Microsoft Outlook is the default email app that comes pre-installed on most Windows PCs. While Outlook is a great tool for managing your email, its potential goes far beyond this.
But with so many add-ons, macros, and other features, it can be difficult to navigate.
This post will introduce some of the things you can do in Outlook to make it more efficient, as well as some of the features you may not have come across yet.
Microsoft Outlook one of the email platforms works smartly for the user (corporates or individuals). Here in this article, you will learn (in brief) the ultimate Outlook tips and tricks for beginners.
Outlook is a complete package, capable of managing different emails, calendars, contact lists, and task lists. Many of the tricks I personally use make my work faster and easier.
@Mentioned
To improve your email efficiency @mentioned Outlook meets the current working scenario, as we all know Facebook and Twitter users use “@”& “#” signs to directly connect to a specific community or account.
Just like that Microsoft Outlook allows the user.
How does mention work in Outlook?
While typing the “@” symbol in the body of an email, the list of contacts opens listed in that email address. Start typing WITHOUT SPACE and you will get your email address and name.
As soon as you select a specific email address the same will be inserted in your body content and that person’s email address will automatically be added to the “To” field.
You can also add as many people as you want, and then send the email when your content is ready.
Read Aloud
The read-aloud feature available in Microsoft Outlook allows the user not to read but listen to the message.
Sounds interesting, let’s understand
How to use Outlook read aloud?
Read outlook email (Aloud) is useful and popular among people with vision problems, and for those multitaskers, who use to work on multiple things at a time, they use to click the play button and get to other tasks.
Read Aloud only ready the body content, not the subject line, events, or task.
Here’s how to use it.
- First Open your email message in a separate window by double-clicking it
- Click to message tab >> Find Read Aloud >> Click
Play buttons appear on the right-hand top of the screen, 
you can hear the message down and clear.
You can also adjust the speed and voice by clicking the setting button, the rewind and forward buttons usually move the narrator back or forward one paragraph.
If you like to read the specific part of your message, not the entire one, simply select the portion and click play, and the narrator will read the particular part for you.
Some users complain that read-aloud is not available.
Simply click to file >> options >> ease of action >> finally check Read Aloud
Save to Desktop
Beyond the Outlook platform, you can easily save your email to the desktop, there may be several methods like (save as in the file tab) but here, you can learn the drag-and-drop method to save mail on the desktop.
How to save mail on the desktop?
Two methods:
- Open your email >> Click File >> Save as >> Select your location and finally Click Save.
- Open Outlook select your mail >> Drag the mail to the desktop >> release the mouse button.
The email saves a message as a file, which is later easily attached with your new mail, forwarded or replied and sent to the person.
This is a good example to send an email with an attachment. If you double-check, click on the saved attachment that email opens with a separate window of Outlook.
Edit the Subject line in Outlook
Changing/editing the subject line of your email in Outlook you received is also possible, every email received is valuable and consists of some information like content or attachment.
Microsoft Outlook supports this feature, to keep a proper record, and it is extremely easy to edit the subject line according to your convenience.
How to customize the subject line of the email received.
Here is a quick step-by-step guide.
- Open Outlook >> Mail view >> double click to open the email whose subject line you like to customize.
- Check out the subject >> Select the complete subject with the help of the mouse >> select the subject >> Type your new subject.
- After the edit or new subject line closes the window directly and the system asks you to save the changes, click yes and your subject line is changed.
- You can also click the file tab after editing your subject and hit save.
This feature allows you to design your email platform on your own terms. Customizing the subject line helps you to find that email in the future very easily.
For complete Review: How to change the subject line in Outlook?
Vision (Dark Mode)
Dark Mode in Outlook changes the background of emails to a deep dark gray, which most people would call “night mode”.
- Colorful
- Dark Grey
- Black
- White
Here are four options with different modes of color, Dark mode is simply more comfortable for your eyes. Which is better, the debate goes on and on.
How to enable dark mode in Outlook?
