Term Definition Introduced in: This option, located within the View tab, provides a variety of options to choose when sorting and grouping Arrangement

60 Minutes of Outlook Secrets Term Definition Introduced in: This option, located within the View tab, provides a variety of options to choose when sorting and grouping Arrangement messages. Module 2 Assign Task Categorize Defer it This features allows you to email a task or list of tasks to another person. By assigning tasks, you can manage which of your team members is in charge of what task, and follow up with them as needed. You can also watch their progress as they work on the task and receive a notice when the task is complete. Module 3 This refers to ways to organize notes, tasks, and items. By assigning Categories to each item you can group projects into easy-to-follow formats in a single place. Module 4 A status that indicates an email must be acted on, but will take longer than ten minutes to complete. Choose whether to create a calendar reminder for it, flag it, or create a task from it. Module 1 Delegate it A status that indicates an email and its associated tasks should be given to someone else to take care of. Forward the message or assign a task to someone from the e-mail. You can also schedule it by using the calendar. Module 1 Do it A status that indicates you should address an email, if you determine the required work will take between two and ten minutes to complete. Module 1 Dump it A status that indicates an email does not require an action, and you should either delete the message or file it away to reference later. Module 1 Find Using the Mail View, you can type keywords or names into the Search box above the reading pane. Outlook will offer option to filter yor search. Module 4 Group Collections of related controls located on the Ribbon's tabs. Module 3 Mail Merge A way to send personalized messages to multiple recipients in your address list. Each message has the same kind of information but the content in each is unique. Module 3 New Appointment This feature annotates your calendar to help you remember events and organize and categorize your time. Module 3 New Meeting This feature allows you to send a request to your co-workers to meet you in a specific place at a specific time, and your co-workers can have their response sent directly to your inbox. Module 3 Quick Steps A feature that allows you to automate frequently performed tasks. Module 5 Reading Pane A location in the Outlook window where you can view your list of email messages. Double-click on any message to open it in a new window. Module 2 Recurrence You can assign recurrent tasks, meetings, emails, and reminders within Outlook. Module 3 Glossary Page 1

OUTLOOK MODULE ONE THE FOUR D S OF ORGANIZATION Module One the Four D s of Organization. Now Outlook is control to many of us during our work days. There s a constant flow of emails, tracking our appointments, and keep in mind they re not just our appointments anymore. It used to be I put in all my appointments. Now I get invited to meetings, and I invite other people to meetings. So there s keeping track of all of that. For some of us, we use the task feature in Outlook, so there s a tracking of our tasks and our to-dos. And then of course there is our address book, or as they call it now, our contacts. Keeping all of this organized has a major impact on our days. It has a major impact on our productivity every day. That s why we re going to start our discussion today with the four D s of organization. Those four D s are Do it, Dump it, Defer it, or Delegate it. So as we work through Outlook, you will see that we will look at these four D s, especially in email, to ask ourselves the questions do I do it? Do I dump it? Do I defer it? Or do I delegate it? It s the cornerstone of getting organized. It will drive our feature discovery today as we go through the secrets of Outlook. Let s start off by making sure that we all understand the four D s. The first one is do it. It kind of goes along with that slogan from Nike, Just do it. That s not necessarily true. We don t want to just every email that comes in, we don t want to just act on it immediately. What we need to do is take a look at that email and we need to ask ourselves the question, is this going to take me a long time to do? Is this something I can get done in a short period of time, in two to five minutes? Depending on your work and the wait and the job that you do, maybe it s a little longer. Maybe you could say if it takes me two to five minutes, five to ten minutes I should do it right away. Just get it over with. So I read the email, and I ve got to ask myself do I Page 1

do it right away? And the general rule is if it s within two to five minutes, or five to ten minutes again, depending on your job, you should just go ahead and do it. Get it done. Get it off your plate. If you re not going to do it, then we move on to the next question do I dump it? Dump it means do I get rid of it in some way, shape, or form? One of those ways would be to delete it, get rid of it, throw it away. But we can t always just get rid of it. If it s not something we need to act on, it still might be something we need to reference. It still might be something that we need to hold on to. So if I can t delete it because I do need to reference it at some point, then I need to file it. So dump it means both it means to get rid of it, to throw it away; it also means let s put it away. Let s put it away so I have it as a reference for later. So when we talk about filing it away, dumping it into a folder, we need to be very careful because I have seen it and I have done it myself where I will create this great folder structure, and I will file emails away in these folders, and I will sometimes forget which folder I created for which types of emails. And I actually will get to the point where I will have multiple folders holding the same type of email, whether it be emails for the same vendor, the same project. So you ve got to be very careful. You need to focus on how am I creating my folder structure so that it makes sense, not just today, but it will make sense three days from now, three weeks from now, and three months from now. One of the things I strongly suggest when you get here is to try and create your email file folder structure the same as you would create your physical file folder structure. So your file cabinets will have the same structure, same organizational logic, as your email file folder structure. If you re the head of a department, you should try to get your entire staff to use a similar logic when filing their stuff away. Not only does it keep everybody consistent, not only Page 2

