Microsoft Outlook for Beginners: 2+ Hour Training Course in Outlook 2021 & 365

[Music] simon says subscribe and click on the bell icon to receive notifications we've made the files the instructor uses in this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these outlook 2021 is microsoft's email calendar contact and task management system outlook is available as part of the microsoft 365 suite or you can use outlook 2021 as a standalone system for example if you've ever set up a hotmail email account then you're already using outlook so it's fantastic for personal use if you want to manage your email your calendar your contacts and create task lists but it's also used heavily by organizations because they can deploy it as a multi-user enterprise system using exchange server an outlook is brilliant if you want to manage your mail when you're on the go because it has a user-friendly mobile app that's available for ios and android users now i've been using outlook for over 20 years and i can tell you that it's been through many different incarnations and the latest version the version we're going to be looking at in this course is outlook 2021 and this is the standalone release so this release would be for people who want to use outlook but don't necessarily want to pay for a microsoft 365 subscription and these standalone versions that are released by microsoft really bring the software in line with the latest updates you'd see in microsoft 365. so we have lots of new things to explore in this particular version of outlook for example we have a new look and feel using the simplified ribbon we can do things like app mention people in our emails there's also a lot more integration with microsoft teams a very popular application at the moment for collaborating with your team we also have much improved accessibility options quicker ways of searching and filtering our email and we now have drawing and inking options which is particularly useful for people who use a touchscreen device with a stylus and we have multiple new galleries of stock media to really liven up our emails and make them more interesting now there's so much more to it than that but that's just a few of the newer features of outlook 2021 and in this course we're going to go through and explore them all along with that basic functionality so if you're brand new to outlook then this is the course for you if you're coming from an older version then this course is going to provide a really great refresher for you and i'm sure you'll pick up some new things that you didn't know how to do before now this course is organized by topic into nine separate sections and in each section you're going to find a number of different lessons each lesson contains a video where i'm going to walk you through and demonstrate the key functionality in outlook 2021 at the end of each section there is an exercise so you can practice the skills that you've learned and we also have test questions so you can test your knowledge as you go through all that's really required for you to complete this course is a working copy of preferably outlook 2021 my name's deborah ashby and i'm an i.t trainer and microsoft subject matter expert and as i mentioned previously i've been using outlook for over 20 years and i feel at this stage i've really managed to optimize the way that i use my outlook for maximum efficiency so i hope to pass all of my knowledge onto you so you can stay organized and productive so i very much hope that you enjoy this course and with all that said let's dive in to the first lesson outlook 2021 is the latest standalone release from microsoft now what do i mean by standalone release well when it comes to all things microsoft there are a couple of different routes you can go down for example you could create a microsoft 365 account and subscribe and what that basically means is that you are able to download the full microsoft suite of applications for a small fee each month so you effectively sign up for a microsoft 365 subscription so you're essentially renting the software from microsoft you don't actually own it yourself the other route you could go down is to just download the standalone version of outlook so maybe you're somebody who doesn't really use any of the other applications in the microsoft suite but you'd like to use outlook to manage your email your contacts your tasks your notes and your calendar items you can definitely do that and not be tied in to a monthly subscription and you may have unknowingly already used outlook if you have a hotmail or a live account then both of those are essentially using outlook now we're going to be looking at the standalone version of outlook 2021 throughout this course and because this is the latest version then it has all of the latest updates that you would expect to find in the microsoft 365 version so throughout the balance of this course we're going to start out by exploring the interface and how everything works behind the scenes i'm going to show you how to do things like create different accounts in outlook a lot of the time we don't just have one email account we might have multiple and we might want to see all of the mail from all of our accounts in the one outlook account so i'm going to show you how to do things like that we're going to take a look at keyboard shortcuts and how we can customize different settings as we go through as well as everything you need to know when it comes to receiving and sending emails in the next section of the course we are going to take a look at contacts so i'm going to show you how you can add new contacts how you can create contact groups edit contacts mail contacts and also share contacts with other people we're going to spend quite a lot of time taking a look at the calendar we're going to create appointments and meetings and i'm going to show you how outlook interacts with microsoft teams i'm also going to show you how you can open up other people's calendar and also merge their calendar with yours we're going to cover so much in this section that we're really just scratching the surface here the next thing we're going to take a look at is task management i'm going to show you how you can flag items so that they appear in your task list or your to-do list and also how you can create new tasks from scratch we'll take a look at how we can edit tasks add information such as due dates and i'm also going to show you how you can assign tasks to other people and then finally we're going to take a look at the notes section i'll show you how you can add new notes to keep track of important information and how you can customize the way you're viewing your notes now we're going to cover so much more than that but hopefully that gives you a little bit of a summary a bit of an overview as to what to expect throughout the balance of this course the only thing i need you to do now is make sure that you have a working outlook account now if this is the first time that you're using outlook you'll be asked to set up an account when you first open it up and this is pretty much like a wizard that you walk through so you can enter in your email address and click connect and outlook will basically do everything else for you as long as your email address is valid once you click connect you should see it in the folder list over on the left hand side and that's the stage that i really need you to be at in order to start off this course i am going to show you how you can add other accounts to outlook but just make sure that you have at least one email address linked to outlook before you begin it's time now to dive into our first exercise and in this exercise we're going to start off fairly slow but i'd like you to complete the following tasks the first thing i'd like you to do is ensure that you are set up to run through this course so i'd like you to have a working copy of outlook 2021 installed on your pc laptop or tablet device and it's also important that before we begin you understand the difference between the standalone version of outlook 2021 and the microsoft 365 version so if you're not sure at this stage go back and listen to some of the videos in the introductory section that's pretty much all i need you to do at this stage i will see you in the next section for the next section you'll want to download the course exercise files click the link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find time stamps for each section in this course if you're enjoying this training please leave us a comment now in this first lesson we're simply going to start out by familiarizing ourselves with the outlook interface so currently i don't have outlook open so let's fix that and launch the application now if i drag my mouse down to the bottom of the screen you'll notice that i have the taskbar pop up and currently i don't have the outlook icon or the outlook application easily accessible from this taskbar so what we can do here if you're using windows 11 like i am is click on the start button and then we can find outlook in our list of applications and effectively pin it to the taskbar so i'm going to go across to all apps i'm going to scroll through the alphabetical list and we're going to find outlook now sometimes this can be under m for microsoft but most of the time you're going to find it underneath outlook just there if we right click on the application and go down to more we can then choose to pin it to the taskbar so that makes it super quick and easy for us to access so let's click on the outlook icon to launch the application now if this is the first time you're launching outlook then you may be required to go through a small amount of setup first of all so you'll be asked for things like your microsoft account so you can sign into outlook now i've already launched mine previously so i'm already at the stage where it's taken me to my inbox and again if this is a brand new email account that you've set up you might find you don't currently have any emails in your account that's absolutely fine i've got a few in here for demonstration purposes you should still be able to follow along however what you could do is maybe send a few test emails to this email account and fill up your inbox so it's a bit easier for you to replicate the tasks that i'm performing now notice that as soon as i've opened up my outlook inbox i've got this big blue message just here so this is basically running me through a couple of the newer features of outlook 2021 so it's telling me that i have a focused inbox and we're going to speak a lot about this a bit later on now i'm going to click on ok just to get rid of that message so this is what your default outlook will in general look like as i said yours might look slightly different depending on if you have males in there or not and if you're used to using other microsoft applications you'll see that it takes on a very similar structure so running across the top we have a search bar so this is what we can use to search for different items across not only our inbox but also our calendar and our tasks underneath that we have our ribbons and again this is standard throughout the microsoft applications currently i'm clicked on the home ribbon and this is where i can find lots of different groups that contain different commands that help me execute different tasks in outlook and in general you're going to find the most common tasks on the home ribbon we then have a send and receive ribbon a folder ribbon a view ribbon and then finally a help ribbon we also have a file tab which isn't effectively a ribbon if we click on file it takes us into what we call the backstage area so this is where we can perform our more admin style tasks so we can save things we can print things this is where we'll find all of our outlook options and our account settings and we are going to go into this in much greater detail than i am in this lesson but just be aware of the difference between the file menu and the rest of the ribbons now one really important change in outlook 2021 is that you have the choice of using the classic ribbon that we're looking at right now or you can choose to use what we call the simplified ribbon and the simplified ribbon is really a more modern version and you'll find it in the newer versions of outlook now what we're looking at now as i said is the classic ribbon layout so if you've used older versions of outlook or other microsoft applications this is going to look very familiar to you and it might be that you