By default, Outlook 2019 comes with a colorful mode, to enable dark mode in Outlook, [here is the step-by-step process]:
- Open Outlook >> Click File >> Options
- Go to General >> Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office >> Go to Office Theme
- There are four options over here (Colourful, Dark Grey, Black, and White)
- Click Ok
Change From Address
MS Outlook is such an email platform that manages multiple email accounts at a time. One of your email accounts always is the default one, (you can also change the default email address).
While creating a new mail, if you have multiple email addresses linked with your Outlook, you have the option to change from address, which allows you to send the mail from the specific email address you want other than the default.
Here is the snapshot for a clear picture:
At the same time replying and forwarding the mail which comes to the specific email address, you can change the email address easily just like that.
One of my friends ask me, why is from button missing, because there is no reason to be there if you have only one email account added to outlook, From Button, is only available for users having multiple accounts.
Quick Steps
Quickstep again an excellent feature in Outlook, allows multiple actions to a message with one click. Outlook provides multiple quick steps by default; you can also create your own quickstep very easily followed by the shortcut key.
Quickly check default Quick Steps, Go to the home tab >> Quick Steps
- Archive
- To Manager
- Team Email
- Reply & Delete
You can click any of them to apply the included actions to a selected message. Other than that, Create New quick step option is also available to customize your own step.
How to Create a Quick Step in Outlook
Click to Create New, Outlook opens with an edit quick step dialog box, First, you are required to name yourself to customize the step and select the action.
The following subsection with multiple options is available.
- Filing
- Change Status
- Category, Task, Flag
- Respond
- Appointment
- Conversation
You can use the shortcut keys to explicitly implement the step-in outlook, once you have created a quick step you can edit or delete it whenever you want.
To grab more information on this topic Click Here
Smart lookup
Microsoft Outlook has a smart lookup feature for keywords or phrases. Smart lookup brings more information like definitions, meaning, Wikipedia, and searches, and much more information is required in the first step.
How smart lookup works
The smart lookup feature is popular among all Microsoft platforms like word, excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook.
Open the email and highlight the keyword or phrase, now right-click on it, and click.
The results pane opens showing more information about that word or phrase, including definitions, Wikipedia articles, and top related searches from the web.
Keyboard Shortcuts
Microsoft Outlook keyboard shortcuts are really time savers, the only thing matters are correct knowledge of keyboard shortcuts.
- Switch to Mail – Ctrl + 1
- Switch to Calendar – Ctrl+ 2
- Switch to Contacts – Ctrl+ 3
- Switch to Tasks – Ctrl +4
- Switch to Notes – Ctrl +5
- Send a Message – Ctrl + Enter
There are tons of shortcut keys, without wasting the time, get your free keyboard shortcuts PDF file on the newsletter subscription.
3D Models
Inserting 3D models reveal emotional reactions, which look beautiful, recently emojis are extremely popular on all kinds of social media platforms including Microsoft Outlook.
Microsoft Outlook allows the user to insert 3D models, which include not only emojis but multiple figures.
How outlook inserts 3d model
- Open Outlook >> Click to New Mail >> Click on the body area
- Click Insert Tab >> 3D models >> Stock 3D Models
It will open Online 3D models, which consists of several models (Emojis, Chemistry, industries, clothing, furniture, tools, letter, cartoons, fantasy, the list goes on and on).
If you don’t find your requirement, you can type in the search bar and hit enter, you will find tons of images in your selected section, the image inserted into the email body section, select according to your choice, and see the magic you can move three dimensional and adjust the size of the image by dragging any corner of the image.
The center portion of the images easily rotates with the help of a mouse in three dimensions. You can insert multiple images at a time.
Wrapping and being in line with text is also a notable feature.
Color Code Incoming Messages by Sender
Many users have multiple email accounts in outlook, easily filter the email according to your requirement (by date, subject, size, attachment, type, and many more), but still, you want something more, like coloring the email received from some specific sender.
Here is the deal, it is possible [Conditional formatting]
Let’s take an example if you want a specific sender to receive his email in red color, how to do it?