does it help them decide how to set up their structure so that it s logical, but it also is a situation where if they are out one day and you need to find something, you understand how they filed things both paper and email. The next one is to defer it. So I ve decided I m not going to do it. I m not going to dump it because it is still something I need to act on. So I m going to decide to defer it. Again, I decide to defer it when it s something that I can t take care of in a two to five minute, five to ten minute timespan. It s going to take me longer to do that, and I want to do that either later in the day, later in the week, or later in the month whatever it is. But the bottom line is I do need to go ahead and defer it. When I make the decision to defer it, I have to be very careful because I need to track the fact that I still need to do it. And we have a couple of different ways in Outlook that we are going to go into in a lot more detail a little bit later. We can use things like the follow-up. I can flag an email for follow up. I can specify I want to follow up today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or I can set a custom date to follow up on that email. So the email itself stays just as an email. But I ve put a little flag on it to say, you know what? Remind me on this date that I need to follow up on this email. The other thing I can do with it is I can actually take this email and create a task from it. I promise, I m going to show you how to do all of this when we get into the different sections. But I can take that email and I can create a task from it. So now, I have the email and I can file it away or throw it away it doesn t really matter because once I create a task, a copy of that email goes into the task, and now it s just a task item on my to-do list. And the last thing I can do with deferring it is I can do the exact same thing as a task, except create a calendar appointment. I can say you know what? I m going to work on this tomorrow at 3:00 PM, and I can schedule time to work on it. So Page 3

again, if I decide to defer it, I can set a follow up, I can create a task from it, or I can create a calendar item for it. And the last one is to delegate it. Delegation is not something that is always that easy for people to pick up on. But if you are a manager or supervisor and you need to, give it to somebody else to take care of. We can use Outlook to do that. And we can do it as simply as just taking that email and forwarding it on to somebody else. Say, Here. Here s what s going on. You take care of it. The problem with that is you forward on the email, there really is no notification at that point whether something happens. There s no way for you to track it from there. So you would have to set a reminder for yourself to check with that person to find out if it was in fact taken care of, and whether or not it was in fact being done. The other option is to create a task from it. I m going to show you how to take that task, how to take that email, create a task, and then assign somebody to it. So I m delegating it to somebody, and when I send them that task, then when they update that task, they can just send me a report to tell me what s going on with it. So I have linkage to that task so that I can have some tracking of what s going on with that task. So again, if I decide to delegate it, I can forward the email out; I can create a task from it and assign it to them; the other thing, too, is I could also schedule it using an email calendar item and invite that person to it. So those are the four D s of organization. Do it, dump it, defer it, or delegate it. So each item that we go through primarily in the email section, because everything else sort of drives off the email section, we re going to ask for every email, we re going to go with the concept of touch it once. Only touch it once. And when you do touch it, you decide do I do it? Do I dump it? Do I defer it to later, take care of it another time? Or do I delegate it to somebody else? So every time you touch an email, you should go Page 4

through this process so that you are not touching that email again. So those are the four D s of organization, which will drive a lot of our work today in this webinar. Page 5

OUTLOOK MODULE TWO - EMAIL Module Two Email. So let s take a look at working with our email. So the first thing I want to take a look at with email is our views. Keep in mind, we re going to talk about email calendar and tasks, contacts we re going to talk about all of it. We re also going to talk about automation. The first thing I want to make sure that we re clear on is that the screen you see initially is not the screen you have to work with. We have different options when it comes to our views. So that s the first place I want to look at, is make sure that you pick a view that works for you. You ll see here, this is my initial Outlook screen with my email being shown, and I ve got my folders on the left; I ve got my emails in the middle here; and then on the right, I have my reading pane. Now let s start off by going to our menu option here, and we re going to click on our view tab right there. When we click on our view tab, we ve got a number of different options in our ribbon. The first one that I want to talk about is one that s very common, which is the navigation pane layout. The first one I want to talk about here is the layout. You see you have the ability for the navigation pane, where is it, which is the item that was all the way on the left on my screen; the reading pane, which was all the way on the right; and then my to-do bar which I don t have turned on. But let s take a look at those. You ll see with my navigation pane, it gives me do I want normal? If I click on minimize, you see it shrinks out. It goes away over here. And then I have to click on this arrow here to open it. Then I can close it back down. Then I can actually just turn it off completely. I don t have that navigation on the left. Personally, I like to leave it on normal. I like my folders to the left. You ll see why later when I start talking about organizing and moving Page 1