want to carry on working in this classic view but just so you know if you do want to work with the simplified ribbon if you go all the way over to the end of the ribbon on the right hand side notice we have a little drop down arrow which says ribbon display options when i hover over it let's click the drop down you'll notice the first thing here it says classic ribbon and i have that one selected but if i choose simplified ribbon you're going to notice that that dramatically changes the look and feel of my ribbons at the top so they're much more compact also notice that i'm now getting a little screen tip pop-up that says welcome to outlook simplified find commands you use less frequently and those that won't fit on your screen here in more commands so it's basically simplified the ribbon down to the commands that you're going to use most frequently and everything else you can find underneath these three dots in this little drop down menu and this runs through all of the different ribbons so if we click on send and receive it's the same structure view and help now if you do choose this ribbon layout to work with it's a lot less overwhelming than maybe the classic ribbon because you don't have absolutely all of the commands visible on the screen it also has a much more modern look and feel which you might prefer and for this training course we are going to work with the simplified ribbon simply because it is brand new and we would expect going forward in later releases that microsoft are probably going to make the simplified ribbon the default as opposed to the classic however everything i am going to show you on the simplified ribbon is also available on the classic ribbon as well now just moving away from the ribbons if we take a look at the rest of the outlook interface so this is the default structure over on the left hand side we have the mail accounts that we have attached and also our folders within that email account so let's start just here where it says sell underscore mates at outlook.com that's my email address that's the one that i set up and attached to outlook when i first set up my outlook and then you'll notice underneath we have various different folders so we have our inbox folder which is where all of our emails come into and if i click the arrow to expand that you can see any subfolders that i've already created we have a drafts folder which holds emails that are maybe part way through and haven't sent yet we have a sent items folder so that's going to show all of the emails that i've already sent any items that i've deleted and we also have an archive folder in here i'm going to talk a lot about archiving a bit later on what we also have underneath is a conversation history folder and again i'm not going to delve too much into that at the moment just be aware that when you set up your outlook you're going to be able to see your account and then any folders that you have underneath and of course we can change this we can add folders we can add subfolders every time you see a little arrow it normally means you can collapse and expand whatever is underneath now just above that i also have a favorites area and it might be that you don't particularly want a favorites area but i find this quite useful what you can do with favorites is if there are folders that you use frequently instead of having to expand through different subsets of folders you can simply add them to your favorites so they're easily accessible and you can see here i have some of the default folders that i use all of the time so my inbox sent items drafts and deleted items and i'll show you a bit later on how you can manage what folders you see in your favorites section now underneath that all the way at the bottom this is how we switch between the different parts of outlook because remember outlook isn't just email we can manage our calendar from here we can manage our contacts and also add tasks as well so if i want to flip over to my calendar you can see i can click on the calendar icon it's going to jump me to my calendar i can switch to my contacts by clicking that icon and then i can switch to my task list or my to-do list as well so these icons allow you to switch between the different parts of outlook now in the middle here we have our email list so when we receive a new email it's going to show in this big long list what you'll also notice at the top is that we effectively have two inboxes we have one called focused and one called other and again i'll explain what this means to you a bit later on now in this list of emails we do have various different sorting options so we can do things like filter our email we can arrange them so how do we want to list them out do we want to list them with the newest email at the top or do we want to list them by the recipient in alphabetical order we can customize all of that from this drop down just here and then on the right hand side this is where we can get a preview of the email that we're currently clicked on so if i click on any email like this top one just here it's going to display it in that reading pane on the right hand side and of course you can customize exactly where you have your reading pane so if you don't like it on the right hand side you can display it on the left or at the bottom as well and i will show you how to change that setting you also might want to customize how that email displays in the reading pane so it might be that instead of just clicking once on the email you want to double click instead maybe that's more familiar or more natural to you all of these things can be changed in your outlook settings now finally right at the bottom we have the status bar and the status bar is really there to give us information about what's going on in our outlook so if you cast your eyes all the way over to the left hand side you can see it's telling me that i have 20 items or 20 emails in my account and 15 of those emails are currently unread so i've got a little bit of work to do if we move across to the right hand side you can see i've got a message that all of my folders up today now that's related to synchronization and again i'll talk to you more about that a bit later on i can see that i'm connected to the microsoft exchange server so we're not having any connection issues at this point in time and then i have some buttons which allow me to customize or switch between different views so currently i'm in normal view but i also have a reading view which looks slightly different now we're going to stick with normal view for the time being and the final thing we have here is a zoom slider so i can zoom into my emails or i can zoom out of my emails and finally at the top of the screen in the top right hand corner we have those buttons that you'd always expect to see so we can minimize outlook down into the taskbar and when you do that it means the outlook is still running so you can still see emails and get back to it easily you just don't have it on your screen if we want to bring that back we can simply click on outlook again to pop that back open we can minimize so if we don't want outlook to take up the whole window we can click this button and it's going to make it a smaller window click this button again and it's going to maximize it out and then of course we have the close button and if i click on close that is simply going to close all of outlook and if i want to reopen it again i'm going to need to go back to the taskbar click on the icon and it's going to restart outlook so that's a very quick run through of the default outlook interface make sure you're familiar with each part of the screen and i'll see you in the next lesson as i mentioned in the previous lesson when you launch outlook for the first time you're going to need to set up an email account and you can see here that i've already done that and i've attached outlook to my outlook email address and you can see that over here in the folder list and we can set up all different kinds of accounts to use outlook we can set up pop accounts imap accounts and also microsoft 365 accounts and the cool thing about outlook is that it is fairly intuitive and most of us these days have more than one email account for example i've got a outlook account i also have a hotmail account which is effectively still an outlook account and i also have a couple of different gmail accounts and we can set all of these up so that we can view and work with our mail from within outlook so first let's take a look at how we would configure a microsoft 365 account so if i wanted to add my hotmail account so i can view both the mail in cellmates and also hotmail all i would need to do is jump up to the file tab and notice here right at the top it's going to tell you which account you're currently using so i'm connected to sell underscore mates at outlook.com but then we have an ad account button and it automatically defaults to outlook now in the next lesson i'm going to show you how you can add different types of account but the first thing i would do here is simply type in the email address that i want to link to outlook so i'm going to use a test outlook email address simply type it in and then click the connect button outlook is going to go away and then you're going to be prompted to enter in your password simply enter in and then click the sign in button now as long as outlook can find that account you should find the account adds successfully pretty easily so let's just click on done and one thing you won't notice is that it hasn't updated in my folder list so for this to get this to refresh and synchronize i'm going to need to close down outlook and then restart it so let's click on the cross in the top corner and let's give outlook a restart so now that i've restarted take a look at what i have in my folder pane you can see i have that additional outlook account included in my folder list and if i expand it i can see all of the folders that i have for this particular account and i can view and work with the mail in exactly the same way so really nice and simple to add other microsoft 365 accounts gmail accounts are probably the most popular type of account that most people have these days i myself have quite a few gmail accounts and sometimes i like to include those in my outlook as well so let's take a look at how we can add a gmail account so we can view and manage our gmail now the process is fairly similar we're going to jump up to the file tab and we're going to say add account now this isn't an outlook account that i want to set up but i'm going to type in the email address anyway so let's just type in and notice as soon as i finish typing that in the connect button becomes available and what you'll find is that most of the time with gmail accounts when you click on connect it's going to recognize that it is a gmail account and just walk you through the process of adding it so let's do that let's click on connect and you can see it pops up the google window and you can log into your account that way so it's very very straightforward however occasionally what you'll find is that outlook might not recognize the account you're trying to use so let's start again because i want to show you how you can get around this situation and add any email address manually so let's go back to file let's add account let's type it in again but this time we're going to click the drop down next to advanced options and say let me set up my account manually let's click on connect now in the advanced setup we can actually pick which type of email we're trying to connect to so for me this is google so i'm going to choose google and it's going to open up that google window again so we just need to check to make sure that my email address is correct and click on next and then i can type in my password and click sign in now because i have two-step verification set up on my gmail account it's asking me to open the youtube app on my iphone and all i need to do is confirm that this is actually me trying to sign in so i'm just going to hit yes it's me on my phone and then click on i have responded from my phone now you may or may not have that two-step verification it really depends on how you have your gmail account set up so let's scroll down i'm going to say i want to allow everything and now it's adding my gmail account to my outlook and if you take a look over on the left hand side in the folder list you can see that i now have yet another folder which is going to hold all of my gmail now if we take a