How can we make our experience with Outlook easier by using some really nice features here as well? Here's what we'll explore today. We'll take a look at modern layout options. We don't have to use the default layout options. It's our Outlook. It's our experience. How can we improve the look and feel? We'll take a look at messaging features. We'll learn how to do more with our calendar than just clicking on creating appointments or creating a meeting. And we'll talk about how to get more done with Tasks, the new Task app that's.
Integrated now into Microsoft Outlook. So, if you're interested, let's go ahead and dive in. This course is designed for individuals who use Microsoft Outlook. As their primary email and communication tool. This course is for you if you want to optimize email communication and enhance your productivity. And if you want to learn how to manage emails more effectively, improve email organization, and automate daily appointments and tasks to save time as well. Let's go ahead and dive in..
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And when it comes to layout options, some tips that we want to apply here, we want to go ahead and simplify the interface. It's your outlook. It's your experience. This arrangement is going to work really, really well for you. We'll take a look at some efficient layouts and you'll be able to kind of choose which one of these principles you want to apply as well. Now we do have another tool in here is called QuickSteps. Now QuickSteps is another type of tool, but I believe that you'll see how it fits nicely into integrating with layout options as well..
So if you want to go ahead and conduct a new mail, we can do that here. We can delete a particular message. Here's quick steps that we mentioned. We'll take a look at this just a little later bit here as well. And if you want to go ahead and reply to a message or forward a message, we can do that. We can even flag messages if you're applying flags. Um, to your messages here as well. So we have everything that we need. Another thing that I really like about this layout is that in this particular view, we can see our list of messages..
We can actually go ahead and read our message here and over on the right. Optionally, if you turn on this, my day icon, you have the capability to view your calendar, your agenda, and even tasks down here as well. So it kind of gives you this. Capability to view all three of these things here in one shot, which is pretty, pretty cool. And so the task set before us, we want to go ahead and simplify the interface so that we can view more in the actual desktop app. So I'm going to go ahead and open up my Outlook here. And here is my Outlook..
And what we want to do, let's see how we can get started, so that we can simplify this interface. I have my Outlook open here, and this is the default view, so I did reset the view here. So when you open Outlook for the first time, this is the default view that you are presented with. I do want to point out that I'm currently using Office 365. So if you're using another version, such as maybe Office 2021 or Office 2019 or earlier, Some of the features and interface will look.
A little different here as well. And all of the tools and features are based on Office 365. And some of the tools and features are only available within Office 365 subscription. So again, we want to go ahead and mimic the web interface here. So there's a couple of things that I want to do. The first thing that I want to do is I want to hide the folder pane. Kind of get that out of the way. And my reading pane is already turned on. After that, I want to go ahead and simplify the ribbon..
And once I have the ribbon simplified, I'll go ahead and add the quick access toolbar. Just to kind of help me with if there's any other commands that I'd like to be able to quickly access. And then we'll go ahead and we'll make sure that we turn on the focused inbox to separate our important mail from other mail, and then we'll have an option to turn on the to do bar. So we'll turn on the to do, and this will allow us to kind of view our messages, our calendar and tasks here at the same time. So if you take a look at this current default layout, here's.
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What we're working with. So here is my folder pane. Sometimes you call this the navigation pane, but it's actually the folder - ID Card Make
Pane because if you kind of mouse over this little icon here, that's, it's the actual folder pane either way. Um, if I want to go ahead and access any of these custom folders that I created here now, hopefully you're working with folders. It's a really nice way to make sure that you're keeping your mailbox organized here. You can simply right click on your inbox and just create a new folder..The quickest way to do that there as well. So I wouldn't need to do that. If I were using search folders as well, I wouldn't need to be able to see this tree view so that I can access them, but I don't really need to see them right now. I can kind of use them as needed or on demand. I just want a little more space in here. So I'm going to go ahead and if I just mouse over this icon here, it says minimize the folder pane. That's exactly what I want to do. So I'll go ahead and minimize that. And here we go. So now it gives me a little more room. But notice I can still access these items here..
So if I want to access my sent items, I can do that. If I come back to my inbox, I can do that. And if I want to access one of my folders, I can simply just expand it, and go back here as well. So right now it's on demand, and this is pretty good. So my reading pane is already turned on. So the next thing I want to do is simplify the ribbon. Now again, the ribbon, unlike the web interface, we have a lot of things in here. And let's be honest, we don't really use all of these commands when you think about it. Some of these we do use, right? So of course, we want to be able to create a new email message..
We want to be able to delete a message or archive a message, reply, reply all. We also have the capability to reply, reply all within a message, so we don't necessarily need these here on the ribbon. Quick steps we do need. I like to use those. This comes with a simplified ribbon as well. And we can go ahead and move items. We can use rules. Tags are good to have, but I'm not really concerned about these, but I definitely want to use categories and tags here as well..