things. I prefer to be able to grab an email like this, drag it, highlight the folder, release, and file it away, and I m done. So I like having that on the side there. So I click here, too, you see I have favorites turned on. And favorites, you ll see, is right up here. I have none. So the question is, how do I add one to it? All I need to do is simply grab one of these folders, drag it up, put it on top of the favorites, and I release. And now in my favorites, you ll see that folder 1-Michael is there. And it s still down here as well. It s just my favorite. It s a quick way to get to it. So we can also use our favorites. Our reading pane you ll see right now is set to the right. That s the one I m using. It s kind of highlighted there. Hopefully you can see that. See that right there? I m going to move it down to the bottom, which is another common place that people have it. You ll see now my email stretch across, or my email list, is horizontal and my reading pane is horizontal on the bottom. With the way monitors are these days with them being wider now, I actually prefer to keep it on the right. You ll see, you can also just turn it off completely. That s another option. I m going to leave it on the right for me. Again, these are all things that I want you to know where they are so that you can set your screen up in a way that s best for you. And then my to-do bar, which right now is minimized, and if I click on normal, you ll see it opens up on the right. My to-do bar gives me a full month calendar, it gives me my appointments, and it gives me my tasks. This completes my screen, especially if I am fully utilizing my calendar and my tasks. You ll see here, I can also minimize that, which again just gives me the arrow to be able to open it and close it, and then I also have the ability to turn it off. And here are the different items. I can take off. Let me make that normal now so you see it. Then I can also click here to date navigator. It just turns the calendar off. Or I can tell it to turn off Page 2

my appointments. So I have control as to what is shown inside that to-do navigation. Then we ve got our people pane, which you ll see is set to normal. What that is, that s on the bottom here. You'll see it s a little clearer when I open the message up what s down here in the people section. Close that back down. Okay, the next thing I want to show here, though, is real quick. I have my arrangement here. You ll see it s arranged by date. In other words, I have my email sorted by date. I can quickly click on any of these. I can rearrange it From, To, the size of the email, subject type. So this is really great because if I wanted to now sort my email, and let me just get rid of my to-do bar so we have a little bit more space here. I want to stretch this out. I just want to rearrange it so you can see it. When I click From, see now it s today, it s yesterday, it s Thursday, and when I click on From, now it s going to sort it based on who it s from 1-800-CONTACTS, Admin Support, you see now it s broken down by who. And again, I can keep going on that and I can change it to who it s sent to, who is this sent to. And Size, Subject, Type, you get the hint. There s a whole bunch of them in here that are all set up for you automatically. I m going to go back to date. And now the other thing in here that I want to take a look at with the views is the ability to change columns. This is a very important, or a really nice feature. Again, I m going to turn off my reading pane now so that we can really see this better. So this is my email listing. You ll see I have the From column, the subject column, and I see as I m clicking on them it s resorting them based on that. But I can add columns in here. If I just simply point to subject and do a right mouse click, you ll see I get field chooser. So I can actually choose an additional field that I want to put in. Let s say, for instance, I m using categories, which we will talk about a little bit later. So I click, hold, drag, and you ll see now I have Page 3

categories moving with me. And when I point to my chart up here, I can release. Let me close my field picker, and you ll see now my category column is now on my listing. So if I move this down a little bit, I can expand my categories. And if I start to use categories, I can see what category each email is set to. So that s how we can modify our view. There are a bunch of other options in here that I would encourage you to play around with. You have reverse, sort, adding columns, which is what we just did. This is another way to get to it. And also the ability to expand and collapse your groupings. The other thing I want to show you in here, actually before we move on, is show us conversations. Conversations, otherwise known as threads, I like this, especially at work when I do show as conversations. When I click on this, it will sort - and I m going to say this folder only for now and what it does is it groups my emails based on conversations. So if I ve had a lot of give and take, you ll see here there s an email right here that says Hi and I want you to see where all these other emails, there s nothing on the right. Yet this one, see there s a white arrow? And this one has a white arrow? That means there s a conversation, meaning there is a thread of emails. The way the system does it is based on the subject, which really means I want you to be careful, because if you have the same subject, it will group together emails that may or may not be the same conversation. So be aware. It really is doing this based on the Subject field. Then based on the reply excuse the, the email, then the reply, then the reply to the reply it groups them all that way. And now when I click on this white arrow, you ll see it opens up and it shows me her original email, my response, and then her follow-up email. And that s what we re talking about with a conversation. It s a thread of emails. And the same thing with this one here. You ll see the original email and then a follow- Page 4