look in the little window you'll notice that this has been set up as an imap account as opposed to a microsoft 365 account or a pop account and also from here if we've got more accounts that we want to add we can simply run through the process directly from here without having to go back into the file window now i'm not going to add any more accounts so i'm just going to click on done and if you already have quite a lot of mail in the account that you've linked you might find it takes a few minutes for it to synchronize you can see here all of my folders are now filtering through but that is essentially how you can set up a gmail account and also how you can manually add any other account before we dive into exactly how to use all the different features of outlook 2021 it's always good to check to make sure that you have your spelling and grammar set up as you would like because spelling and grammar is so important when you're composing an email if we send out an email to a client that's full of spelling errors or grammatical errors then it really does make us look quite unprofessional so we want to make sure that we are spell checking and grammar checking everything before we send it out so let's make sure we know where we go to check our settings now the first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to create a brand new email now we're going to spend more time looking at all of the different ways you can create new emails but just for this example if we take a look on the home ribbon notice the first button here is new email so let's click it to pop open a brand new email now don't worry too much at this stage about all of these different buttons and commands that we have in here i'm not expecting you to know exactly what all of these mean but what i do want you to check is to very quickly jump across to the review tab in the new email and notice that we have a spelling and grammar button so if we click spelling and grammar this is where you would come to spell check your email now i've just typed some test text into here and you can notice straight away that i have quite a few spelling and grammatical errors if we take a look at the first word this is supposed to say hello but instead i have this red squiggly line underneath the word so that is outlook's way of letting me know that i have a spelling error so all spelling errors will be flagged with that red squiggly underline whereas if there's a grammatical error in the sentence or in the paragraph that's going to have a blue double underline now what i could then do is click on my spelling and grammar button and it's going to pick up all of the errors that i've made for example here it says hello and underneath i have some suggestions so outlook is trying to help me out here by having a good guess at the word that i meant now in this case i did mean to say hello so i can simply select it from the suggestions and then i can say change and it's going to correct that for me outlook then moves on to the next error in this paragraph so this is a grammatical error which is why it's highlighted in blue also notice at this stage the dictionary language that i'm using is english united kingdom so again this is a setting that you're probably going to want to change depending on whereabouts in the world you're located now once again i'm going to take the suggestion let's click on change it moves across to the next word which is attachment so i'm going to change because the suggestion is correct and then the final suggestion here is the word server which is correct so let's click on change again and now it's telling me that my spell check is complete now i mentioned briefly there making sure that you've got the language set correctly and if we change the language in that drop down whilst we're running through the spell check then it's really going to only apply for that particular mail if you want to change it for all of your mails if you jump up to language you can jump into set proofing language and this is where you can adjust exactly which language which dictionary you want it to use so the one at the top is the one that's currently in use so this case english united kingdom and i also have detect language automatically set and i would recommend that you set both of those to make sure that it's using the correct dictionary for your location let's click on ok so that's one way you can check the spelling and grammar in your email messages and also check the language now i'm going to close down this email and i'm not going to save it because we don't really need this one another place we can go to check our spelling and grammar settings is in outlook options so let's jump up to file and into options right at the bottom so let's start out by clicking on mail notice here in the compose messages section this second group here allows us to define a couple of spelling and autocorrect options so here i can choose to always check spelling before sending so if i was to check this box if i haven't done a spell check when i click on send to send the mail it's going to prompt me to do a spell check so this is quite useful if you're the type of person that always forgets to spell check their emails after they've typed them out and once again we have a spelling and autocorrect button which is going to allow us to define our spelling and autocorrect settings in a bit more detail now i don't want to talk too much about autocorrect at this stage but if we scroll down to the section titled when correcting spelling and outlook i always like to make sure i have check spelling as you type turned on so that i can immediately see those spelling and grammatical errors with the red squiggly underline and the blue double underline so i would highly recommend that you at least have the top two options in here turned on as well and then the final thing to point out in here related to spelling is the language section so at the top here this is the display language so this is being picked up from my pc settings and then the box underneath is the are the languages that you want to use for proofing so so notice here that i have english united kingdom and english united states installed and that's because i tend to create courses for clients in both countries and we might speak the same language but we definitely have different ways of spelling things now if you want to add another proofing language you have an add a language button just here and you can go through and add whichever language you want to spell check in so basically make sure that your language and proofing options match the language that you're using in this lesson we're going to talk about a really useful option and that is the quick access toolbar and the quick access toolbar is available across all of the microsoft applications so if you've used it in excel and powerpoint or maybe word then the good news is it's pretty much exactly the same in outlook but because we're using outlook 2021 and we're using the simplified ribbon we do have a couple of differences between this version of outlook and the older version so we'll take a look at those in a minute but first let's delve into exactly what the quick access toolbar or the qat as we call it for short does now really all the qat allows you to do is basically access commands that you use frequently quickly so currently if i'm looking for a particular command i might have to search through all of the different ribbons trying to find it what i could do instead is display the quick access toolbar and add the command that i use all the time to the qat so that it's easily accessible now if you have used or are familiar with the q80 and other applications you might be looking at your outlook window thinking to yourself well where is the qat in outlook 2021 and this is where we have a little bit of a difference because by default the qat isn't visible and in older versions of microsoft and in particular outlook the q80 has always been visible by default now if you want to view the q80 or use the q80 if we hover our mouse all the way over on the right hand side where we have this little drop down arrow notice right at the bottom here we get the choice to show the quick access toolbar now as soon as i do this you'll notice that i get another toolbar underneath my ribbons and currently the toolbar just says send and receive all folders and undo now this is effectively my qat now once again this might look a little bit different to what you've been used to and that's because i'm actually showing the labels for each of the commands in many of the older versions of microsoft when you opened up the qat you'd see your commands there but you'd only see the icon associated with that command and not the label now it might be that you like the label maybe sometimes you find it a bit difficult to know what each of the icons means but if you don't and you want to save a little bit of space if you click the drop down arrow next to the qat right at the bottom you can see we have an option to hide command labels if i click that i just get those icons and no labels another thing you can do with this qat is you can move its position so you can see as soon as i turned it on it was positioned underneath my main ribbons but if i want this to be tucked up out of the way i could click that drop down arrow again and choose to show it above the ribbon which is going to put it all the way up here in the corner and this is all very much personal preference it really depends where you prefer to display it and of course if you don't like having this q80 or you find that you don't use it you can choose to hide the quick access toolbar all together now we're not going to hide it because i'm going to show you how you can customize your q80 now once we're in this menu take a look at what we have in here we have a few common commands that you might want to use in outlook and the ones that are currently ticked so send receivable folders and undo are the two icons that i can see on the quick access toolbar so what i can simply do here is choose which ones from the list i want to add to my qat so maybe i find that i'm always printing out emails so i want to add the print command let's just select it and it's going to add that to the qat i can go back in here and maybe i want to add the reply icon as well and i can carry on going toggling on these different commands in here now of course when we click this drop down we only have a selection of about 15 commands and there are so many more commands available in outlook that we might want to add to our qat so how do we get to those how do we add other commands to our quick access toolbar well there's a couple of different ways you can do it by far the easiest is simply to right click on the button on the ribbon for example if i want to add the archive command to my qat i can simply right click and choose add to quick access toolbar and you can see it's appeared and i can carry on going so maybe i want to add the categorize option to my qat i can right click add to quick access toolbar now it's worth pointing out that not all commands in outlook are available on the ribbons there are many commands that are hidden underneath different menu structures and aren't immediately obvious so if i want to see a full list of every single command available in outlook i can simply click the drop down and jump into more commands now this is actually going to jump us across to our outlook options this is what you would find underneath that file tab notice we've jumped into the quick access toolbar section and on the right hand side we can see all of the commands that we currently have added to the quick access toolbar now on the left hand side i can see all of the commands available in outlook categorized into different groups so currently i'm just viewing the popular commands and the good thing about this is they are all in alphabetical order which makes them a little bit easier to find now if i just want to see a big long list of every command available if i click the drop down i can choose all commands and that's going to load up absolutely every single command available in outlook and i can simply go through find the one that i'm looking for so maybe the clipboard for example and then click the add button to move it to the quick access toolbar and i can carry on going adding different commands to my qat once i move them over to the quick access toolbar i then have these up and down arrows which are going to allow me to organize my commands