- Open Outlook >> Click View >> View setting
- Advanced view setting dialog box appears >> Click Conditional formatting
- Click ADD and name the rule >> Click Font >>
You can easily adjust the font, style, size, and color of the email, now click condition >> Click From
Select the email ID of a specific person from which you required formatting and click OK. (Keep the search for the word black because anything received from your specific email id). Finally, click OK. Try it.
Quick Excess Toolbar
Quick Excess toolbar performs the action instantly for you, if you look on the top left-hand corner of the outlook screen, you found some default options and there few more options which you can enable to activate easily.
There is an option for more commands, click on it, there are tons of options select and click add, and finally OK. Some of the excesses like print, save, reply, and forward are helpful.
Ignore Conversation
Ignore Conversation removes all messages related to the conversation that you select and moves future messages in the conversation directly to your Deleted Items folder. You might know a Conversation by the term email thread.
I personally experience it when a marketing company sends an email to the bulk of customers, and one of the customers replies instead of a reply, and this process goes on and on.
Ignoring conversation is a useful tool to get rid of it.
How To Activate Ignore Conversation?
Open the email >> Go to left-hand corner >> Click Ignore (Short cut key Ctrl + Del)
The specific conversation moves to the deleted items folder and all future messages in the conversation are moved to the deleted items folder as they arrive.
You can also recover that, go to the select folder open the conversation and click ignore and that will stop ignoring the conversation the email again goes to the inbox and further mail of conversion will inflow as regularly.
Mark Deleted Items Read
Have you ever noticed that you delete an email that moves to the trash folder and marks unread, and your trash folder reflects the number of emails (which means that those mail are not read)?
Here we are not talking about, that maybe you have not read the mail before sending it to the trash, here we are talking about marking select items read, that convert the figure to nothing in the trash folder.
Go to file >> Options >> Mail >> Others section >> Select mark messages as read when selected >> Click OK
The problem is solved.
AutoComplete
The Autocomplete feature in outlook is really something great, autofill and complete your email address when you start punching the alphabet of the email address.
Whenever you create an email and type the address in TO, CC, or BCC outlook automatically saves the address in the Autocomplete list.
In the future recall when you start typing the email address and give you the suggestions which allow you to just select and hit the tab to complete.
Sometimes due to typing mistake two email address (one correct and another right) are both saved in autosave, you can easily remove the odd one just by clicking the cross sign of the email address which remove that email from the list.
To grab more information on this topic click here
Mailbox Cleanup
Clean-up options get rid of unwanted emails or duplicate emails or compress your data to release some additional space for the users.
Another option is to Go to File >> Info >> Tools >> mailbox clean up dialog box appears.
You can check the size of your folders, which will give you an idea to manage those emails which are important and get rid of unwanted ones.
You can check manually X days older or XX kilobytes size emails and delete them if you don’t need them in the future.
Custom Search Folder
Have you ever searched for the same item in your inbox, for instance – I personally use it to fill out income tax returns every year for that I required the account statement received from the bank in my Inbox every month.
I never take that mail seriously, but during tax season searching for those emails is quite hectic.
Instead of searching for months, Search Folder is the alternative.
Go to the button of the email folders, and you find a search folder, by default, there is no such folder available, click on it, and (new search folder) popup.
Here are some default options available to create a copy of those emails in the search folder.
- Unread Mail
- Mail Flagged for follow up
- Mail either unread or Mail Flagged for follow up
- Important Mail
- Mail from and To Specific people
- Mail from Specific People
- Mail sends directly to me
- Mail sends to public groups
- Customized mail
- Large mail
- Old mail
- Mail with attachment
- Mail with specific words
Other than that, you can create your custom search folder refer snapshot below:
Final Thoughts
Now that you’ve got the list of some of our best Outlook tips and tricks, all the above ideas are really helpful for you if you are stepping in as a beginner. Knowing how to effectively use Outlook can increase your productivity.
Don’t forget to share which trick helps you the most, and comment below on your experience.
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