New tips for Outlook users
Do more with your messages
Send later. It’s not always necessary to send a message immediately, you can postpone it to a later time. Compose your message and click on Delay Delivery in the More Options section of the Options tab. In the Delivery Options , specify that the message shouldn’t be delivered before a specific time. Your message will be moved to the Outbox folder until it’s sent, after which it will be moved to the Sent Items folder.
Note. If you don’t use an Exchange mail server, your Outlook program needs to be running at the desired time in order for your message to be sent.
Attachments. To add an attachment to a message, you don’t always have to look for this file in the appropriate folder on your hard drive and then drag it to your message. If you click on File in the Attach section in the Message tab, a list of all your recently opened files will be opened and you can select and insert the desired attachment directly.
Smarter use of folders
Search folders. If you often look for specific messages, for instance e-mails from your boss, it’s handy to create a “search folder” for these messages. Go to the Search Folders in the left-hand pane of Outlook. Right-click on this folder and choose New Search Folder . You can now have Outlook search for all the messages sent from your boss’s e-mail address, or all e-mails which contain attachments, or all messages labelled “Important” , etc.
Whenever you subsequently open such a search folder, you will immediately see all the e-mails meeting your search criteria, including the most recent messages.
Clean up your folders. Few people are familiar with the option in Outlook to clean up your countless incoming messages. In the Start tab, Delete group, you will see a folder icon marked by a red cross. After clicking on this icon, you can specify the conversation or the folder (and its subfolders) you want to have cleaned up. This means that any redundant messages (for example, messages which are quoted in full in all subsequent replies, which can lead to very lengthy messages) will be moved to the Deleted Items folder. In this way, you can recover a lot of storage space.
Open multiple Outlook windows
If you use Outlook intensively to manage your calendar or your tasks, it can come in handy to keep your calendar or task window open in addition to your message window. In order to open your calendar as well, right-click on the calendar icon in the message list at the bottom and choose the Open in New Window option.
The result: two Outlook windows will appear, one with the familiar message list and one with the calendar view. Using Alt-Tab , you can switch easily between the two windows, or you can arrange them neatly next to each other if you have a large screen. Very convenient!
Tip. When shutting down Outlook, do so via File ; Exit rather than the X icon. As a result, the next time you open Outlook, it will show the same number of windows in exactly the same position as when you last exited.
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