into a logical order so maybe i want to move categorize up a little bit maybe i want to put reply at the top there maybe i want to move archive down to the bottom you get the idea you can just reorder them if i decide that i want to remove anything for example maybe i think i don't need close all items anymore i can select it and click the remove button in the middle and when i'm working in this window i also have the option to change the toolbar position to below the ribbon and i can choose to show those command labels again if i want to now the final thing you can do in here is you can add a little bit of structure to your quick access toolbar by adding what we call separators and separators are really just little lines which will show on the qat which allow you to visually group together commands of similar type so if i go to the top of this group notice we have separator so i could select this and click on add and maybe i want to add three of them let's do that and then i can use my up and down arrows at the side to move these into position so maybe i want this one to separate off these first four commands maybe i want this one just there and we'll keep this one where it is once you're happy with the layout then simply click on ok and that's going to update at qat if you take a look at the layout now it's reordered all of the icons and we have these little lines in between each group just to add a little bit of structure and i think i'm actually gonna move my qat to below my ribbon now of course when it comes to removing icons from your qat the process is very straightforward for example we can right-click on any of the icons and choose remove from quick access toolbar we can even right click on a separator and remove that from the quick access toolbar as well so effectively this qat is a really good efficiency tip add to it all of the commands that you use frequently to make your life a lot simpler outlook today is a quick way of seeing an overview at a glance of everything that's going on in your outlook account it'll show you upcoming events in your calendar it will show you if you have any emails unread how many drafts you have and it will also show you your task list and the cool thing about outlook today is that you can customize it to suit your needs and tailor the information so that you can see what's of most interest to you so how do we access outlook today well it's a simple case of clicking on our mailbox now when i say clicking on the mailbox i don't mean click on the inbox i mean click on the actual email address just here this is a mailbox notice it jumps us to what we call outlook today so i can see in here today's date i can see any calendar appointments that i have coming up this week i can see any tasks currently i don't have any because i haven't added any and i also get a quick overview of my messages so i can see that i have 15 messages in my inbox one draft and nothing sitting in my outbox and notice that these are clickable links as well so if i want to jump to my inbox i can click on this and it's going to take me directly there so outlook today is a really nice way of just getting a general overview of everything that's upcoming this week now of course we can make customizations to this it might be that when you first start outlook you want to see this outlook today page by default when i open my outlook it defaults to my inbox as opposed to outlook today but we can definitely change that in our settings i also might want to change the theme or the style of my outlook today and maybe determining other things that i want to see on this page so if we want to customize the way our outlook today works if you take a look in the top right hand corner we have a customize outlook today button so let's click on it so the first thing we can customize is if we want to go directly to outlook today when we start up outlook so i'm going to say yes i want to go to outlook today i can then choose folders that i'm interested in seeing on that outlook today page so if you recall when we were looking at the messages section we simply had inbox drafts and outbox but if i want to customize that and add some more folders i can click on choose folders and then choose whichever ones i like so maybe i'm interested in seeing my sent items as well let's select it and click on ok i can also choose how many days i want to show in my calendar so i'm going to change this from five days to seven days and then we can customize the type of tasks that we want to see on that main page so i'm currently showing all tasks as we saw i don't currently have any tasks as yet and i can then choose how i want to sort my tasks so currently i have mine sorted in due date in ascending order but of course you can change this so maybe you want to change it to sort them by start date in ascending order and then finally the bottom we can choose a style for our outlook today so by default we have the standard style but we do have a couple of other things in here so we can have a two column layout a one column layout and then we have a couple of different themes so summer and winter so i'm going to change mine to summer now that i've made my changes i'm going to click save changes in the top right hand corner and you can see those changes take effect so the most obvious change is the theme here so i now have this nice bright yellow which really differentiates it from other mailboxes and folders and if you take a look underneath messages you can see that the change that i made there is also reflected so i can now see my sent items folder and as we start adding more and more things into our calendar and creating tasks we're gonna see these appear in outlook today as well the final thing i want to show you is if i now close down my outlook and then reopen it again notice that it loads directly into outlook today as opposed to going to my inbox there are numerous different ways that you can get on-demand help when you're working in outlook 2021 and in this lesson we're going to take a look at all the different options that you have when it comes to getting help now we all need a little bit of help every now and again it might be something fairly straightforward that you're not entirely sure how to do or maybe something more complex whatever the issue is that you're having outlook comes with a vast selection of help files which will help you find your answer now the most obvious way to get help if we take a look at our ribbons is by clicking on the help ribbon and you'll notice here that we have quite a few different options and depending on your location in the world some of these are going to be more helpful than others now the first option that we have here is help and if we hover over take a look at the screen tip that i have there because it's showing me the shortcut key to quickly jump to help wherever i am so if i'm clicked on the home tab and i want to pull up the help files all i need to do is press f1 and it's going to pop open that help pane on the right hand side and these are all of the help files that are available in outlook 2021 divided down into different categories so this really depends on what exactly it is that you're searching for so if we click on get started underneath this section you're going to find some of the most common tasks that you're likely to perform when you're using outlook for example things like adding an email account in outlook notice here that we also have a little home icon and a back button so if i want to come out of here i can click back and it's going to take me back to that main menu so for example if i'm looking for information on how we can send an email something really basic i'd probably go to the email section just here and take a look through some of these different subjects so the top one here create reply to or forward an email message in outlook.com that pretty much sounds like what i want to do so let's click on the link to jump into that help file and that's exactly where it's going to take us it's going to take us to the microsoft support site and we can read a little bit more about creating and sending email messages you can see here i have step by step instructions so it makes it extremely clear now if we go back to that main page again we could spend time browsing through these different categories looking for help on a particular topic but what about if we know exactly what we're looking for so maybe i want to find out more information about how to create a rule in outlook well instead of going through each category i can use this search bar at the top and just type in what it is i'm looking to do so if i say create rule and hit the enter key it's going to go away and search through all of the help files and i can then scroll through and see which one best matches my search criteria so here it says manage email messages by using rules that sounds about right let's click on the link and now i get into my step-by-step instructions as to exactly how to do that so these help files are exceedingly useful one other thing to remember with this little window or this pane on the right hand side is that you can move this so if you don't particularly like it docked to the right hand side of the screen or maybe you want to maximize it so it's full screen if you hover your mouse over the top of this pane until you get that double headed arrow click and just drag it out it then becomes this floating pane and we can use the corners to pull it out and resize this window and make it as big as we like so sometimes that's useful if you're trying to read through a lot of information because you have a little bit more space now i'm going to close this window down so that is how you can get to your help files you can simply click on the help button or you can press the shortcut key f1 to open up that pane so aside from that what else do we have on here well we have a contact support button so this will allow you to get help from an office support agent now this tends to look a little bit different depending on where you're located in the world i know that if you're in the us sometimes you'll see like a phone number in here so that you can contact support so let's type in something in here how do i create a rule let's click on get help and see what we get well it's telling me that there are no search results which to me doesn't really make much sense as this is a fairly common task which you can find in the help files but it is giving me the option to talk to an agent so if i click on talk to an agent you see i get an error message and that's because i'm in the uk i think if you're in the us then this feature probably works but as i said it is all determined by your location so for me that option isn't particularly useful let's move on to the next one which is feedback so this is if you want to provide some feedback to microsoft maybe you want to let them know that you like a particular feature or you don't like something or maybe you have a suggestion on how they could improve something so if you want to be part of that and improving the products you can send feedback directly to microsoft the next button here is to suggest a feature so again this is very similar to the feedback button if you find that there's something that you often need to do in outlook and it isn't currently a feature of the application you could put in a request here send some screenshots and even add your email address to have a discussion with someone from microsoft about the new feature so that might be something that you want to do the next button here is show training and this can be really helpful because it will show you a library of different help videos so for example if we go to the quick start section you can play a video on how to add an email account and that's where you'll find in this show training section all of the help files in here tend to be video led so if you're somebody who prefers to watch a video as opposed to reading step-by-step instructions then these training files can be exceedingly useful so don't forget about those as well and then finally we have this thing called support tool and this is a fairly new feature in outlook this again takes you to the microsoft support site now if we scroll down notice that we have three tabs here office outlook and teams now because we're dealing with outlook let's click on the outlook tab and what you're finding here are common tasks which you might come across when you're first setting up your outlook and how you can