your Outlook and you want to reply, Ctrl+R for, you guessed it, reply. So when you're right there, don't even have to look for the reply button, just hit Ctrl+R and start typing, and then Alt+S to send it. So those are my favorite Technically that's two shortcuts, Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Shift+Z, but let's call that 6 favorite keyboard shortcuts. Another one of my favorite things to do with Outlook is use Cleanup. Now Cleanup is specifically to declutter or kind of organize your folders. What I find really useful about the Cleanup feature is that it actually It eliminates those kind of nested threaded messages or redundant messages that are, that are repeated in your Outlook. You know, we run into that a lot. So redundant messages, threaded messages, it just moves it all up and archives them or does whatever you want. If you go to File, Options, and Mail, File, Options, Mail, and you'll see Conversation Cleanup. Again, talking about your Outlook. So File, Options, Mail, and then you'll see the cleanup settings, and that's where you can configure it. Some of the choices in conversation cleanup are, um, don't move the categorized messages. So if you've categorized them, they stay where they are. That way you don't accidentally remove, recategorize, or whatever a message you already manually processed. You can also not move flagged messages. Anything that's been digitally signed. So there's, you know, certain reasons that you want to keep those in your inbox. You can also set up a message— I'm sorry, set up a structure that says when you're cleaning subfolders, recreate the original hierarchy in the destination folder. So let's say if you have a folder with subfolders and you want to clean up that whole thing, it will recreate the same subfolder structure in your new let's say you're moving into archive or moving into another folder, it'll recreate the same structure. Mind you, if you don't do that, then if you have multiple subfolders, it'll take everything from all the subfolders and put it all in one place. So if you want to recreate that folder structure, you can check that box in the settings. Also, when a reply modifies a message, you can make it so it doesn't move the original. That way you're not accidentally moving something from the place where you originally have it, but you're handling all the other threads and things like that. So that's all inside of the options for Outlook. You do have to, if you're going to do this, you do have to specify where all of the cleaned up items will go. My advice is some sort of archive. That's what I call it. I call it my archive folder. That's where everything goes, and that way it's not in my inbox, but it is somewhere. And I even have in my archive, I even have unread items because there's still items that I want people to, you know, look at later. If you use coloring rules where, you know, rules from emails that are from your company are in blue, emails that are external are in red, or whatever, that kind of thing, all that coloring remains when you put it in there, but it's all going to end up moving into an archive. Once you have this set up, then it's really easy to just go right into your account. When you're in Outlook, you look at your email account right there, and underneath your email account, when you right-click on it— so right-click on your email account— you'll see the cleanup. It just says cleanup. It's right on that little, um, list below. Here, I'll show you where it is so you can see what I'm talking about. Okay, so here's my email accounts. These are all my different email accounts. Right-click, and you'll see right there, you know, click on that, and it runs through the process that, you know, whatever the rules are that you decided, and it puts it into the folder that you want it put on. Very easy way to just right-click and get rid of a bunch of stuff from your inbox. So what was the other one? Oh yeah, send later. Send later is when you have a message that you don't want delivered at at a particular time because it's too early, it's too late, you're in a different time zone, you know, etc. And you just want to be cognizant of not, you know, hitting someone's inbox because, you know, most of us these days we're checking our email on our phones. So if I get a message from someone I know, I'm probably going to open it and it might be, you know, it might be something I feel like I can do something about right then and there. But if you don't really need to do it right then and there, you can set it at another date. So to do that, when you're in the email itself, when you're writing the email itself, you can actually go into the properties. So you're in your email, going to properties, and there's a section called delay delivery. It's just delivery, that did not come out right. Delay delivery, and it's under the more options, under the options. So options, more options, delay delivery. You're Basically, you can do this at any time after you've started writing it or before or whatever. So click New Email, or as we learned, click Ctrl+Shift+M, and that creates a message, right? Ctrl+Shift+M for message. So you hit Ctrl+Shift+M and you have a message in front of you. Up across the top you have File, Message, Insert, and Options, and then some other stuff. So you've got File, Message, Insert, Options. Click on Options. And then inside of Options, there's a More Options section, which is