30 Ultimate Outlook Tips and Tricks Updated for 2020!

This artical is the ultimate complition of Outlook tips and tricks to enhance your skills using Microsoft Outlook. You'll find these tips and tricks useful whether you're using Outlook for the first time or jus twanting to enhance your Outlook skills.

#1 Dark Mode.

Outlook has a dark mode feature. To set it go to File, Options, under the Genera ltab look at this section to personalize your copy of Microsoft Office. Here change the theme to black and hit OK. This sets it in dark mode. You have one additional option here where you can turn on and off the background for your preview pane. To set it back go to the same location and change it from black to color or other. That's dark mode.

#2 Quick Steps.

Quick Steps applies multiple actions at the same time to email messages. It's available from the Home tab in this group called Quick Steps. It comes with predefined quick steps for various things that you might want toperform on an email like sending them to your manager, sending them to your team,or doing a reply and delete of a message. You can also create new ones.Within the Quick Steps you give it a name, then you can choose an action. Theactions available are many, including moving to folders, deleting messages,marking them as read or unread, flagging them, or sending new messages and forwarding them to other people. You can even create a new meeting appointment fromyour message. So in this example, let's create a new one where we're going totake any incoming message that we select and move it to a folder. I'm going tochoose from the folder list and I'm going to add another actionto mark the message as read. I can also assign a shortcut key so we'll do Ctrl-Shift-1 and create a tooltip text. it's given us a name but you can change thatif you want to. Click Finish and it adds the quick step to your quick step menu.Now when I select an email, choose that quick step, it moved it to my Save folderand marked it as read. Let's bring that message back and I'll show youif I hit Ctrl-Shift-1 it performs the same task. So if you want to be moreefficient managing email in Outlook automate some of your steps with QuickSteps.

#3 Add Calendars.

Normally, when you're in Outlook you can come downhere to the calendar at the bottom and you can see your list of calendarsavailable. Turn them on and off as needed and you can right click on My Calendarsto add new calendars from an address book or from the Internet but there's abetter method to add calendars and to get them you'll need to go to yourOffice.com login. Once you're logged into Office.com go to your Outlook Web Appand click on the calendar. At the bottom there is an option here to add calendars.This brings up a menu where you can add your personal calendars like younormally can in the Outlook client and you can edit those calendars and adjustthem however you need to but there's also options down here. I can chooseSchool calendars. If you put in a zip code, choose a city. It'll show theschools available in that area. You can also choose Holidays. Pick a Country andit adds that country's calendar. TeamSnap allows coaches, managers, and othergroups to create their own team calendars and share them. You can choose Sports teams. Pick a sports league, search for a team name, and add their scheduleto your calendar. You can also choose TV. Pick your timezone, select a channel, andyou can add your favorite TV shows calendar. Once those are complete closeout of your office web apps and those calendars will now be available on yourOutlook client. Turn on any that you want and you'll be able to see the calendarwith the data.

#4 Drag to Calendar.

Let's say you get an email andyou want to create an appointment around that email. Just drag your email down tothe calendar, let go, and it opens up an appointment schedule with the data fromyour email. Just set the time and date and other pertinent information,save and close it, and now on your calendar you'll see an appointmentschedule with the information from that email.

#5 @Mentions.

Just likeTwitter, Facebook, and other social media apps @mentions has been added to Outlook. It's used to give attention to an individual recipient of your email. Itworks like this. When I create a new email message, type in my subject line,when you type @ anywhere in the body of the text it brings up a list of contacts.Select one from the list and you'll notice that it automatically added thatcontact into the to list. Complete my message and when I hit Send the recipientwill get the email and you can immediately tell that this was an @Mention because it's got the @ symbol in the upper-right corner of the message.That's an indicator that my name has been referenced in the message. You alsohave the ability to filter based on mentioned mail to see only the messagesthat you've been mentioned directly. @Mentions is a simple way to get people'sattention when you send email.

#6 Search Folders.