resolve them if you're having issues so if your outlook won't start you have a big old troubleshoot button just here which will walk you through the troubleshooting steps or if maybe outlook keeps asking for your password and you don't know why you have a button here which is going to help you walk through those steps so this is really kind of like a diagnostic tool it will allow you to go through and fix any issues that you're having in that initial setup of your outlook so that can sometimes be really useful now the final way that you can get help is by using the search bar at the top now if you want to quickly jump your cursor up to the search bar there is a keyboard shortcut for this of alt q you can see it grabs focus up there and i can then type in exactly what it is i'm trying to do so let's keep with the create a rule and you can see i have two sections i have actions so it's going to show me exactly where the command is where i can go to create a rule or i can get help on creating a rule so you'll always see this right at the bottom whenever you type anything into this search bar it's going to have the option to get help on this particular item as well so if i click on get help to create a rule it's basically just going to open up those help files again and i can go in browse through the different subjects and click on whichever one interests me so quite a few different ways there for you to get help when you're working in outlook 2021 it's time now to complete exercise two and in this exercise i'd like you to complete the following tasks i'd like you to configure an email account of your choice so this might be your hotmail your gmail your microsoft or your live account once you've done that i'd like you to ensure that you have some test emails to work with throughout the balance of this course if you don't have emails it's going to be pretty hard to work through some of these sections so what you can do here is you can maybe ask friends and family to just send you some test mails for training purposes or you could even send yourself some emails from another account just make sure that you have at least seven or eight emails in your account if they've got attachments and things like that even better once you have some emails i'd just like you to make sure that you're familiar and comfortable with the outlook 2021 interface for example understand the different terminology understand the ribbons and where your basic commands are located and also make sure you know where you need to go in order to access your outlook settings once you've done that i'd like you to make sure that you have the quick access toolbar visible and i'd like you to add the following commands undo redo archive and reply and i don't mind which method you use in order to add these i'd then like you to check your spelling and grammar settings and make sure it's configured to check spelling and grammar as you type i'd also like you to know where to go to access outlook today and i'd like you to customize the following so i want you to make sure that when you open up outlook the first folder you see is outlook today i'd like you to set your calendar to display the last seven days and then i'd like you to change the theme to winter so quite a few different things for you to do there now is the time to pause the video and practice that but if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing i asked you to do here was to configure an email account of your choice and for this i'm going to just add a gmail account so for this we're going to jump up to the file tab and we're going to click the add account button simply type in the email address of the account you'd like to add and then you can either click on advanced options to set up your account manually or you can just click the connect button and see what happens a lot of the time you'll find that outlook's able to configure it for you so we can see here that it's managed to configure this as an imap account and i can now see that my account has been added successfully over in the folder list i'm going to click on done and we are good to go the next thing i asked you to do was to make sure that you have some mails in your account to work with now i can't really demonstrate this this really just involves you maybe asking other people just to send you a few test emails through to your email address alternatively you can send emails to yourself my email address is sell underscore mates at outlook.com i could click new email compose an email and simply address it to myself so i'm going to give this a subject line of test click on send and i should find in a couple of seconds that email comes through to my account so that's another way that you can just get some emails into your outlook mailbox the next thing i asked you to do was just to make sure that you're familiar and comfortable with the outlook interface so what i mean by that is know some of the terminology so what we have on the left hand side is a folder list in the middle here we have our email list and on the right hand side we have our reading pane our commands are all housed and grouped logically onto different ribbons and remember if we click the drop down we have the choice of switching between the classic ribbon or the newer more modern simplified ribbon all of our admin style tasks we can find under the file tab in the backstage area and this is also where we find our outlook settings underneath outlook options in the next part of the exercise i asked you to customize the quick access toolbar and add some commands now the first thing we need to do is make sure that we are showing the quick access toolbar i then asked you to add undo redo reply and archive so for undo and redo i'm going to click the drop-down now i have undo in here so that one's pretty straightforward i can see archive and reply on my home ribbon so i can simply right click add to quick access toolbar on both of these now redo is a little bit more complicated for this i'm going to need to jump into more commands i'm going to switch across to show all commands and because these are organized into alphabetical order i can simply scroll down until i get to r and there is the redo button let's add that across into the quick access toolbar and click on ok next i asked you to check your spelling and grammar settings so let's jump back up to file and we're going to go into options and across into mail and from here we want to jump into spelling and auto correct and right at the bottom we have a couple of check boxes check spelling as you type and mark grammar errors as you type i want you to make sure that you have ticks in both of these boxes and the final thing i asked you to do was to customize outlook today so the first thing i required you to do was simply access outlook today and we do that by clicking on the actual mailbox on our email name in the top right hand corner we have a customize outlook today button and i asked you to ensure that when we start up outlook it goes straight to outlook today so we want to make sure we have a check in this first box i then asked you to modify the calendar so that it shows the last seven days which i've already set just here and finally i asked you to change the actual theme or the style to winter so let's do that and click on save changes it's important to understand how mail is sent and received in outlook with a microsoft account we receive our mail as soon as it hits the server whereas with something like an imap account it's delivered at designated intervals so you might find that there is a small delay now we can make sure that everything is synced and all up today and we've received all our mail by simply looking down in the status bar so let's come out of outlook today and simply click on our inbox for our microsoft account now if we take a look down the status bar you can see it's telling me that all of my folders are up to date and then i'm connected to the microsoft exchange server so i know that everything is synchronized and up-to-date and i have my latest mails in my inbox whereas if i was to click on something like my gmail account so let's expand that out and just click on the inbox you can see it's synchronizing right now so if i had anything that was on the way to this account it should have updated but the difference between a gmail account or an imap account in this case and a microsoft account is that email is kind of synchronized in intervals so there might be a little bit of a delay you might have to wait a minute or so in order for that mail to come through now there is a way that you can manually force mail through to your inbox so if you know that a mail is on its way but you can't yet see it in your inbox you can effectively do a refresh by clicking on the send and receive ribbon and if we click on send receive all folders keyboard shortcut f9 that's going to do a manual sync so any mail that's on its way will be pushed through the server and you'll see it in your inbox so if you're finding that the delays are a little bit too much then you can just manually push those through now another thing that's worth noting here and this again is a difference between a microsoft account and an imap account if we jump back to the inbox for our microsoft account if i go to the home ribbon notice i have things like color categories now we're going to go through these a lot a bit later on but i can effectively assign different color categories to different males in order to organize them now color categories aren't available in gmail quite in the same way that they're available in outlook so if i now click across to the inbox for my gmail account take a look at the home ribbon i don't have the option to assign color categories to emails so just be aware of that there are some differences with regards to the commands you have available depending on whether you're clicked on a microsoft account or an imap or a gmail account now let's just jump back to the send and receive ribbon because another button that can be quite useful on here is this work offline so this will essentially disconnect you from the server and when you're working offline you won't receive any new mail until you reconnect to the server again so this is a pretty good option if you don't want to be disturbed maybe you're working on something really important you can switch to work offline which i'll do right now and i can still create and respond to emails but nothing's going to send until i come back online again and notice down in the status bar now that i've turned this option on it says that i'm currently working offline now if you do create a new email and you try to send it when you're working offline it's basically going to be held in your out box until you come back online again at which point that mail will send through to the recipient now i'm going to go back to send and receive and i'm going to toggle off work offline and you can see that again i'm now connected to the microsoft exchange server in this lesson i'm going to take a look at the basics of opening and reading our email now as we've already seen if we cast our eyes all the way over to the left hand side this is where we have what we call the folder list and this is where you can see any mailboxes that you have attached and you can see i have three here cell mates and then i have another outlook one and then train i t now limited and you can collapse and expand these up depending on what you're interested in seeing underneath the main mailbox this is where we have all of our subfolders so you're going to see certain folders in there by default so things like your inbox drafts sent items and deleted items and if i expand inbox you can see some folders that i've created myself in order to house specific emails another thing you'll also notice when you're looking at your folder list is that some of these folders have a number next to them for example the inbox has a number 15 next to it i have number one next to drafts and number one next to deleted items now this number in relation to the inbox is basically telling me how many unread emails i have currently in my inbox so those are the emails that i haven't yet read and may require attention when it comes to the drafts folder this is where i've started to create an email and then i haven't sent it i haven't finished it i've just saved it into my draft so that i can come back to it later finish it and then send it and then deleted items i can see that i have one message in there