up email to that one. Now what I d like to move on to now is setting up, as we talked about just a little while ago, setting up a reminder. So if I have an email here, for instance this email study cluster if I do a right mouse click, I can select follow-up and flag this message for a follow-up. You ll see all the way to the right hand side here, it has now turned the flag red. Now there s a reason why your Outlook is going to be a little bit different than mine. And let me go back to my Home tab, and you ll see here s the other place that I can find that follow-up flag. And when I click on the down arrow, you ll see it just says clear the flag or flag the message. In your Outlook, if you re using an exchange server behind it, you will not only get the option to follow up, but you will also get a reminder option follow up today, follow up tomorrow, follow up next week and then a custom follow up - when do you want to follow up? That gives you that reminder. So you can move this email into a folder, or you can leave it in your inbox. But on that specific date, it will remind you that that email needs to be actioned. The reason I don t see it is because I m using Outlook and using Google behind it. My Google account is being delivered to Outlook. And because it s an IMAP client, it does not use the follow up reminders. The next thing I can do is I can take that exact same email. I m going to click and hold on it. And you ll see now I m dragging it. And I can file it away as I talked about earlier; I can come over here and file it away and put it into a folder, and as I highlight the folder, if I release my mouse it would put it there. The other thing I can do, though, is if I come all the way down here to my icons for my different sections, here s my to-do. If I point to my to-do item, you ll see the to-do item right here. If I have my mouse dragged over, highlighted that, when I release my mouse click, it s going to open up a window to allow me to create a task based on that email. Page 5

Notice all the details of my email are in here. So it s taken that email, put it inside a task, and now I have the ability here s my subject of my task, or the name; I have my start date; I have my due date; I have my status - so I m creating a task from that email, going back to the concept of defer it. So I m going to go ahead and save and close that. And you ll see now if I click on my tasks, that task is now in here. You ll see this icon here. Notice the email. That s the follow-up. That s the flag I put on for a follow-up. This one here is the task I created. So it s basically very similar. Doing each of those is very similar, but they have a different designation inside your task list. But in the end, you have basically done the same thing, whether you do a follow-up or you create a task from it. The difference is if I were to open this, it s just the email. If I were to open up the task, I have a lot more options as far as start date, due date, things of that nature. So that s how I can defer it. Now one of the last things I want to do, we ll get into delegate it a little bit later when we get into the details of creating a task. Page 6

OUTLOOK MODULE THREE CALENDAR, TASKS, AND CONTACTS Module Three Calendar, Tasks, and Contacts. Let s get started with our calendar in this module, and we re going to come down here and click on my icon here at the bottom so that I can select my calendar. And let s start taking a look at some of the tips we can go through in the calendar itself. You ll see I have a couple of test entries in here. First off, let s make sure we see that our views are right here. We have a day view, work week, week, month, and a schedule view. You can play around with those. What I want to start out, though, is I want to create a new appointment. There are certain basics in here subject, location, most of us know all those things. We ve got all the basics in here the appointments, schedule, invitees we re going to talk about that in a second. Then over here, we have, is it a recurrence? Do I want to have it recur multiple times? That s where you would set that. If you want to change the time zone, here is your reminder. And here s your indication whether or not it should list it on your calendar as busy, or you ll see there s other options where you can indicate that it s free, tentative, busy, or out of the office. So it s a little more descriptive as to not just as an appointment, but also what is going on with that appointment. To the right, which we will talk about a lot in our next module, is our tags categorizing it. What I want to focus on right now is this concept in the middle here of scheduling and invitees. When I click on Invite Attendees, you ll see now it shows that it s coming from me, and you ll see who it s going to. This allows me to email out an appointment to others. And that way, they can then accept that appointment, thus notifying me that they ve accepted the appointment, and it automatically adds it to their calendar. Now this definitely works if everybody has Outlook, and it does work with most normal calendar and email systems Page 1

like Google or Yahoo. Some are not compatible. The vast majority are. The only major difference between over here where it says New Appointment and New Meeting is New Meeting immediately assumes you re going to invite other people. So the new appointment gives me a basic appointment for myself. New Meeting starts it out with the From, the To, and then of course the rest Subject, Location, and notice here on the bottom, and you ll see this when you invite people, you have this additional piece at the bottom here that will show you who s attending, who s accepted, who s tentative, who declined, and who has not responded. So that gives you a better view as to what s going on with that meeting. Have people joined us? Are they going to be there? The next thing I really want to take a look at with you is the fact that we can have multiple calendars. You ll see over here, I have two individual calendars. One is checked, one is not. You ll see that when I check that second calendar, you ll see now I have a side by side view of the two calendars. I have entries on the left in blue, and I ve got entries on the right in green. If I want to see those on top of each other, I want to see them in one view, I simply need to click on this arrow right here, which will move the two and join them together. Excuse me not join the tasks. I m not putting them all in one. I m just overlaying one over the other. So watch what happens. When I click on this arrow, now I can see my blue entries on the same screen that I see my green entries. And you ll see here if I click on blue, the blue become highlighted; and if I click on the green, the green gets highlighted. So you see the tabs up top here? And then if I don t want that anymore and I want to split them, here s the arrow pointing the other direction where I can split them back out to the way they were before. And they re two separate. I can also have them joined, and just uncheck it over here on the left hand side and it Page 2