Search Folders are ahandy way to get access to filtered mail with a click of a button. Search Foldersis located at the bottom of your folder list. Just right-click to create a newsearch folder and choose one of the options from thelist. For example, if we want to show just unread mail hit OK and it filters outjust the unread mail. Let's create one for just mail that contains attachmentsand it filters the list of just attachments. You can now click betweenthese to select different mail filters. If you want to remove one just right-click, delete the folder. That doesn't delete the mail. It just deletes thesearch folder and you can clear that search folder by going back to yourinbox. You can do quite complex searches by scrolling down and choosing a customsearch folder. Click Choose, give it a name, select the criteria. This gives youthe ability to search for keywords, look at the subject line only, frequently usedtext fields, pick who it's from, who it's sent to, only items that are read orunread, the importance level, the case, or the size, and even in the Advanced you canselect from all of the fields available in Outlook and filter just on those soit's very powerful. So if you want quick access to filter out your mail useSearch Folders.

#7 Mailbox Cleanup.

There are multiple locations you canclean up your data in your mailbox. The first one is under the Home tab. There isa cleanup here. You can clean up conversations, folders, or folders andsubfolders. When you run any of these it removes redundant messages so that it'sonly storing one copy of any particular set of data. A second location formailbox cleanup is under File, Account Settings, Account Settings and on theindividual email account double-click, go to More Settings, clickAdvanced and Outlook Data File Settings. This brings up an option to compact yourOutlook data file. When you run Compact it compresses that file and gets rid ofa lot of wasted space. Do the same thing on each one of your email accounts. Thethird option for mailbox cleanup is under File, Tools, Mailbox Cleanup. Hereyou can view the mailbox size and get an idea of how much storage space is beingused in each one of your folders. That gives you a clue of what messages youshould delete. You can also search for messages over a certain date or largerthan a certain size and individually delete those messages if you no longerneed them. And finally, you can empty your deleted items folder if you don't needto keep those stored.

#8 Quick Access Toolbar.

In the upper-left cornerof Outlook there is a Quick Access Toolbar. It defaults to send and receive all folders and undo. When you click on themit performs that task. To the right is an option to customize the Quick AccessToolbar. Click that and you have different options you can enable. If Iwanted to enable printing it adds the Print icon to the menu and now I canclick that button to print my email. You can also come down here to the MoreCommands and select from this list of popular commands or choose alternativemenu options and anything that you find in the list, click on it, and add it toyour Quick Access Toolbar. Ht OK and now it's on your menu. The Quick AccessToolbar is a great way to customize frequently used tasks.

#9 Insert Calendar.

If you want to send somebody a copy of your calendarof events create a new email, go to Insert, select Calendar from the menu, andit brings up this popup message where you can select the calendar that youwant to send, the date range over a period of time, or you can specifydates, the amount of detail you want to show,just the availability only, limited details, or the full details, and onceyou've made all these settings hit OK, and it inserts your calendar into theemail body. Now just address it, send it, and they have a copy of your calendar. Italso includes the ICS file which can easily be clicked on and imported intotheir calendar. Information that's displayed shows the calendar, the day, andfree and busy times that you've got marked on your calendar.

#10 SharedCalendars.

You can easily share your calendar information to other peopleexternally or to other users in your organization if you have Office 365 in acorporate environment. The best way to share is to go to the Office.com, login,and click on your Outlook app, then go down to the calendar section and you'llsee the calendars that you have available. You can click on one to theright of that calendar and go to Sharing Permissions or you can choose Share uphere in the upper-right corner. It takes you to the same place. If I want to sharethis calendar to somebody externally just enter the email address here andthen you have a choice of what kind of detail you want that person to view. Theycan view just the busy information, you can include titles and locations, or youcan give them all the details. Click Share and it sends an email to thatperson to notify them. For people in your organization you can also set what youwant them to view. Not shared, busy information, locations, or all, or evengive them the ability to edit. Once you've got all these settings just closethat window and now your calendar is shared. The email received will looksomething like this. So the recipient that you send access to your calendarwill get this message to accept and view the calendar. That opens a web link toyour Outlook calendar showing the calendar link and the name. I'm going tosave that and now I can see the other calendars listed where I can view thedetails. If you want to get rid of the share justclick on the options again, go to Sharing Permissions and remove that entry andchange the sharing option.