where you see Delay Delivery. It'll be— if you have your icons set up, it'll be like a little inbox with a clock on it, a little inbox tray, the old-fashioned, you know, filing cabinet kind of inbox tray. But if you have it minimized to where it's the simplified ribbon, it might not show up because you'll have the text that says like Deeds Effects, encryption, etc. So you have to click on the little open window thing here. So let me show you what I'm talking about. I'm in my message right now and I just created, you know, Ctrl+Shift+Down created a new message. This is the minimized ribbon some people use. Also, if you have a smaller screen or you're on a laptop, it'll default to the minimized screen. So just either go to the classic one, which here you'll see Delay Delivery. Or if you're in the minimized or simplified ribbon, you can open it right here. Same thing, and you'll end up being able to see the delivery options. So here's what I was talking about. So you can choose to not deliver before a particular time. Let's say it's too late, it's still Friday past 5 PM, you want to send the email but you don't want the person to necessarily, you know, get it. You can have it delay delivery until Monday morning at, let's say, I don't know, we'll do 8 AM. There you go. If I send it now, it's not actually going to send until then. There. So let me back out here. Okay. Next one that I wanted to share with you is the search folder. But before I tell you about the search folder, I also want to tell you about the search command. This is pretty cool. Wherever you are inside of Outlook, there's always a kind of floating search box at the top. I'm not a huge fan of the new layout that just came out like literally a couple days ago because there's a lot of white space, but I gotta admit I'm getting used to it. One of the things that I did to get used to it, get a little bit more used to it, is I made changes to what's, what shows up in the ribbon. So maybe I should start with showing you what that is. All this white space here kind of bugs me. It didn't used to be there. All of these tabs and everything were close to the top, and now I see that there's this whole bunch of space here that's wasted. But actually, you can change what goes up here by taking this, um, Quick Access Toolbar and changing it to go above or below the ribbon. So when I first got the new Outlook layout after my computer restarted, it was down here, which had all this extra white space and then another row now removing some of that real estate. So first thing I did was I went in here and I said, you know what, put it up there. Now you can see I got some of that back. And then you can also check some boxes here on actions that you want accessible here, like forward, reply, etc. And that takes them out of the other ribbon out here. So now I was able to use the simplified ribbon instead of the classic ribbon, which is a lot, you know, taller, and that takes up less space. So two things that I did is I moved to a simplified ribbon I moved the quick access up here and I put some of the more frequent things that I do in the quick access, so that gave you a little bit of that space. However, you can still see there's all this white space over here. It's just sitting there. So it'll take us some time to get used to it. Hopefully I'm not, I'm not altogether that annoyed, but the point is you can go to search here and you can use all kinds of different search commands. First thing is you can search your current mailbox. That's your inbox or wherever you are, or you can search all mailboxes. Either way, the commands are there. My favorite commands are FROM and TO. Basically just FROM: that's it. Just put in FROM: and then someone's name, partial name, first name, last name, email address, and it'll search either that mailbox or whichever mailbox, all mailboxes for messages that were from that person or to that person. So if you're looking for sent messages, like, oh, I know I sent this to you, but I don't remember where it is, rather than going into your Sent folder and scanning through or sorting or whatever, just simply go From or To and type that in. A little hint though, if you're using only Current Folder and you're looking for sent to, a lot of your sent items are actually in your Sent folder. So make sure you choose All Folders or choose the appropriate folder. So that's From: and To:. Another one, you know that you sent an attachment to somebody, but you can't find it. And maybe you sent emails to that person a lot, so, you know, looking through all items that you sent to them is a long list. You can just type in "has attachments," H-A-S, A-T-T-A-C-H-M-E-N-T, "has attachments," colon, yes, and then it will sort and find only all the ones that have an attachment. So let me recap: sent to, so you can say to colon, Shelly, and then has attachments colon, yes, And it'll show you all the emails you sent to Shelly with attachments, or conversely, has attachment: no. And right, or also from Shelly and has attachment: yes. Now if you want to do cleanup, one of the easiest things to do is to sort messages that are really large because they have attachments and things like that. You can actually do message size colon, and then the thing about message size is that there's a few, uh, words that they use to describe message size. And there's— it's not intuitive. It's not like message size 10 bytes or 100 bytes. It's large or enormous. The