goes away. So that s a very important thing. It s a great feature. It is a phenomenal feature. I use that tremendously when I have multiple calendars. I want to show you here open calendar because some of us have Internet calendars. So we have our work calendar, and then we have a Google or a Yahoo calendar. All I need to do is go to that calendar, get its URL, once I do that I go from Internet and I paste my URL right here, and I can open up and see my calendars all together in one view. And again, I can use the checkmarks on the left to show and not show those calendars side by side, or overlaid. All right, now let s move on to tasks. Tasks go kind of hand in hand with the calendar. And I say that because you ll see right on this view here, right on the bottom, it actually shows my tasks because our tasks generally have start dates, end dates, those types of things. So I m going to jump right over to tasks. And the task system in Outlook is fairly basic. It is not a project management system, but it is a great, solid, todo task management system. You ll see we have the entries that we had put in earlier. Now my view here, keep in mind again we have a bunch of different views at our disposal detailed, simple to-do and I click on this arrow here, it will show me even more. So I m going to stick with the detailed view list, which shows me my subject, status, due date, and remember, just like with email I can change this view by going right click up here, and doing a field chooser, remove column, any of these options inside of here. What I want to take a look at, though, is when I do a new task, you ll see I basically get a subject, start date, due date, those types of things all the normal stuff. What I do want to look at here, though, is you ve got another option here called details. And that allows us to go a little bit further, and we can enter in the total work, the actual work, mileage, and billing information just a few more pieces of information for us to Page 3

be a little bit more detailed about what s going on with our task. The major thing I really want to get to on this, though, is right here, Assign Task. As we talked about earlier, we want to delegate. We re delegating something out. When I click on Assign Task, again I get an email option to add in whom I m sending this to. So I can then send this task to somebody, and if you notice right here, I have a couple of checkmarks that have been added as well. And the first one is keep an updated copy of this task on my task list. So my personal task list will have this task that I ve assigned to somebody else. And then the second one here is send me a status report when it s completed, meaning whoever I ve given it to, once they complete it, send me a report that they ve completed it. So this goes back to what I mentioned earlier about keeping yourself up to date. Rather than email it over to them and then have to put a reminder for you to go check with them to find out whether it s done, not done, those types of things if you use this, now you can really forget about it because it s in your to-do list, and every once in a while you ll review your to-do list and you ll see it sitting there, and it will remind you that you need to check up with that person. But when that person completes it, you don t need to go ask. You don t need them to send you a special email. As soon as they mark it complete, it will automatically notify you that it s been marked complete. And again, keep in mind we ve got the ability to set up recurring tasks, just like we have recurring appointments. And we re going to get into these tags in our next module. Just a few quick last things I m going to say no on that just a few quick last things. Notice how quick and easy it is up here to mark it, complete, remove it from the list, specify a follow-up for a specific date or time. That s the key stuff that we wanted to go through with our tasks. Now let s take a look at our contacts, our address book. And Page 4

again, this one is relatively simple. We do a new contact, we have all the basics in here that we would anticipate. We now have the ability to add in a picture if we wanted to pick a picture and put it on, associate it with somebody s card. And you ve got the ability to do all the basics here full name, emails, and those kinds of things. What I really want to show you related to this, again just a reminder, we have different views that we can look at. What I want to talk about here, though, is a contact group. This is something a lot of people are not aware of. In the contact group, I have the ability to set up a group, just like you have groups usually at work where you ll have an IT group or an HR group, and if you pick that and you send an email to that group, it sends it to everybody in that list. Well, this is how we create one for ourselves in our own Outlook. You ll see here all I ve got to do is start typing in a name. I m going to name my group. Then I can click on Add Members. I can add them from Outlook contacts, from my address book, or from just the new email contacts. So if I click on New Email Contact, I can type in just, okay, this is going to be Michael. And the email address is MichaelSavelly.org, and I click okay, and now it s added to my list. And I can continue to do that until I have all my members in here. Then I can save and close. Now that becomes just another person, kind of. It becomes something that I can send an email to. So let s select a group, and we ll click on email. You ll see it says here I m sending it to the test group. Notice the little plus sign. Once you click on that plus sign, it will expand out all the names of the individuals in that group. Once you do it, you can t roll it back up. And it will tell you that. When I click on the plus, it says if you expand the list, it will replace with the members. You will not be able to collapse it again. Just click okay. Really all it does is add into the To field all the different contacts. Now remember Page 5