Don't really want that. I don't really want this either. Here's the filter, but we do have a filter right here that we can use. So I don't really need that to be on my ribbon. And again, some of these over here don't really use as well. So when you take a look at this, you can kind of go through it yourself and see which one of these you actually use. Either way, we're going to go ahead and simplify the ribbon. And the easiest way to do this, I'm just going to go ahead and right click on any of my ribbon tabs here, and I'll click on the option to use the simplified ribbon..
And there we go. So now take a look at our ribbon. We'll see. It's drastically different from before. We now have a lot more room to be able to kind of see our messages, especially if you have a smaller monitor. I'm on a really big monitor right now, but if you're on a smaller monitor, it makes it a lot easier to manage things. And now what we have is a simplified ribbon. We just have, and notice we still have, you know, quite a few commands on here, but we have the common commands. Right. So. New email, delete a message, archive, move, reply..
Here are quick steps, they're kind of hiding over here. Those are our quick steps. We can go ahead and tag messages over here as well. So we pretty much have everything that we need. We can remove some things off of here as well. So for example, um, you know, this policy, maybe I don't want this from the ribbon. I can just go ahead and click on remove from the ribbon. And I can move some other things here as well. I don't want to be able to read my messages aloud. I'm not concerned about add ins right now. I'll go ahead and remove those. If you click here at the very end for more commands, you can go ahead and pin these to the ribbon as well..
So this gives you a little more flexibility as well. So very good. So we're able to simplify the ribbon. And again, if I click on the View tab, I have the basic commands that I need to be able to get my work done. If I actually click on a message Right. I'm going to go back to my home tab here. So if I click on a message, I bring this over here. If I want to create a new message, I also have the simplified ribbon.
And the actual message as well. But again, the whole idea is whether that we have everything that we need to be able to conduct our messaging here as well. So that's pretty good. But what if I want some more commands here? Well, what I can do is customize the quick access toolbar. Let's go ahead and incorporate our quick access toolbar so that maybe we can just quickly add some commands here that we may not have. Now, hopefully you took the time to kind of remove some of these commands here from the simplified ribbon and took some time as well to go ahead and add some more commands from over here as well..
If you have not done so, you can go ahead and pause the video and go ahead and remove and add as necessary.
But right now, my quick access toolbar is kind of hidden here at the top. It's very difficult to see. It's kind of in the title area here as well. I'll just go ahead and point a big arrow to it here. So it's very small, subtle icon, little underscore with a down arrow. Well, the best way to manage your quick access toolbar, I'm going to go ahead and right click on any one of these ribbon tabs here. I'll click on the right click on the home..I'll click on customize the ribbon. And what I want to do is head on down to where it says customize the quick access toolbar. So here is my quick access toolbar. And here is my quick access toolbar over here on the right. So currently I only have the undo command in there. So here's my little undo command. And with Office 365, you can actually either turn off or show the quick access toolbar. Right now, it's actually showing. What I want to do is show it below the ribbon..
So I'll go ahead and click on this option here, I'll show below the ribbon, and I'll choose this option here also to always show command labels. So this way I don't just get the icon, I can kind of see exactly what it does here as well. At this point, what I'd like to do is just add a few items. And again, I want to add some things that maybe I don't see right here on my simplified ribbon. So, I'll add a couple of things here that I want to use. Maybe I want to go ahead and manage my rules. So here's manage rules and alerts. I'll go ahead and click here. I'll add that to my quick access toolbar..
Right now we're looking at popular commands, but I can change this so that I can see all commands. I'm going to warn you, there's a lot of commands in here. So if I click on all commands, now it shows me everything. Now if I want to get to a particular section, I'll just type the letter. So, for example, if I want to go ahead and let's see, maybe I want to turn on my to do bar. We'll talk about the to do bar in a little bit. I'll type the letter T and I'll scroll down to to do bar. And here's my to do bar. So I'll go ahead and add that to the quick access toolbar..
And we'll also be taking a look at the focus inbox. So I'll type the letter F. To go to the F section here, and here's my focus inbox. As you can see, it's going to provide me with a dropdown of options. I'll go ahead and add that to my quick access toolbar. And for now, I'm good. If you want to add anything else, feel free to do so. I'm pretty good with that right now. I'll go ahead and click. Okay. And now we can see the result. So here's my simplified ribbon underneath my ribbon. I now have a very small, thin area, not taking up too much space, and I have my quick..
Commands here that I can use. Okay. This is another thing. Typically, when we, we add items to our quick access toolbars, typically the basics from the home, but we can add any command here as well as we can see. So here's my manage rules and alerts. If I click here, I can go ahead and manage my rules and alerts. If I click on the to do bar, I have the capability to turn some offer on. And if I mouse over my focus inbox, I'll get a dropdown that can show me my. Focus inbox or not here as well. Well, the next thing we did talk about was turning on the to do bar..