big ones are basically enormous. So message size colon enormous will find all the attachments that are like multiple megs, audio files, large PowerPoints, and so on. And the last one is Actually, no, two more. The, the second to last one is received. So received: will actually search for messages that were received on a particular date, or you can use relative terms like yesterday, last month, this week, etc. So received: yesterday will find all messages to or from— actually, to would not be for received, it would be for sent— but all messages from Shari received yesterday or received last week or received in January or whatever. You can actually use relative terms there. And then now the last one is read, R-E-A-D. So read: no will show you all the unread items, and read: yes will show you all the read items in whatever folder. And again, you can combine it. So show me everything I sent to or everything I received from that has an attachment and is or isn't read. So that it's from, to, has attachments, message size, received, and read. All of these have a colon next to them and no spaces. So read: no will find you all of the ones that haven't been read. Lastly, I want to tell you about search folders. So now that you know how to do all of these search commands, you can actually create a saved folder that essentially runs this search constantly. So when you click on it, like a folder in your inbox, instead of it being a folder of messages that you drag and drop or you move or you cleaned up into that folder, this is a folder, a virtual folder of messages that match specific criteria. So it's kind of like, it's what I call a pervasive search. So when you do, to do that, all you have to do is create a new search folder. Inside of your Outlook, there's a tab that says Folder. Click on that, and then there's a little icon that says New Folder, New Search Folder, and then you can set up a bunch of criteria like a search folder for all unread mail will show, will show you all unread mail. It could be on this account or on all your accounts, etc. You can have a search folder for all email from a specific person or all email from a specific group, all email from a specific domain, So for example, here's what I do. I have a search folder for all email from people inside the company because, you know, in your inbox you have people that you know externally and internally, and, you know, there's different things you can do with that. So I have an all email from inside my company search folder that automatically finds that, and it's also all email from inside my company that's also unread. So it's got two criteria: unread email from people at my company. There's a few other things that you can do. One of my favorite views of my inbox is where I am the only person in the To box, because my theory is if I'm the only person in the To box, there could be other people in the CC or BCC, but if I'm the only one in the To box, then it's more than likely something that I should be paying attention to or taking action on, or, you know, maybe it's just an FYI, but still, if I'm one of several people in the To box, then more than likely it's an FYI or a group message that I don't necessarily have to take action on. So my first view when I, when I clean up email is anything sent just to me. Well, that can actually be a search folder. You can also likewise have a search folder for everything sent to me where I'm on the C instead of the To, and that's a lot of times, majority of the time, those are FYIs. So now you can look for those, archive them, process them, clean them up, etc. There's a lot more that you can do with search folders. For example, you can look for emails that are from mailing lists. You can look for emails that are, you know, have a particular keyword in them, etc. We can have one that's just for attachments. So search all, search all folders for all emails that have attachments, and that's a pervasive search. By the way, if you like that, you can do the same thing with folders on your computer. In other words, you can have a search folder of searches on your computer in Explorer, you know, not, not Internet Explorer, but Windows Explorer. So that's where you open up a new window, go to the search box on the right-hand side, and type in a search, and then make it a saved search folder. I do this with types of files, so there's a spreadsheet one that searches all spreadsheets. It's a search folder that doesn't have anything in it, just searches, But when I click on it, it shows me every Excel. I have one that has every PowerPoint. I have one that has every Word document. And that way I can sort through. I can also look for duplicates and things like that. So anyway, I hope you enjoyed today's Shelly's Alley. Sorry to disappoint you, it's just me, but maybe I made up for that by providing you some useful tips. I'm going to follow up with a blog post or, yeah, it's an article, whatever you want to call it. On my favorite shortcuts. So pass it along if you, if you liked it. And if not, well, we'll be back to our regularly scheduled program. Now next week, there is no Showers Alley because it's basically the day after Thanksgiving. Some people call that Black Friday, whatever. But the point is, it's kind of a, kind of a holiday, necessarily. So I'm just not going to have an episode, but we'll see you the following week. Have a great weekend, everybody. Hope you enjoyed the show. Bye.