when you re doing this, if you re sending an email to a large list of people and you don t want other people to see who else is on the list, don t use the To or the CC field. You want to click on either one of those, and you ll get the ability to use the BCC field. Of course we have some other quick items up here. You have the ability to attach files, attach items, signature. The one I want to mention here is the Attach Items. You can attach an Outlook item to an email. In other words, I can attach anything that s in my Outlook system emails, calendar items, contacts, journal entries all of these are available for me to select and send as an attachment with that email. Okay, one last thing I want to show here in contacts is mail merge. I wish I could tell you we had enough time to go through the mail merge in detail, but I don t. But I want you to know it s there. No longer will you have to use Word to have to then pull a list in and do a full mail merge. You can now do it directly from Outlook. This will give you the ability to walk through the procedure to select, you ll see here, contacts all the contacts in the current view, only selected contacts then you can specify your document file, and then you can specify the other information and it will do a mail merge and email it out for you. What is said here, though, all contacts in my current view, in our next module we re going to get into filtering how do we narrow down my view, whether it be email, calendar, contacts, tasks how do I filter my information down so that I can find what I m looking for? Page 6

OUTLOOK MODULE FOUR FINDING STUFF Module Four Finding Stuff. So now let s talk about how we can find stuff in our email boxes, in our folders, in our calendar, our contacts, our tasks how are we going to find stuff? Now we ve already talked about some of the things we need to do to be proactive about finding stuff, because it s not just about being reactive and saying I ve got to go find something in the mountain of emails that I have. It s also about being proactive what can I do up front so that later on when I have to find something, I can find it. And I can find it easier. So what we re talking about here is indicating or marking some of our emails - or all depending on who you are and how you like to do it but marking them so that you can find them better later. What I m referring to here is one of the things we talked about earlier is follow up, the follow-up flag. Well that s in this grouping on your ribbon called Tags. And different variations of tags are available in email, calendar, contacts, and tasks. Categories is always there. It s on everything. Let s refresh our memory on one of the things we ve already spoken about which is the follow up. And we already talked about how you can put a flag on an email so you can follow up on that email later. You see here, if I click on this, not only can I add now a specific flag with no date, which is what I was able to do before, but I can also now, you ll see when I click on this, I can set the reminder as well the follow up today, tomorrow, this week, next week, no date, custom date, add a reminder, mark it complete so I have a lot more options now. So that is one of our options, to be proactive. Because this isn t just about finding it. This is about the fact that I need to remind myself that I need to take care of that later. But again, when later comes and I need to find it, this is one of the ways I can use to find it. The other option here usually works out by default, is the unread/read tag. Page 1

That happens automatically. If I were to come here for this email, and notice these are all in bold. The ones earlier are not. That s the difference between a read and unread email in my email box. And as soon as I double click on this and open it up to read it, when I close it back down, you ll notice now that is not bold anymore. So the system has now flagged that from an unread email, to a read email. And I can do that manually just by pointing to it here, click on unread/read, and it automatically changes it from one tag to the other. Keep in mind as well, if you have the read pane open, it will mark it as read as soon as it s displayed in the read pane. Now the last thing I want to talk about in this section is the categorize. Categorize, like I mentioned already, is available throughout all the different areas email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes all these different pieces are available with categories. So let s take a look at what category means. I ve already done one here, and you ll notice because earlier, if you ll remember in my earlier modules, I added in the column for categories. And you ll see I have an email here that s already in the blue category. So I want to grab these emails here, and I want to say you know what? I want to flag that and pick my category. Now when we start working with categories, they all start with a blue, a green, orange, purple, red, and yellow category. That is there by default. You ll see that the first time I select it, let s say the green one, for example, the system is going to tell me this is the first time you have used the green category. Do you want to rename it? Now I can change that to, I ll call it Support Emails. So I m flagging that this is a support type email. I can leave the color or not. Now I can pick a shortcut. Notice here, control F2, F3? That means when I m in my email box, I m going to select control F2, and I m going to say yes. You notice over here on the right, now it has a green flag and it says support emails. Now I m Page 2