#11 Developer Menu.

There is a hiddenDeveloper menu tab available in Outlook. To enable it go to File, Options,Customize Ribbon and scroll down to this list on the right and check this box forDeveloper. When you hit OK that adds the Developer tab to your menu. In there isoptions so that you can create and edit macros and set the security. You can alsosee your COM add-ins and turn on and off these add-ins from here and you cansee forms in the forms library or you can click on one and edit it. Just beaware that there is a hidden developer menu available in the options.

#12 Download Addresses.

If you have an Office 365 corporate account you would be usingthe Global Address List and sometimes it gets out of sync. If you go up to the Send/Receive and click on the Send/Receive groups there's an option here toDownload Address Book. That gives you a choice of downloading changes since thelast Send/Receive. I'm going to turn that checkbox off and you'll notice here thatthe address book it's pointing to is the Global Address List. This is the sharedgroup for everybody in your organization. When you hit OK it does a re-syncing ofthose contacts. So if you're missing any contacts it's agood idea to perform this task.

#13 Quick Parts.

Quick Parts allowsyou to save frequently used text and recall it later in a message. It works on new email messages. So let's say we have a quote here like this onefrom Albert Einstein and we want to save that phrase as a Quick Part to recall itlater. Just highlight it, click the Insert, and go over here to Quick Parts andthere's an option to save this selection to the Quick Part Gallery. When you'resaving it you give it a name, you can save it to the Quick Parts Gallery, andyou can put it into a category. So let's say we want to call this Quotes. You cangive it a description and then for the options you can insert it as just thatcontent or you can have it be its own paragraph or its own page. Hit OK and nowwhen you're typing an any message anywhere just come back to the Insert, goto Quick Parts, and you'll see your saved Quick Parts in the list. Click on it andit inserts it into your message. If you want to edit the Quick Parts that are already are there just come down and right-click on one and you can edit the properties tomake changes however you want or you can right-click and organize and delete allof your Quick Parts which brings up a menu and shows you all the Quick Partsyou have saved. You can delete them, you can insert more. Once you're done closethat. Quick Parts are handy if you want to save any kind of frequently usedtext and it doesn't matter what it is it can be your name, it can be a quote, itcan be a full paragraph, or a page of documentation that you want to send topeople in an email. It's a quick way to retrieve that information.

#14 Export to File.

Outlook has an option to export data toa file. This is useful for data backups or for transfer to other programs. Youcan access it by going to File, Open & Export, and choose the Import/Exportbutton. Here you have choices to Import from other programs or Export to a file,which is what we're going to choose. There are two types of files that can beexported; Comma Separated Values which export the data into a text formatthat's easily readable or can be imported into Excel and otherapplications. There's also an Outlook Data File which is a special coding justfor Outlook that stores your data including all your calendar entries andemail messages. Choose that and hit Next and it defaults to back up your inboxwith the check mark here to include subfolders. You can also choose differentfolders specifically or you can choose the entire mailbox. There are filtersavailable if you want to filter on just certain keywords or messages to or froma specific individual. These choices are similar to what you have in the SearchFolders that we looked at earlier. Once you've set your filtering hit OK. Nextit defaults your My Documents folder and creates a backup PST file. You haveoptions here to replace duplicates or you can allow the duplicates to becreated. Once you're done hit Finish and it exports your data. When it's doneyou'll be able to use that backup PST file to import to other programs or copyoff onto another storage location for backup purposes.

#15 Smart Lookup.

