Easy Efficiency Boosts for MS Outlook
Are you a Microsoft Outlook user? Many people are simply because IT departments require them to be. If you live in Outlook all day, you can greatly improve your efficiency and save time by reviewing some simple tips. In this post, I’ll round up some useful ones.
From E-Mail to Contact. If you want to save the person who sent you an e-mail as a contact, with the e-mail open right-click on the person’s name in the From field and select Add to Contacts. Especially if you delete e-mails frequently or haphazardly, this can ensure that your contact list stays organized.
Check Me. Have any problems in the spelling department? You can easily have Outlook check your spelling in all outgoing messages. Just click on the Tools menu, click on Options, and select Always check spelling before sending.
Fast Delete. If you’re like most Outlook users, you send messages that you want to delete to your Deleted Items folder, then empty the folder—a process consisting of several steps. You can get the job done in one step. Just hold down the Shift key and hit Delete. Outlook will ask you on the fly if you want to permanently delete the message. If you have several messages selected it works the same way.
Fast Undelete. Want to make a message you have deleted reappear in an instant? Hold down the Ctrl key and press the Z key for Ctrl-Z if you have just deleted the message, and it will reappear.
Sync GMail. Do you use Outlook and GMail? If so, definitely get a hold of Google’s Calendar Sync application. It does a totally seamless job of keeping both your calendars updated.
Do you know of any good Outlook tips or applications?
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You should check out http://www.xobni.com
It’s beta invite only, but it is an awesome tool for Outlook.
I use Xobni as well. But the best I’ve seen so far is ClearContext. Xobni and CC together is awesome. I’m also testing Tungle for calendar, that is looking pretty cool.
Ctrl+Enter is a shortcut when ready to send an email
Outlook task management remains a huge opportunity – only 1% of users actually use the built in task capabilities of Outlook. ActionThis was developed with this in mind, comprising a rich Outlook client and a funky website. Have a look at http://www.actionthis.com.
Yes it’s nice that the Google Calendar sync is easy, but quite frankly it’s got a poor featureset.
It doesn’t support more than one calendar, so only your primary (name) calendar is synced. It doesn’t support any categorisation/tagging of the items.
However the nice feature is the 2-way sync – something I couldn’t get working in the technically superior RemoteCalendars – especially if you’re happy to use google calendar as your primary means of sourcing data (I only sync to outlook to sync onwards to my phone, for example)
Remotecalendars supports multiple calendars (any iCal type, not just Google) and can categorise them automatically in your outlook display.
I use these keyboard short-cuts constantly:
Reply to Sender: Ctrl-R
Reply to All: Shift-Ctrl-R
Forward: Ctrl-F
Mark as Read: Ctrl-Q
Move: Shift-Ctrl-V
Goto Folder: Ctrl-Y
New E-mail: Shift-Ctrl-M
New Contact: Shift-Ctrl-C
You can make Outlook display the keyboard short-cut in the screen tip of each toolbar button:
1. Right-click in the Toolbar area
2. Select Customize…
3. Select “Show shortcut keys in ScreenTips
4. Close
Just for note – if you need some additional functionality for your Outlook, check http://www.4team.biz
try http://www.hyperoffice.com, it lets you set up outlook mail and share calendars, contact tasks without MS exchange. the final tipping point for our decision to go for it that it also allows us to acces and share Outlook info from iPhones