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50 Most Popular Outlook Tips, Tricks and Secrets.Asana for Outlook • Asana
This article was written by the product team that created Microsoft Outlook for the best possible reason — our customers asked. Outlook is designed to be used by a wide audience with many work needs and styles. Although there's no one "right way," there are a few ways of working in the program that we know to be easier than others.
We hope that by being aware of the best practices, you will have the best experience possible using Outlook. This guide represents our advice on how to get the most out of Outlook. A few core scenarios are covered to help you leverage Outlook into your information management needs. Spend lots of time every day using Outlook to send and receive messages and to set up or attend meetings.
Basic principles of good time management. Setting up Outlook The layout. To-Do Bar. Quick Steps. Tame your Inbox with the four Ds.
Daily review: Managing your time and tasks. Tasks: Doing your work. Find that message: Searching effectively. How to find a message from a particular person. Write great email messages. Calendar and meetings. Frequently asked questions. About the author. Outlook is a tool to help you manage your email messages, calendar, contacts, and tasks. To get the most out of Outlook, we suggest a few basic principles:. Reduce the number of places where you read messages.
If you're using a new version of Microsoft , you can use Focused Inbox for Outlook to automatically separate the types of messages you're most likely to read right away from other messages. Let some messages pass by. Use rules to send the messages that you don't need to read right away into their own folders. Such as folders for projects or Contact Group folders. Reduce the number of places where you manually file messages.
Reduce the mental tax of filing by relying on search to locate messages. Reduce your to-do list to one list. Use a single to-do list and a single calendar to manage what you need to do.
Even if you don't use all of the best practices described here, following only a few will improve your experience with Outlook. The first step in following these best practices is to set up a system to optimize how you use Outlook.
The Navigation Pane open on the left. Your messages in Conversations view , with messages sent directly to you automatically formatted in blue. The Reading Pane on the right. The To-Do Bar open on the far right. If your screen resolution is less than by pixels, the To-Do Bar can be minimized.
Cached Exchange Mode turned on. For details on how to set up the recommended layout, see the FAQ section. An Inbox for messages that you need to process deal with. Your Inbox is for messages sent directly to you or that could be important for you to read. If you receive many messages that go back and forth among several different people, change to Conversations view.
Otherwise, use the date arrangement the default arrangement. Use automatic formatting rules to make all messages sent only to you blue. A single reference folder, under the Inbox, for all reference material that you might want to refer back to later. Nothing is automatically filed that is, with a rule into this folder. Name this folder 1-Reference. Adding the 1- will cause it to be the first item under the Inbox.
This folder is created under the Inbox so that you can collapse the Inbox and remove it from view. Set this folder to auto archive annually. Note: If this folder becomes too large 10, items or more , Outlook might become slow when switching to this folder. A folder for career-related, private, and personal messages.
Having a separate folder for personal and career-related information gives you the freedom to search for a message while someone is standing over your shoulder without worrying that a personally sensitive message will appear.
Name this folder 2-Personal. Managers might have a single folder for feedback on their employees called 3-Management. Set these folders to auto archive annually. A set of folders for Contact Group messages.
Create a single, top-level folder under your Inbox called Contact Groups , and then create a subfolder for each topic of Contact Groups. Usually, one folder per Contact Group is enough, but if you are on several related Contact Groups, consider having all of the messages delivered to the same folder.
These messages should go directly to your Inbox. Set your Contact Group folders to auto archive every six months or more frequently if they are time sensitive — for example, a Contact Group for finding carpool rides should be archived daily.
A set of folders for RSS Feeds. Outlook creates these folders automatically. Search folders are useful for gathering information from across different mail and RSS folders.
Search folders can be especially useful when you need to gather information that is saved in different folders — for example, when preparing for a quarterly meeting. If you receive a large volume of messages more than messages a day , search folders might be a good way for you to parse mail from different senders. Favorites give visibility to folders that are otherwise buried in your mail folder list. Favorites , a subset of your mail folders, appear at the top of the navigation pane.
The goal of organizing your Outlook is to reduce the amount of unnecessary "noise" in your Inbox and to make the most important items bubble to the top. Rules help this process by moving messages into folders based on criteria that you set. Rules filter the messages coming into your Inbox for must-read items only. You can see who has accepted by checking the tracking tab inside the meeting window.
Defer Sent Items This rule delays sending messages by one minute or longer. When using this rule, make sure that your messages have been sent before you shut down your computer. Multiple Contact Groups that are similar should use the same rule and be filed in the same folder.
Any messages that you must read should go directly into your Inbox. The To-Do Bar is the panel on the right side of Outlook. It shows you a calendar, your upcoming appointments, and your unified task list, which contains:. Show favorite contacts. The default arrangement for tasks is by Due Date, but you might consider changing the arrangement to Start Date, depending upon how you use flags.
If you want to see the tasks that you have pushed out for next week on Monday, arrange by Start Date. If you want to see tasks on the day that they are due, arrange by Due Date. If you receive a lot of messages or are easily distracted by the notification sound that plays for incoming messages, we recommend turning off the following options:.
The new mail pop-up alerts. To change these settings, select the File button, select Options , and then select Mail. Categories in Outlook allow you to manage items in many different ways. There are three main types of categories that we recommend creating:.
For example, they can help you more easily identify what you can do now and help you group similar tasks so that you can do them all at once. Each of your direct reports and your manager for items that you want to review the next time you meet for example, a category named Manager.
Each of the major locations or types of activities that you do, so that you can perform bulk actions a useful part of managing your tasks , for example:. Commute for tasks that you can do on the way home from work. Email for tasks that involve email messages, meetings, or any other aspect of Outlook. Meeting for items that you need in order to prepare for a meeting. Offline for tasks that take you away from the computer, such as making a copy of a document. Online for tasks that you can accomplish only online or through a Web browser.
Read for tasks that involve just reading — not responding. Waiting for messages or tasks for which you are awaiting a response, but there is no explicit next action for you. Note: Using the symbol makes the categories stand out in your category list.
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