Outlook has a smart lookup feature available for keywords or phrases. All you have to do in a message is highlight a word or phrase, right-click on it, choose SmartLookup from the menu, and it brings up the Smart Lookup pane. It contains moreinformation about the word or phrase including definitions, Wikipedia articles,and top related searches from the web. So if you want more information about aword or phrase use Smart Lookup.

#16 Junk Mail.

Outlook has a number ofjunk mail filtering features. It works when you have an Office 365 or anExchange Server email account. You'll know that if you have this Junk Emailfolder. When you're on a message and you think it's junk mail just right-click onit, come down here to Junk, and you have choices to Block the Sender.If it's not junk mail you can choose Never Block Sender. You can do it basedon the domain or an entire group. Let's say this is junk mail. Let's Block theSender. What it does is it moves that email into your junk email folder andnow that email address is going to be blocked for any future emails. If youfind something in junk mail and it shouldn't be right-click again, go down toJunk, and choose this option Not Junk. It moves it back to your inbox folder andit marks your email address as trusted. If you right-click come down to Junk andgo to Junk Email Options, you can also set the level of junk email protectionyou want. Low means that it will move most obvious junk mail to the junkfolder. You can set it high or you can set it to safe lists only which meansonly mail from people or domains in your safe senders list, and you have someother options here to permanently delete the suspected junk mail instead ofmoving it to the junk folder, and you can have it warn you about suspiciousdomain names. There's also a safe senders list and you'll see that our addressthat we just added to the safe list is there and you can add other emailaddresses or full domain names and even import those from a file. There's SafeRecipients which means any email that sent to that address will be safe. Youalso have a Block Senders list and remove those if you don't want them tobe there. There's also an International option. This allows you to blocktop-level domains from different countries or pick specific languages toblock based on their encoding in the email so you have a wide variety ofemail filtering options for junk mail. Remember this is only available if youhave an Office 365 or Exchange email account. It won't be true of any IMAP orPOP3 email addresses. The other good news is Microsoft keeps track of junkmail on their side based on the junk mailthat's coming through their servers and when you mark junk mailMicrosoft gets that information to share with others.

#17 Offline Mode.

Normally when you're in Outlook you'll see down here in the bottom that you'reconnected to your email. If you get this message showing Working Offline that'san indicator that you've lost Internet connectivity or access to your emailserver. You can double-check this by going to the Send/Receive tab and thereis a button here for working offline. Click that and it should reconnect. Thiswill normally happen if you are disconnecting a laptop and taking itwith you or you're on an airplane where there's no internet access but it canhappen anytime during the day in a normal office environment if it losesconnectivity to the server. Click that button to go back online. If it doesn'twork then there is a problem with your connectivity and it's most likely yourInternet connection or something on your network. Just be aware of that option.

#18 Out of Office.

Outlook provides two different methods for sending out ofoffice replies and it depends on the type of account you have. If you have anIMAP/SMTP/POP mail account like this yahoo account, when you go to File you'llhave to create a rule and there won't be an out-of-office automatic reply option,but if you have an Exchange Server or Office 365 account, when you go to filethere's an Automatic Replies option. To set that one click the button, enableyour automatic replies, and you can specify a time range, put in your message,and specify your message for outside your organization. I don't normally recommend turning this on because it will reply to spammessages as well and they will confirm that you have a valid email address butif you choose to turn that on. You can put another message in there. Once that'sset, hit OK and you'll see that your automatic reply is turned on. Once thatdate range is complete your automatic reply will turn off or you can come in here and manually turn it off again. For theother type of account you'll need to create a template and use the automaticrule process to send replies and be aware that Outlook has to be open andrunning in order for those replies to be sent. The first step you need to do iscreate a template of the reply so go to a new email, put in your subject line, andenter your reply email, and then save it as a template. It will default to yourtemplates folder directory. Hit Save and then close that message. Now go to File,Manage Rules and Alerts and we're gonna create a new rule and we'll apply it tomessages I receive. we'll do it for all messages so we'll skip this and just sayYes to All and we're going to reply using a specific template. The templatewill be the one that we created which is available in the user templates filesystem. Select it, hit Open, hit Next and you can do exceptions if you want to.Otherwise hit Finish and OK. That rule is now enabled for reply automaticallywhen outlook is open and running. To turn it off go back into Rules, Manage YourRules, and turn off the one that you created, and hit OK. And those are the twomethods for automatic replies for Out of Office.