which is unread that i've actually deleted so that's what these numbers in blue next to each of the folders mean now another way to determine if an email is read or unread is simply by looking in our email list just here so that's this center section in the middle if the email has this blue bar next to it like this top one just here and these ones further down then that means that that email is unread so you can see the difference between those males and for example the top one from microsoft it doesn't have the blue bar because i've already clicked on this and read the message now notice on the right hand side i have this kind of big empty area that says select an item to read and this is what we refer to as the reading pane so what i can do here is click on the email and that's going to display it in that reading pane notice i only have to click on the email once in order to see that in that pane now you can adjust that i know some people are very much in the habit of double clicking to open up their emails and notice that if i double click on the top email here from microsoft instead of just clicking once it's going to open that email in a brand new pop-out window some people prefer this other people like to view their emails in the reading pane so we can just click once now we can customize that a little bit whether we like to single click or double click to open them in the reading pane and i'll talk to you more about that a bit later on now one thing to notice is when we are looking at certain types of email in the reading pane notice here that i've got a little message at the top here now notice at the top here i have a little red cross as opposed to whatever this is supposed to display and normally when you see these little red crosses throughout your email it usually means that there is some kind of image in there and by default outlook is going to protect you against harmful images by effectively blocking those images now sometimes with an email that's very heavy on images this can really throw off the whole context of the email so what you can do and you can see it in this message just above is to click here to download the pictures so if i click on this blue bar i can say download pictures it's going to reload that email and it's going to load or refresh and all of those red crosses are going to display the image that they relate to so in this case it had simply blocked the microsoft logo so just remember that it's just related to downloading pictures in an email now another thing that we briefly touched on in an earlier lesson is that by default with outlook you're going to get two different types of mailbox so at the top here if we take a look at our email list you can see that currently i'm clicked on focused but we also have another tab called other now some people really like this concept of a focused inbox and other other people don't if you're wondering what the difference is basically when an email arrives in your inbox outlook determines whether that email is important or not and if it does deem it to be an important email something you're going to be interested in it's going to put it in your focused inbox if it considers it to be maybe junk so maybe it's a newsletter or something like that it's going to move it into the other folder so the idea of this is really just to focus your attention on the emails that are most important to you now as i said some people really like this automatic filtering this automatic sorting other people just prefer to see all of their emails in one long inbox now i have to say that i'm not generally a fan of having both of these so i always like to turn off my focused inbox now you can do that very simply by jumping up to the view ribbon and the first button we have here is show focused inbox so if i click this to toggle it off it then just sorts my mails into all and then i have an extra tab which is just going to show me all the emails that are unread and i actually prefer this layout so i'm going to leave it in this for the duration of this course but of course it's entirely personal preference and completely up to you the final thing to point out about opening and reading mails is that when we do open an email in our reading pane this reading pane and all of the widths that you see of these columns are completely customizable so if i hover my mouse over this center line just here i can drag this over to give the inbox a little bit more room i can drag it in so i can see more of the mail and the same applies to our folder list as well so i can drag this all the way out or i can drag it all the way in now there is a lot more we can do in terms of the layout of our folder list our emails and our reading pane i'm going to talk more about that a little bit later on but for now that's really all you need to know about opening and reading email in the previous lesson we briefly mentioned draft messages so what exactly is a draft message well it might be that you've started to type out an email you've maybe got halfway through and maybe you've had to run off to a meeting or maybe you just don't want to send it yet what you can do is save that email and it's going to go into your draft messages folder and then you can come back to it at a later time finish it off and then send it through to the recipient or recipients so let's take a look at that process now the first thing we're going to do here is we're going to create a brand new email which we haven't really done as yet now the easiest way to create a brand new email is to click on the home tab and the first button we have here is new email now notice when i hover over the new email button there is also a keyboard shortcut of control n so if i press control n it's going to create for me a brand new email in its own separate window also notice with this new email button we have a little drop down arrow next to it so this allows me to create not only new emails but other new things so we have email message we can create a new appointment from here a new meeting a new contact or a new task and obviously we're going to be going into these in more detail as we get to those sections of the course but for now let's focus on email message let's click it to open it up now the first thing you'll notice when you create a new email message is that each new email comes with its own set of ribbons so we now have running across the top we have a message ribbon insert draw options format text review and help and these are very different to the ribbons that we have when we're simply working in our inbox so just be aware of that and most of these commands that you'll find on these ribbons allow you to do things like format your message so maybe you want to make certain things bold or a different color we can do things like flag our messages we can insert attachments set specific delivery options things like that and of course we're going to be going into all of these throughout the balance of this course for the time being let's just focus on this brand new email now notice here we have a from drop down and by default it's picked up that i want to send this email from my cell mates email account which in this case is correct however if you do have multiple accounts attached to your outlook like i do i have three different kinds of accounts i could click the drop down just here and choose to send this mail from any other one of these accounts so just bear that in mind as well we then have a to field so this is where we can type in the email addresses of the people that we want to send this email to now we can simply type in the email address of the recipient if you are within an organization and you're all on the same network you can click on the to button and it's going to open up your address book so if you have contacts in your address book already then you can select your contacts from here so you can see currently i only have one contact in my address book that is sophie i can select her click on the two button down here to put her email address into that to field if i wanted to add another email address i can press the semicolon button and then type in the next one so if i type in this is jen green at gmail gmail.com and you can see as i type that it's recognizing this email address because i've used it before now when you click away or move on to the next email address notice that the email addresses now have a line underneath them and this basically means that this is a valid email address that you're sending to if you click away and start to type in the next one and you don't get a line underneath you might find that you've made a typo in the email address or that email address is no longer valid so just be aware of that so you can type in all of your recipient names into here or as you've seen you can select them from your address book we can choose anybody that we want to cc into this email and cc'ing is normally for people who maybe need to know about this email for information purposes but don't really need to action anything on it so the main two recipients would be sophie and jen and i might want to maybe cc ben now one other thing you can do here is you can bcc people as well and bcc stands for blind carbon copy so if you want this email to go to maybe your manager but you don't want all of the other recipients to see that you've also sent it to the manager of the department then you could bcc that person now notice currently we don't have a bcc field just here it's not there by default so what we need to do here is go to the options ribbon click on the three dots at the end and we can say to show the bcc field and that's just going to give us another one down here so maybe i want to copy in the manager we'll say olivia like that and nobody else is going to be able to see that i've actually sent this to olivia once i've typed in all my recipients i can simply add a subject and then i can type in a message now notice here as i've typed this message outlook has flagged that i've got a grammatical error just here so what i can do is just simply right click and right at the top here it's going to show me the most obvious correction so this is the one i want i can select it from that right click menu and it's going to correct that grammatical error for me so now i've completed this email i have all of my recipients in there i'm at the point now where i'm probably going to want to send it by clicking on the send button but maybe just before i do i think to myself actually i want to add a little bit more information in here but i've got to run off to a meeting so what i can do is i can save this to my drafts and come back to it later now if we jump up to the file tab notice that we have a save button just here so i could click on save or alternatively i could just close down the email and it's going to say do you want to save your changes so i'm going to say yes and it's going to move that to my drafts folder now if we take a look at our folder list where we have drafts we have a number two next to this now previously there was just one draft in there if i click on this folder you can see there is my email and if i click on it once i can open it in the reading pane which means i can come back to it later make any changes that i need and i can choose to send it through to my recipients alternatively if i decide at this stage that actually i don't want to send this email i've got a discard button in the top right hand corner as well now i'm pretty happy with this email so let's click on send you'll see it moves from my drafts folder it goes through my out box and then it will land in my sent items folder and you can see if i click on my sent items there is that email right at the top of the list one thing you'll notice when you're sending emails is that if you suddenly see next to outbox number one it means that your email is kind of stuck in the outbox so for some reason it hasn't been sent that can sometimes happen if you've got problems with your internet or maybe the recipient address is wrong something like that so it's always worth keeping an eye on the outbox because if there are any problems sending you're going to find your mail kind of sits in the out box not ever managing to get to the send items folder if you can see it in sent items then you can be confident that that mail has been sent but that's how you compose an email and how you can save it to your drafts and then go back to a later time and send it through to your recipients one of the most common tasks you're