going to highlight all of these emails here, hold down control and press F2, and you ll notice all of those are now automatically categorized as support emails. The whole point to this is we have folders remember we talked earlier about folders? So I can put things away in folders. I can flag them for follow up. I can mark them read or unread. And now I can even say specifically a category of email. And this helps because now as I file things away in folders, I can say even though this email is going into a vendor folder, I can indicate that it s a support email for that vendor so that later on when it comes time to filter, which is where we re headed, which is how to then filter and find the emails, I can use the categories along with the folders, along with the flags, along with the read and unread in order for me to narrow down and find the emails that I m looking for. So we re clear, proactively we set up folders and file it away; we flag them for follow-up so we can find them later; we mark them read and unread; and we categorize them. So now let s take a look at how we can apply a filter to narrow down an email box that may have thousands of emails to just a select few, and that is in that grouping right next to Tags. It s the grouping called Find. What that is designed for is exactly what we re talking about finding stuff. When I click on Find Email and I click this dropdown here, it gives me a number of shortcuts. First one is Unread. It s one of the most common things. It s just to show me there are emails I haven t read yet. And if I just simply click on that, you ll notice that all my emails below now are all bolded because they are all unread emails. But also notice my ribbon has changed. And you ll see that I got a new grouping called Search Tools and a tab called Search. And you see this here? From, Subject, Attachments, Category, Unread is bolded, which means it s selected; then I have Sent to this week, flagged, important, and then more, which is Page 3

going to give me more search options. We ll get there in a few minutes. But that is what you now have available to you, is a lot more than was just in your original ribbon. For now, I m going to close that because I want to go through some of the shortcuts that they have here so we take a look at them all. So this one here would filter out anything that has an attachment. So if it has an attachment, I see it; if it doesn t, I get rid of it. Not RID of it. You don t throw it away. It just filters it out. So we have here Attachment, see you see here you can specify just emails today, yesterday, this week, last week, this month, last month you have all those options. Then here s my categories. And again, blue, and here s where I ve changed it to support emails in all my other categories. Or I could say give me every email that has any category, or no category. Then flagged, important, sent to me or Cc d me, then we ve got our More filters. So those are all shortcuts, and I encourage you to play around with those. But I also encourage you to play around in here, which is I m going to select more filters. And what that s going to do is rather than apply one of these shortcut filters, it s just going to open up the search tools, and my ribbon and my tab for all my search options. Now I can click on From, and you ll notice right here on the right it says From: and it s already highlighted, and I can say here, Show me everything from PM Study. You see now it just filters it down to just anything where the From is PM Study. I can do the same with Subject. And you ll notice as I did that, let me do it again. I want to make sure this is nice and clear. So we have From PM Study. Notice that s right here. This is where I was typing in. Watch what s going to happen, though. Watch over here, and I ll zoom in in a minute. When I click on Subject, it adds it to that line. You see here? It s not From and Subject. So let s put in the subject, and I m going to put in the word Page 4

Michael. What it should do is narrow it down now, looking for anything with the word PM Study and From, and anything that has a subject of Michael, and that s why I am now down to just email. And I can keep going. I can add in Has Attachment. You ll notice now I have nothing because there is no PM Study with the subject line of Michael that has an attachment to it. So you see how I can group these altogether. Again, this is sort of a shortcut way. The first level with shortcuts is here, where I can only pick one or the other. Then I can go in here and I could pick multiple of these items. Then I can go even further and I can click on More and here s even more of my options. But the furthest is if I come over here to Search tools, and I go to advanced find. When I do that, now I get a box like this. This allows me to do a lot more. But you notice there are not a lot of shortcuts here. This is where you kind of have to know what you re doing, and here s where I m going to search for certain words. I put the words in this box here. I want it with Michael. And then the From, see here? Now it says From here. That s where I m going to put in PM Study. Then I can specify who it was sent to, and then I have Find Now, and you ll see it shows me in this box below it doesn t affect my inbox like it was before. Now it shows me below this is the results set that you get. And I could keep going. I have this option of where I am, and it gives you a bunch of different options - the time, when it was received, sent, due, expires, created, modified. And then if I move on to More Choices, I have even more in here. I can deal with categories and pick multiple categories. Okay, I don t want to start setting these all up. But I can pick multiple categories. I can say only items that are, only items with so I have so much control in here. Then if I go all the way to advanced, now this is where I can specify individual fields. I have access to every field available inside of Outlook, and I Page 5

can specify in that field mileage, which if you recall is in Tasks if I pick that, it says well anything that has a mileage of 50, now I m not going to find anything because I don t have any tasks in there with mileage. But I think you see my point. Then I can add this to List and keep going, and continue to pick field upon field upon field until I get the search criteria that I am looking for, so that I can find all of my stuff. If you really know what you re looking for, you can build these search criteria and get yourself all the way down to the one or two emails you are in fact looking for. But it starts with being proactive. The more you can do up front by putting it in specific folders, you more you can be proactive by putting a category on it, to using flags. All of that will help when you need to go find stuff. Page 6