#19 Get Add-ins.

Outlook has a new feature available to get add-ins fromthe web. Off the home tab you'll see this Get Add-ins icon if you have an Office365 or Exchange email account. Click on it and you'll see a list of add-insavailable for download from the web. There are thousands of add-ins to choosefrom third-party locations as well as some that Microsoft has developed. You can also see a list of the add-ins you've already installed and ones that are managed by your admin that automatically install into Outlookas a client. In addition to add-ins there is a Connectors which containsthird-party connectors for Outlook as well. The difference between Add-ins andConnectors is the direction of the data. Add-ins supply data to external thirdparties whereas Connectors pull data fromexternal third parties into Outlook. To see how to install these add-ins be sureto visit my Top 10 Outlook Free Add-ins video. I'll provide the link above.

#20 Change From Address.

If you have more than one email address in your Outlook,when you create a new email you can choose a different From address to sendyour email. Whatever you send the recipient will see that From address andwhen they reply that's what address it will return the email to. You can alsoset the default address under File, Account Settings, Account Settings andchoose which one of your accounts you want to make the default. This makes iteasy to manage multiple email accounts from one Outlook client. Congratulationsyou've made it through 2/3 of the tips and tricks list. The rest will continuein 15 seconds but please take a moment right now to subscribe to Sele Training and click the Bell icon to get notified when new videos are released.Don't forget the entire 30 tips and tricks list is in the description ofthis video with hyperlinks to each. Now let's getback to it.

#21 AutoComplete.

When you send a message to an email recipientOutlook stores the email address in an AutoComplete list. The next time you usethat email address Outlook makes a recommendation and if you type part of aname in it will search that AutoComplete list and find names that match and makethose recommendations as well. Sometimes this list gets confused and it stores anemail address that's no longer valid. There's a couple things you can do toclear that. You can just click the X to the right of any recommendation if youthink it's incorrect and that will remove it from the list. The other option you have is to go to the AutoComplete list and clear theentire list. That's located under File, Options, Mail, and if you scroll down tothe group that says Send Messages this check mark right here is what turns onthe AutoComplete list, and to the right you can empty the list and then you'llbe able to start over with a fresh list of email addresses. Another feature to beaware of is Ctrl-K. Whenever you're in the To location for an email address, ifyou start typing a name and you hit Ctrl-K it brings up names that match that outof your Global Address List and you can select those from the list as well. If this list appears to be missing names then go back to #12 in thisvideo and download the addresses again to make sure that that's updatedproperly. That will ensure that AutoComplete is working properly.

#22 Multiple Time Zones.

If you work with people in different time zoneswhether it be a different state, a different country, you can set multipletime zones in your Outlook calendar. Currently on the left column here you'llsee the time on any week or day view of your calendar but if you go to File,Options, Calendar and come down to the group for time zones, you can see thatyou have multiple time zones available. Let's give our home location a name andselect a second time zone. We'll pick Eastern Time and call it NY. Pick a third time zone and let's select something far away, all the waydown here to Guam, give it a name. You also have an option to swap the time zoneswhich basically rotates the order of these time zones. Once that's set hit OKand now on your calendar you'll see the multiple time zones listed, including the name of the location for each one of those timezones. It doesn't change the way calendar entries are recorded or when you send aninvite to somebody else but it does show you the reference for the time in thatother location so you know what time it is there.

#23 Keyboard Shortcuts.