likely to perform when using outlook is attaching a document a presentation a spreadsheet or maybe even a pdf or an image to an email to send through to your recipients and this process is really simple so let's walk through it so that we understand so the first thing i'm going to do here is i'm going to create a brand new email and i'm going to use the keyboard shortcut ctrl n to do that let's fill out our recipient information let's add a subject line and now we can add a message so i'm sending this email to jen i'm asking her to please see attach the updated sales figures for q1 and the proposed sales pitch presentation for the client meeting next week so i need to attach two different documents i want to send her the excel spreadsheet that contains the sales figures for q1 and also the powerpoint presentation for the sales pitch so how do we attach items to our email well this is fairly straightforward if we jump up to the message tab or the message ribbon notice we have a little paperclip icon just here and if we hover our mouse over that icon it says attach a file to this item now we have a little drop down arrow here and when we click on this we get this big long list and this is really there to aid us in finding the files that we want to attach so what you're going to see at the top here is a list of recent items that you've worked on so you can see that i've worked on a couple of word documents i've worked on the sales pitch presentation that i want to attach to this email so you're going to see the last 10 recent items that you accessed and used so that makes it really simple just to select one of them for example the sales pitch presentation to attach it now you're always going to get asked this message how do you want to attach this file do you want to share a link or do you want to attach a copy now there's a really important difference between a link and a copy now the presentation that i'm trying to attach i have saved to onedrive and onedrive is microsoft's version of cloud storage so if you're used to using something like google drive then it's pretty much exactly the same thing now because i've saved it up into the cloud into onedrive that is a shared space so it means that i can share a link to the powerpoint presentation and then when jen receives this link she can click on the link it will take her to the powerpoint presentation and she can start working on that file and when you share a link the recipient when they open it is working on the original copy of the file whereas if we attach a copy we're sending a copy of the file instead so any changes jen makes to the copy of the powerpoint presentation are not going to reflect on the original presentation stored on the server so that's the difference between the two now in this example i'm going to attach a copy so let's click on attach a copy you can see it's now attached it to the email now i also need to attach the sales figures for q1 so let's jump back up to our paperclip icon and i can see them sitting in here but let me show you a different way of doing this if it's not listed in the last 10 recent items we have some additional options at the bottom we can go to attach item and you'll see as i hover over we can attach other items to our email so we can attach things like business cards calendars outlook items i can browse different web locations so in this case i can browse my onedrive which i have connected or i can choose to browse this pc and if we browse this pc it's going to open up file explorer and you can then navigate through your different folders and find exactly the file that you're looking to attach so for example if i go to let's go to my documents folder outlook 2021 i'm going to go into course files and i want to attach the sales figures which i can see sitting just here click on insert and it's going to attach those to the email as well so just be aware of all of the different options you have under this paper clip you can attach recent items you can attach other outlook items you can browse one drive if you have files stored there or you can browse your pc if you have your files stored in my documents or downloads or desktop things like that so it makes it really simple the most important distinction here is to know the difference between sending a link to a file and sending a copy so i'm pretty happy with how this message is looking i'm going to click on the send button to send that through when you receive a message that contains attachments it might be that you want to save those attachments off maybe to a folder on your local drives or maybe upload them to onedrive but then delete the actual email message fortunately that is something that we can definitely do we can save the attachments independently of the email message itself so let's take a look at how that works so you can see here that i've just had a new email message come through from jennifer green and i can immediately tell that there are attachments because i can see a paperclip icon just here so let's click once on the message to open it up in the reading pane so we can see her message here it says hey deb here are the new images for the website please update when you have a moment and i can see that she's attached to jpg files image files at the top of this message now it's very important for me to keep and save off these images but i don't really need to keep the email messaging here taking up space so what i can do is notice next to each of the images we have a little drop down just here and this is going to open up a contextual menu and there's lots of things i can do with this image i can preview it so if i want a closer look at the image i can simply do that let's click back to message i can open it so that's going to open it in my photos application i can print the attachment i can save it or i can save all attachments i can even upload it specifically to onedrive or upload all attachments in this message so if you have an email that has quite a few attachments and you want to save them all the quickest thing to do here would be to either save all attachments or upload all attachments depending on where you want to save them so if i wanted to save these to a local drive i would say save all attachments i would make sure i have both of them selected click on ok and then it's going to open up file explorer and i can then choose a folder to save these attachments to so maybe my desktop or documents something like that if i wanted to upload them to one drive i can click the drop down upload all attachments i can select my onedrive account and you can see it's automatically uploading them and now it's telling me that they've both been saved and the cool thing about uploading them to onedrive is that when you go into a file explorer you can see there is my onedrive account just there if i expand it it's created a brand new folder for me called attachments so any attachments that i choose to upload to onedrive are going to be saved into this specific folder and this is done automatically for you as soon as you choose to upload your first attachment to onedrive and you can see both of those files and now sitting there ready for me to use now one thing i can do whilst i'm in here is i can change my view in file explorer by clicking the view drop down to show the details of these images and what that's going to do is it's going to show me the size of each of these images so these are pretty small images they're not taking up a great deal of space but it might be that somebody sends you an email that contains really large images and in general when you're working in outlook you wouldn't really want to keep that email in your email account with those images attached because it's going to take up a lot of space and fill up your outlook mailbox so in general what i like to do is save off the images as i have done here and then i like to delete the email and i now have a couple of different ways that i can do this i could just simply delete the email by selecting it and pressing the delete key on my keyboard alternatively on the home ribbon we have a delete button just here as well and you can also see we have a keyboard shortcut for deleting of control d but what about if i do actually want to keep the email message well as long as i've saved off the images i don't necessarily have to have them attached to the email taking up space what i could do is click the drop down and say remove attachment i'm going to say yes i want to remove it and i'm going to do the same for this one just here so i'm keeping that email which is a very very tiny email in size but i still have those images saved off to my onedrive so a couple of different options for you there when it comes to saving off attachments and keeping your mailbox tidy and small over time you're going to find that your email inbox fills up with hundreds and hundreds of emails and one really important thing to be able to do in outlook is to be able to find specific emails quickly now there are lots of different ways that you can add some kind of organization to your inbox and we're going to be going through a lot of those later we can categorize emails we can flag them we can create subfolders and move them into there but how do we perform a search in our inbox to search for specific items well this is very simple if you take a look at the top of the screen notice that we have a search bar up here so if you want to search you can either click your mouse in that search bar alternatively there is a keyboard shortcut of alt q which will put your cursor directly up in that search area now the first thing you want to do here when you're searching so i'm just going to perform a search on my cellmate's inbox is you need to define the scope of your search and the scope really just means where exactly are you searching so you can see here next to my cursor it says current mailbox so any search i perform currently is going to search through everything in my cell mates inbox if i click the drop down here i can redefine the scope of my search maybe i want to limit my search to a current folder so whichever folder i'm currently clicked on in this case the inbox if i say current folder any search i perform is only going to look in the inbox it's not going to look through drafts sent items or any subfolders that i have i could choose to search through subfolders of the current folder that i'm clicked on all mailboxes which will search across all three mailboxes that i have attached in this outlook account including the gmail inbox and i can even search through all outlook items so that means not only am i searching in my email i'm also searching for the search term through my tasks my contacts and my calendar and if i want to i can even simply search in one of the folders that i have saved to my favorites and again we'll talk about that a little bit more when we discuss the layout now i'm going to change my scope back to current mailbox so now up here i can type in a specific search term that i'm looking for so maybe i'm looking for the email that contains the images for the website well what i can do here is type in the word images if that's all i know hit the enter key and it's going to return any emails that contain the word images and you can see here that i have two so i have a much more refined list now to scroll through to find exactly what i'm looking for if i want to clear that search term and do another search i can simply click on the cross up in that search bar let's click back in search maybe this time i'm interested in specific emails that contain the word olivia i'm gonna type that in hit enter and you can see it's pulled back an email that i've sent where olivia is in the bcc field and it's also returned to me any emails that olivia has sent so you can literally type anything you like into this search bar in order to find your email and this can be really useful if you can just simply remember one word from the email or maybe even the subject matter it becomes quite easy to find exactly what you're looking for now the interesting thing about search is that as soon as you type in a search term and run your search as we have done here notice that we get an additional search ribbon and this is called a contextual ribbon and contextual ribbons appear from time to time in outlook as and when they're needed so if i'm not performing a search i don't need access to this search ribbon so if i close this search down that search ribbon disappears because i don't currently need it