In this article, we’ll give you some of the best Outlook hacks for digital office management, along with some awesome Outlook tips and tricks featured in the program. I told my boss I'd like to give a (voluntary) company-wide training in something someday as a self-development goal and he suggested Outlook/inbox management. I don't manage his inbox but I did help him get the Stack method set up and he's blown away by how awesome it is, so now thinks I'm an Outlook wizard. I'm decent but certainly not an expert - so I figure before I actually lead a training I should brush up.

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Companies that use Outlook also sync Outlook or GAL contacts to employees’ smartphones. For example, Skender and The Morse Group, top construction companies, respectively save 1500 and 500 hours in flush DNS and re-sync Outlook IT labor. For instance, you can quickly switch between Mail (Ctrl + 1), Calendar (Ctrl + 2), and Contacts (Ctrl + 3). You can also open a new email (Ctrl + N), send an email (Ctrl + Enter), or reply to all (Ctrl + Shift + R).

View the calendar and inbox side by side

Learn how to unlock AI-powered presentation creation and boost your productivity. Use your organization’s solution in place of AutoArchive, and as always, follow your corporate policy. If your corporate policy dictates that you have multiple folders for each type of item, follow that policy.

If you receive a large volume of messages (more than 200 messages a day), search folders might be a good way for you to parse mail from different senders. If you are short on time, for example, between meetings, you can read the messages in blue – messages sent directly to you. Often these messages are waiting on you for the next step and are the most important. That's not to say that there isn't a need for browsing through messages that are all on a particular topic or project. Outlook provides better tools — such as categories and search folders — so you can search effectively. By viewing your messages in conversation view, you can easily see which conversations have had the most back-and-forth discussion.

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To view the Scheduling Assistant when composing a meeting request, on the Meeting tab, in the Show group, select Scheduling Assistant. Choose a time when everyone can meet by looking at the invitees’ free/busy information in Calendar. Use the Scheduling Assistant to view all meeting attendees availability. Rather than using Bcc to inform a third party of an issue, forward the message after you send it. Use the Bcc feature to remove extra people from an email conversation when you deem that they no longer need the extra email or if the conversation topic has changed. If you need more information or are investigating the issue separately, respond to the whole Contact Group to let everyone know that you are responding and then reply to the individual separately.

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Create a single task, mark it with the @Meeting category, and set the Start Date or Due Date to the date of your meeting. As the meeting date approaches and discussion points come up, add comments, bullets, and thoughts to the task as they occur to you. If you receive mail from a Contact Group that you don’t want to be on, send a message to your network administrator or to the owner fix MFA prompts not working of the Contact Group and ask to be removed. To find the Contact Group owner, double-click the Contact Group name on the To line. Outlook keeps the list of your completed tasks automatically. If you don't need to keep a record of the task or the message, delete it or clear the flag.

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Search folders are useful for gathering information from across different mail and RSS folders. Search folders can be especially useful when you need to gather information that is saved in different folders — for example, when preparing for a quarterly meeting. Set your Contact Group folders to auto archive every six months or more frequently if they are time sensitive — for example, a Contact Group for finding carpool rides should be archived daily. Sentences prefaced with the Microsoft 365 logo repair corrupted OST in Outlook are references to other Microsoft 365 products, such as Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Sentences that mention AutoArchive and Outlook Data Files (.pst) are marked with an icon of a folder and file .





For reference messages that you have responded to or otherwise dealt with. Your Quick Click category should be the category that you apply most often. It’s considered best practice to set your Quick Click flag to Today (which is the default).

• To quickly mark a message as read, press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Q.
• This becomes even more complicated if there is more than one appropriate folder per message.
• As part of good time management, you need time to deal with your messages, manage your appointments and tasks, and reflect on what you have to do.
• Each additional person you invite to a meeting adds to the complexity of the meeting, making it harder to control.
• In the U.S., around 47% of workers use Microsoft Office products, including Outlook.
• Set a reminder by selecting a time frame from the "Reminder" dropdown menu.

Inevitably, messages will be reread, and the mental tax of figuring out what you need to do will be paid again. A far more efficient Inbox plan is to go through your messages and decide what to do with each one. Spend 20 minutes in the morning going through your messages, and then turn your attention to doing a daily review of your task list.