Outlook has a number of keyboard shortcuts but I'm going toshow you the ones that I think are the most effective and easy to use. You canswitch views between these items down here at the bottom by doing Ctrl-1for Outlook mail, Ctrl-2 for the calendar, Ctrl-3 for Contacts, andCtrl-4 for Tasks. It works with the number associated with the order thatthese items are in the list. If you're in your calendar try hitting Ctrl-G andsearch for a date. You can pick one from the list and go there directly but youcan also say Next Thursday, or you can say Christmas, or how about the LastMonday in April. Ctrl-G has a lot of options. Use F3 to bring up the Search. Use F9 to Send and Receive your email. Ifyou're highlighted on a message Ctrl-U marks it unread. Ctrl-Q marks it read. Ctrl-N creates a new message. Ctrl-R does a reply. Ctrl-Shift-R replies to all. And Ctrl-F forwards the message. If you create a new messageclick on the body and you can do Ctrl-K to insert a hyperlink. And if you'vetyped a message you can hit F7 to do the spell check. That's a peek at some of the bestshortcuts for Outlook.

#24 Mark Deleted Items Read.

You find it annoying that whenever you delete an unread email it leaves it marked unread in the trash? There is a solution for that. Go to File, Options, Mail and go all the way to thebottom in the Other section. There's an option here to Mark messages as read when deleted. Turn that on, hit OK, and now when you have an unread message and you delete it it's marked as read.

#25 Read Aloud.

Outlook can read your emails. If you click on an email and click this Read Aloud button it'll read this quotefrom Thomas Edison. I failed my way to success - Thomas Edison. You can also highlight just a portion of it and read it - Thomas Edison and it'sgot a menu option here where you can change the settings. You can speed it upa little bit and also change the voice. Edison. To enable the Read Aloud makesure that you go to File, Options, Ease of Access, and check this box for Show ReadAloud. If you don't have that available it's not in your version of Outlook.

#26 Ignore Conversation.

When you open an email in the upper-left cornerthere's an Ignore option. Click that and it will ignore that conversation and allfuture messages will be moved to the trash folder. Just click IgnoreConversation and it moves it to your trash. Any new messages coming in will go to the trash on that same topic.If you want to recover that you can go into the trash, click on the message,click Ignore again, and this time we're gonna Stop Ignoring Conversation.That moves the message back to your inbox and allows them to be receivedfrom this point forward. Now, unlike Junk Mail it only affects that specificconversation so you don't have to worry about deleting mail from other peoplethat you want to receive from, but it's great to ignore that conversation.

#27 Dictation.

If you have Office 365 you can dictate your message instead oftyping it. On a new email you can click on the subject area, click on this iconup here to dictate - this is my subject period. Click in the body of the messageand you can dictate there - this is a test of the dictation exclamation point,newline, smiley face. Dictation even supports multiplelanguages. So if you want to save some time from typing use Dictation.

#28 Save to Desktop.

Did you know that you can save any item in Outlook to yourdesktop for access later. For example, here's an email. If I drag and drop thatout on my desktop, now you can open it even if you're not in Outlook. You can dothe same thing with your calendar entries, or your contacts. Even if Outlook is closed I can stillopen those. So for quick access to Outlook itemssave them to your desktop.

#29 Edit Message.

Did you knowthat you can edit the subject line of a message that you've received. Just openthe message, type your changes, and hit File, Save. Now when you close thatmessage your new subject line is displayed. You can use this to correctsome spelling or make the subject a little more clear. You can't change themessage body though so it's only going to work for the message subject line

.#30 3D Models.

You can insert some really cool 3D models into your emails.Just go to a new message and click on the body of the message, go to the Insertmenu, and select 3D Models from the list, choose from online sources, and there's abunch of different categories of 3D models. Pick one of those categories andthen select the model that you want to insert into your message. This brings the3D model in, where you can reposition it any way you want, and resize it as needed,and you've inserted a 3D model into your message. Just be cautious because thesize of these 3D models can be very large which makes your emails very largeto send as well.

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30 Ultimate Outlook Tips and Tricks Updated for 2020!