The traditional way to get to turn on the to do bar is by clicking on the view tab. And over here in the layout command group, we have, here is our to do bar. Alright, so we can either view, right now it's turned off. We can view our calendar, people or our tasks. Alright, so that's the traditional way. I'm going to go ahead and use my quick access toolbar here. I'll click on the dropdown and I want to turn on my calendar. So now I can see my list of messages here in one pane..
I can see the actual message preview and over here I can see my calendar and my upcoming appointments here as well. I can click on a particular day on my calendar and I can see everything that's populated in here as well. I'll also turn on my tasks. So if I have any tasks, I can go ahead and see them. Now we're pretty much identical to the web interface. So a quick recap, we have our minimize folder pane..
We can view all of our messages and we still have the filter capability here as well. View the details of individual messages. We have the big monthly view for our calendar. Here we have our agenda. Next upcoming appointments here. We can scroll through this list here as well. And we also have our tasks, right? We can also create a task right here. I have one task here. We can go ahead and manage our tasks right from this little window here as well. So pretty, pretty cool. This is really efficient interface, really, really efficient layout. It allows us to get a lot of things done..
Without kind of navigating all over the place here as well. So go ahead and apply the steps that we took. Go ahead and turn on your quick access toolbar. Show it below the ribbon. Go ahead and add some useful commands there. Turn on your to do bar. View your calendar, your tasks, and your agenda here as well. The last thing we'll take a look at here. Because we did simplify the ribbon, we can see that it's simplified here as we're checking our messages. We saw that when we were conducting a new email, the ribbon is simplified as well..
If I click on my calendar, same concept, we have a simplified ribbon here, but we have all the tools that we need to go ahead and manage our appointments and meetings here as well. If I click on my task app here, same thing, my tasks are also being displayed in a simplified ribbon. I'm going to go back to my mail. Go back to my home tab and I'm good to go. So go ahead, apply those concepts and you may want to enable some of these features or disable some of them, but it's up to you. It's your mailbox. Go ahead and give it a shot and come right back..
Welcome back. So we were able to simplify the interface. We took a look at some efficient layouts here as well. So to wrap up our first lesson, we'll take a look at quick steps. Now, quick steps are a really nice way to go ahead and just kind of have either a one click or a two click solution to manage your messages here as well. Now, when it comes to quick steps, we have a couple of different options here. Okay. Um, so the first. Option is to use a built in quick step..
The second option is to create one from a template, or you can go ahead and create a custom one as well. Okay, but all in all, it's a basically a One or two click solution for automating your messages and managing your messages here as well. All right. So let's go ahead and take a look at that. Again, we're using the simplified view and on the simplified view, we have our quick steps..
So my quick steps are right here. If I expand it right here, does not say quick steps. But these are my quick steps. Another really cool feature. Another nice tip. This search box here is very, very powerful. So what if I, you know, just having some trouble finding quick steps, I can type right here in the search box. So if I type quick steps, so take a look at this right here. I can go ahead and actually use a built in quick steps, such as move selected message to a, to a folder..
Here's to manager forwards, the selected email to my manager. It creates a new email to my team. I can mark an email as complete, move the email to a folder and mark the messages red. That's a pretty cool one. Or I can just simply apply a quick step, which will reply to the sender and delete the original email. That's a very useful one as well. Saves a lot of time, cleans up your mailbox. Here I can go ahead and create a new quick step. So these are from templates. So I can say, Every time I receive this message, I want to go ahead.
And move it to a particular folder. Or I can go ahead and assign a category to it, move, hopefully using categories as well. As you can see on my calendar, my calendar is color coded. I have different categories in here that we can use. We can flag and move a message. So a lot of different things here that we can do. All right, so I encourage you go ahead and use that search bar and type in a command and you'll get some actions here that you can use. I can go ahead and click on manage quick steps here as well, and this will pull up all of my quick steps for me where I can either apply a quick step. I can go ahead and edit an existing quick step or I can go ahead and create a new.
One either based on a built in template or I can go ahead and create a custom one. We'll take a look at all three. We'll use a built in one. We'll go ahead and create one from, from a template, and we'll also create a custom one here as well. So again, you have a few options. You can either type it in the search bar. You can also right click on an actual message. So right clicking on an actual message allows you to apply a current quick step to it..
Gives you the same options here. Apply one, create a new one from a template, or go ahead and create a custom one here as well. The third way is from the home tab right over here. Here are our quick steps that we can go ahead and use as well. So go ahead and locate those and let's come right back and we'll start using, we'll create at least three quick steps together and we'll continue. Let's go ahead and use a built in quick step. I'll select a random message here. Maybe this message here from notifying me that I was added to a Microsoft team..
So, To make it easier. I'll just go ahead and right click. Or if you want to, you can use the, use the ribbon here, your simplified ribbon to choose one of these. Either way, I want to forward this to my manager, right? So I'll right click on it. I'll head on over to quick steps. And I want to go ahead and forward the selected email to my manager. Once I click on here, if you do not have this set up now, Outlook does not know who your manager is, unless you already specified it. So we need to go ahead and kind of fill this out here. So right now it's called ToManager. And forward to, I'll just go ahead and specify who my manager is..
Right now I have Patty Fernandez in here. Maybe it's not Patty. I'll go ahead and click on the To icon here. I'm going to remove Patty from here. And I'll type in a name. Maybe I'll say, um, let's see. Let's say Lee is my manager. Once I click save, the next time I click on this quick step, it's going to automatically forward this message to my manager that I specify here. So I'll go ahead and click save. And so now if I right click on this message and I click on quick steps and I say to manager,.
Here is the preloaded message. And if I just want to add anything here, maybe I'll just say FYI and go ahead and press send. So it's either a one click or two click or three click solution. And there we go. So that's our first quick step that we can go ahead and use. There are other quick steps in here. And again, if you have not used them before, you would need to program them. For the team email, you would need to specify who your team is. Um, and this one, you need to specify the folder that you want to move this to..
And here is reply and delete, which is pretty, pretty straightforward here. All right. Very good. Let's go ahead and use another one here. I'll click on another message here. Maybe this message from, there we go, day one topics here. I'll go ahead and use another quick step. This time I'll right click or this time I'll go to the ribbon actually. So I'll click on the dropdown here. I want to go ahead and create a new quick step. And maybe what I want to do is messages that I received from, from Adele, maybe I want to go ahead and. flag it or actually categorize it and move it..
So I'll click on categorize and move. And this is the way that it works. So we have different actions that we can take here as well. So this, so this is called categorize and move. So I can move it to a particular folder to specify the folder that I want to move it to. I have an A1 folder that I created. So I'll just move that to my A1 folder, or if I want to, I can go ahead and create another folder, but I already have this here. I'll click on A1. And under categorized message, again, hopefully using categories, I can choose a particular category, right? So all messages from Adele is going to have, let's say, maybe.
You'll have a pink category, right? Or maybe this is, maybe this relates to planning. Maybe Adele is on the planning team. I'll use this planning here. So I'm gonna go ahead and mark it as red and I'll go ahead and click finish. If I wanted to add others, if I click on options, notice I can add another action here if I want to. So I can continue adding actions just as we would add rules. We'll do this in our next example here, but I'm good to go. Alternatively, if I want to create a shortcut for this, I can use one of nine shortcuts control shift one through control shift nine..
All right, I'll go ahead and click save. And now if you take a look at your quick steps, you'll notice that it moved to the top here. And if I click on manage quick steps, I can see it's showing up here at the very, very top, right? So this time I'll go ahead and I'll right click on this message and I'll use my quick step and I'll just say categorize and move. And let's check that folder. Here's my A1 folder and I can see it moved here as well..
So that's a nice one click solution actually. And so that just works very, very well. And so the difference between this and a rule is now you have the capability to kind of run this manually whenever you want to run it does not apply every time, every time we receive a message from Adele here as well. Let's go ahead and create one more quick step. This time we'll create a custom one, not from a template. We'll create one from scratch and this time I'll go to my quick steps here and I'll click on manage quick steps and down here I want to click on where it says new..
And And I want a custom quick step. So I'll go ahead and click on custom here, and I'll just go ahead and give this a name. I'll just call this flag and move. So basically if a, if a message is very important, I want to be able to flag it so I can make sure I don't miss out on it. When I flag a message, it will actually show up over here, um, on my to do bar as a task as well. So I want to make sure that I don't miss anything. So if it's very important, I want to go ahead and..
And call this flag and move so I'll go ahead and choose an action. So here's different actions here. Filing status categories. Well, right here under categories, I want to choose flag message. If I scroll down a little more, there are other options here. I can respond. I can create an appointment. With an attachment, create an appointment with the text of the message. So as you can see, lots of really nice options here, really nice way to manage your mailbox. Either way, I just want to go ahead and flag that message..
And here I can choose a flag. So I can say, you know what, I want to make sure that I address this this week. So I'll click on this week. And I'll add another action here. And this action will be to move to a particular folder. So I'll move it to a folder. And I'll choose my, I'll choose my follow up folder. So I did create a folder called follow up. So this way, nothing falls through the crack. If I want to add another action, I could, um, maybe I will, I'll go ahead and assign a priority to it. So I'll set the importance under change status, and I'll.