OUTLOOK MODULE FIVE - AUTOMATION Male: Module Five Automation. In this module, we re going to look at automating Outlook so it does things for us. There are two distinct ways we can do automation in Outlook. One is Quick Steps. The other is Rules. They essentially do the same thing. They both can move items to folders, they both can categorize, they both can run multiple action steps in what to do with your email, your calendar item, your tasks. The major difference is, or the key difference really, is the fact that Quick Steps is something you have to say, go ahead and run it. I have to click here and say system, run this Quick Step right now on this email. Or I can use a shortcut key, but I m highlighting an email and I m saying, go ahead. Run it now. I have to tell it to run that automation. In a Rule, that s not true. The rules can be designed so as soon as you receive an email, it checks some criteria. If that email matches the criteria I select like if it s sent to me or if it has a specific word in the subject, go ahead and run this rule, run this automation. Same thing as with Quick Step, though, it will run steps. It could run it, throw it into a folder, categorize it all those kinds of things. So Quick Step I have to initiate. Rules happen automatically. So let s jump right into Quick Steps and you ll see Quick Steps is right here in the middle of our ribbon. It s a big grouping called Quick Steps. Bank Email and Support Email, those are ones I ve created. These others are automations or default items that are in there. So we re going to take a look at one of those first. So I m going to highlight an email, which I really don t have to do, because it has nothing to do with the email I have highlighted. But I m going to click on Team Email. When I click on that, you ll see it says first time setup. This is a Quick Step. It opens up a new email and sends it to specified people. Bottom line is it s going Page 1

to send an email out. So the name of it, I m going to change the name of it to Send Email to Staff. You ll see here, the action step is create a new message, and it wants to know to send to who? So I m going to send it to staff, and I m going to click save. That s it. And you ll see now, my Quick Step says send email to and you can t see it all because it breaks up. Something for you to be aware of. So when I click on that, what do you think it s going to do? It s going to open up a new email and automatically address it. It really doesn t do a whole lot, does it? All it really does is open up a new email and automatically put in the staffing address. But that s not all it CAN do. We just set up a real simple one. I m going to take that same email I just set up, and I can point to it, and do a right mouse click and click on edit send email staff. And you see here, I open it up and now it says, well here s my name, here s my action steps. New message, send to. But look right below that Add Action. Now when I click on Add Action, I get another box and I can click on here and look at all the different options I have. I can move it, copy it, delete it, mark it as read, mark it as unread. Now some of these things are not things I would do with an email I m sending out. But this is not just for the fact I m sending out an email. If this was a new arrived email, I could tell it move it to a folder, copy it to a folder. But here, look at the Categorize. I can categorize the messages, clear the categories, flag them for follow up I can do all these different things. And in this case, I m going to categorize the message, and it s going to say, well what category? I m going to say I ll make it an orange category. So I can add additional actions beyond that, but we re going to leave it at that for now. I want you to see down here at the bottom, I have shortcut keys because right now in order to run the action step, I ve got to click on that Quick Step, and it ll go off. I can also choose a shortcut Page 2

key control/shift/1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I m going to select 5. Then this, Tool Tip Text. You see it already says create a new email to your team. I m going to modify that just a little bit, just so you can see where this is going to show up. Create a new email to staff. I m going to put my initials, just so you can see that it s stuff I typed in. And I m going to click Save. Just so you know, when I point to send email to staff, notice right below it, and I can t zoom, I apologize, but right below it, you ll see it says send email to staff. Then in parentheses, control/shift/5, which is my shortcut key. It s letting you know you have a shortcut key assigned. Then below that is the text we typed in, create new email to staff MGC. Now when I click on this, I can send it out and I can do that for a number of these different items here. Reply and delete, that allows me to automatically reply, and as I tap in my reply, when I hit send, it deletes the email. So I can set up Quick Steps. Now if you want to set up one brand new, click this down arrow right here. And you ll see you ve got the option of new Quick Step, manage Quick Steps. So if I want to manage the ones I already have, the other option is right there, you have Create New. And when I select Create New, it doesn t start with a predefined one they had by default. It allows me to create one from scratch. I can call it Test, and I can pick every action I want to happen. Now again, this doesn t happen automatically. I m going to set that as important, and I m just going to click finish. Now if I click on an email, click on that, see how I have to initiate it? Rules can happen automatically. So let s move over to our Rules, which is just to the right of Quick Steps. You ll see it right there, called Rules. And the primary use of Rules that I ve seen is that as a new email comes in, if it matches a certain criteria, I can move it to folders, I can categorize it, I can forward it to somebody, I can reply to it automatically, those kinds of things. As I open it up, the first Page 3