Outlook Tips
How much time do you spend in Outlook grappling with e-mail, wrestling Calendar items, or scuffling with to-do lists? Knowing how to efficiently handle Outlook can save time, keep your inbox at a manageable level, and improve your organization.
There are several simple ways to optimize Outlook:
- Create signatures so you don’t have to type in your contact information at the end of your e-mail messages.(Tutorial)
- Set up rules to automatically organize and sort e-mails.(Tutorial)
- Quickly create calendar items and notes.(Tutorial)
- Add an item to your task list.(Tutorial)
- Flag messages that need follow up attention.(Tutorial)
- Mark important messages.(Tutorial)
- Preview an attachment without opening up the program that created it.(Tutorial)
- View more than one date at a time when setting up a calendar item.(Tutorial)
If you had to pick one tip that would be the most beneficial, setting rules should be at the top. Learning how to set and use rules is a great time saver and headache preventer!
Examples of When to Use Rules
Setting rules in your Outlook e-mail account is one way to harness the power of technology to make your e-mail life a little bit easier and, ultimately, less work for you.
Rules help you manage your e-mail by:
- Moving messages sent by your students to a folder specifically for that class so the messages are not lost among all the others
- Organizing messages from your dean or department chair into their own folder
- Deleting messages with inappropriate words (or other user-specified criteria) in the subject line, message body, or header
- Marking messages as being important
- Flagging messages for follow-up
- Displaying mail from someone in a New Item Alert window
- Deleting (or organizing) out of office messages
Further Resources
The following three sites provide other useful training: