Microsoft Outlook remains the de facto email in many offices. To boost your productivity when using this versatile email program, here are some favorite hacks worth revisiting:
1. Keyboard shortcuts
Like Excel, Word, and other Microsoft Office applications, there are a number of keyboard shortcuts that you can leverage on to avoid wasting time drilling through Outlook menus. By mastering a few, you will have a better opportunity to speed through most of your Outlook tasks. Some of the most useful include:
• Alt+S: Send an email
• Ctrl+R: reply to an email
• Ctrl+M: F9 to Receive or Send all
• Alt+W: forward an email. You can also use it to switch to your weekly calendar view
• Ctrl+G: to jump to any date in your calendar
• Ctrl+ [position of the item]: to switch between your contacts, calendar, mail, and other items in your navigation pane.
2. Limiting your desktop email notifications
While it can be terribly distracting to be notified every time you have a new mail, you still want to know when you have an important email alert. In Outlook, you can easily limit your desktop limitations to VIP mails only. Essentially, you just need to turn off all your desktop notifications under the Mail Options, then create a rule for the program to only display alerts from specific people.
3. Restoring Deleted Outlook Contacts
You can always restore deleted outlook contacts if you know where to go to. Every time you delete a contact in Outlook, it is moved to the Deleted Items folder. Accordingly, this is the first place that you should check when trying to find or restore a deleted contact. In case you can’t find the deleted contact in this folder, the next place that you should consider checking is the Recoverable Items folder. This folder is usually hidden, and it is where contacts are stored when you execute one of the following:
• Delete contacts (or items) from the Deleted Items folder
• Empty the Deleted Items folder
• Permanently delete an item or contact using the Shift+Delete
4. Creating a new email from your clipboard
To create a new email from your clipboard, just copy the content of your clipboard then press Ctrl+V, and Outlook will create a new message (or a new item depending on the folder that you were viewing) with the copied text already pasted. This means that you don’t need to create a new item then copy and paste content in as you can easily do both in one step.
Bottom-line
Most people spend a lot of time in managing their mails. With these hacks, though, you will have easier time organizing your inbox and staying on top of your Outlook emails.