Tech Tip Tuesday 19/11/19

Outlook tips and tricks

For this week's TTT(Tech Tip Tuesday) we will be looking at outlook and discussing some of the less obvious(and some that are obvious) functions to improve efficiency. Efficiency and organisation within outlook is critical to managing incoming and outgoing communications both within your business and to external parties that you deal with on a daily basis.

Quick guide to searching emails

Searching emails seems fairly obvious. You click in the box and type what you're looking for. But did you know that its possible to be more specific with your searches?
Some of the most useful search features include:

• From: "service@initiativeits.com.au" - by including From: at the start of an email you can exclusively search for emails you have received from a particular address. This is helpful because it cleans a lot of noise where the email address has been cc'd on another email, or various correspondence back and forth etc.
• Subject: "Help with outlook" - the Subject: function will allow you to only search in the subject of emails. This is handy if you know vaguely what the email was about but cannot remember who it was from.
• hasattachments:yes - this search function will show you any emails with attachments, remember this further down when we discuss using multiple search terms.
• category:red - This will give you all emails that have been sorted into the red category. We will discuss using categories to organise emails further down.

These are only a few of the useful search functions available when digging through outlook for email content. Another great way to use these is by combining them.

• These search terms can be easily combined by typing multiple of them into the search bar. For example:
  • From:"service@initiativeits.com.au" category:red

You can combine as many as you like, but with all searching, be mindful of being too specific. As this can often be as troublesome as being too vague.

Email rules

What is an email rule? It is a simple piece of logic that can be used for automatically sorting emails received (and many other things).
This can be useful for sorting emails from a particular supplier, or co-worker, or emails of a particular topic.

• To get started, we pick an email that is a good example of what we want our rule to apply to.
• Right click it and select "Create rule".
• The default logic applied is to move emails from this sender to another folder. This is very convenient as its the most common way to use rules. 
• Select the folder you want emails from this particular sender sent to and click ok.

It is worth noting that mail rules can do significantly more than just filing senders into folders. If you'd like to know more please get in touch with us, and we can organise some time to show you more! 

Colour coding priorities

The last thing we will be discussing in this blog post is categorising our emails using colours.
In the above image, see how one of our options is categorize? When this is selected we can choose from a range of categories such as Purple Category, Blue Category, etc, etc.
These category names can be changed by selecting Manage Categories however by default they no true meaning. This is where you come in! Decide what you want each colour to mean and start organising your mail into colour categories for easily identifying priorities.

That's all for TTT this week. Touch base again next week for more!
Don't forget if this was helpful or you'd like to know more leave a comment below. Also, please make suggestions if there are any topics you'd like to see covered.

---