it's only when i then type in a search term again so let's just do olivia once more that that search ribbon appears and this search ribbon is going to allow me to further refine my search results to help me find what i'm looking for so you can see here the first one i have is from so this is going to allow me to search by sender so if i want to just see emails from olivia i can click from and then up in the search bar can you see it says sender name and it's highlighted in blue so i can then just type in olivia hit enter and it's just going to refine that down to emails that i've received from olivia the other emails that i had just before this search result contained the word olivia these are emails specifically from olivia i could clear that search out again and click up here and maybe i'm looking for emails that i sent to somebody else so maybe i just want to find emails that i've sent to sophie i can type that in the top hit enter and it's going to return those results for me i can search by the subject so maybe i'm looking for an email that has the word website in the subject line let's hit enter and you can see it's going to return those results and you can see all of these other options that we have on here so maybe i just want to see emails that have attachments so let's clear the search and this time we're going to say has attachments and it's going to pull back any emails in my current mailbox that have attachments now you can also combine different search terms so maybe once i've filtered for emails that have attachments i want to filter those results where the subject has the word pitch in it hit enter and now you can see my result so just by combining two or more pieces of search criteria i've been able to really refine down my results and find the email that i'm looking for and this pretty much works exactly the same for the rest of these i can search for all unread email in my inbox that's quite a nice one if you just want to see those items that you haven't yet looked at or actioned i can search by category and we're going to talk about categories and flags more later on if an email's been flagged as important i can search for all of those particular emails and if i want to make sure that i'm also searching through my deleted items i can include my deleted items folder so lots of different ways that we can refine as such once we've finished searching we can click the close search button at the end here and that's just going to close down that search ribbon now one other thing we can do again something we're going to discuss later is if we perform a search regularly so maybe i find myself regularly searching for emails from olivia which have attachments i can actually save that search criteria which makes it really easy for me to run the search with those properties anytime i like with the click of a mouse and as i said we're going to take a look at that a little bit later so just have that information in the back of your mind but that's pretty much how you can search and refine your results when you have a long email list aside from using the search bar to find messages in our outlook inbox we can also use filters and some people much prefer to use filters as opposed to search so let's take a look at how these filters work because again they are very simple now once again i'm just working in my cell mates inbox so i have quite a few different emails in here if we go up to the home ribbon all the way over towards the end we have this little funnel icon and if we hover our mouse over this icon it says filter email so this is going to allow us to filter email messages to only show certain items such as unread or flagged items now if we click the drop down next to filter we can choose one of these pieces of filter criteria so if i want to filter my inbox to show only the mails that have attachments i can simply click has attachments it's going to refresh and i can now see all of those emails notice what's going on in the search bar because filter is still related to search you can see it's automatically put in the search bar has attachments yes and it's performing this search on the current mailbox so it's still effectively doing a search but we're just using the filter drop-down instead let's close the search i can go back to filter and maybe i want to just see all of my unread emails or maybe i want to see emails assigned to a certain category again more about that a bit later on i can even filter for emails that have been sent to me or where i've been cc'ed so if i click this that's going to give me those search results as well once again if we take a look up in the search bar you can see the piece of code effectively that we have in there to perform at that filter so it's searching for my email address in the to field or in the cc field once again close the search to come out now if we click the filter drop down one more time and go all the way down to more filters this is simply going to jump us up into the search bar where we can then use the search ribbon to apply more filters to as such so filter and search are related but some people prefer to use one over the other throughout this course so far we've been viewing our email in the same way and what i mean by that is that we have our folder list and our mailboxes over on the left hand side we have our email list in the middle and we have our reading pane on the right hand side but of course we can customize this and make changes to our inbox so that we have things set up in a way that suits us best and everything i'm going to show you in this lesson is very much down to personal preference so really just take the skills that you've learned and set up your mailbox in a way that suits you now in the previous lesson we saw how we can filter and search for mail when we clicked on the all tab notice that we have different ways that we can sort the email that we're seeing so currently i have all of my emails sorted by date and that's in general the way that i prefer to have mine set up i like to see the last mail that came in at the top of the list but you can of course change this so if you take a look next to it we have an up arrow and it says newest on top but what i could do is click this and it's going to show me the oldest at the top and i know that some people do like to organize their emails this way so they're dealing with the oldest males first so again that's entirely up to you now aside from sorting out emails by date if we click the drop down just here we have a whole host of ways that we can sort our mail so i can apply some filters at the top here i've currently got mine on all mail which is fine and then i can choose how i want to arrange these so maybe instead of arranging them by date i want to order them by who they're from so if i click on from you can see that i now get these little collapsible and expandable groups so at the top here and it goes in alphabetical order i have all of the mails that i've received from ben lee and i can click the little arrow next to his name to collapse it up so if i'm just looking for specific emails from a specific person or i want to look through all the emails i've received from one person this is a good option to use let's click back on the drop down we have other things in here i can arrange by who the emails have been sent to if i have categories applied i can group them into their different categories i can even sort them by size so this can be quite a good one if you're running out of space in your mailbox so if i click on size it's going to group them by the size of email so i can see here at the top i'm just showing all of the emails that are of medium size so in between 25 kilobytes and one meg let's click the drop down again maybe i want to organize them by attachments so this time i can see at the top all of the emails which have attachments and then i have a group called no attachments for the rest of my email so lots of different ways that you can organize your mailbox in this way right at the bottom if i decide that i want to turn on that focused inbox again i can do that from here as well now i'm going to rearrange these back into date order now notice here when we sort by date we also have these different groups so i can see emails that have been received today last week two weeks ago three weeks ago so on and so forth now another thing you can do in outlook is you can group all conversations together and this is what we call threaded conversations now what i'm going to do here is jen's sent me this email i'm going to quickly send her a reply now if we take a look over in the reading pane notice that we have three buttons here reply reply all and forward now i just want to reply to jen if this email had been sent to more than one person i could reply to everybody or i could choose to forward this email onto someone entirely different now i'm just going to reply i'm just going to say to jen thanks so much i'll get these updated asap let's send that through so effectively i am now having a conversation with jen she's sent me an email i've replied to it and would you take a look at that jen has now replied to that email i've just sent and she's just said cool now effectively these emails going back and forth between myself and jen are all part of one conversation but every time she replies to me this is coming in as a brand new email now that might be fine if you prefer it that way but what we can do to save a little bit of space in our inbox and keep everything together is choose to show this as a conversation instead so if we jump up to the view tab and click the drop down next to current view i can say show as conversations i can then get a prompt which asks me if i want to show all messages arranged in conversations do i want to apply this to just this folder so just the inbox or all mailboxes now i'm going to say just this folder and notice what happens when i click this you can see that i no longer have two messages from jen i just have one but i also have a little expandable arrow just here so if i click this it's going to show me the entire email chain so i can see all of those individual messages underneath they're just grouped together saving me some space in my mailbox so changing the current view to show as conversations is really going to save you quite a bit of space as i mentioned some people really like that feature other people i know will come in here and turn that off straight away so it's entirely up to you if you choose to use this now another thing we might want to do here is change the layout how we're viewing our outlook so once again working on this view ribbon if we go across to the layout drop down we can customize the different parts of our outlook for example the folder pane currently i have this set to normal but i can choose to display it in a minimized format and you'll see as soon as i do that it kind of collapses it up and changes the way this looks so it's a much more compact way of viewing my folders if i want to open it back up again i can simply click on the arrow to expand that folder pane out but notice that it's only temporary if i click onto my email it's going to expand it back down again if i expand this out and i want to keep it in this format i'm going to need to click the drawing pin icon to pin that folder pane again so just be aware of that i can even turn off my folder pane entirely so if i click on off it's just going to get rid of that now i will say that i don't use this option very often because i'm always switching between my different folders but if you just need to focus on something in particular and you want to get rid of that pain you can definitely do that now i'm going to turn mine back on and i'm going to switch on normal now also underneath here underneath folder pane notice i have favorites selected and that is why i can see that little favorites area right at the top if i turn that off it's going to get rid of that favorites section and i can simply toggle it back on again and those come back now if we click the layout drop down one more time this is where we can define our options for our reading pane so i like to have mine on the right hand side but you might prefer to have it on the bottom and you get a completely different look and feel there with your outlook and of course you can drag this up to give it a little bit more room so now i'm viewing my mails at the bottom underneath my email list so you can choose to have your reading pane on the right the bottom you can turn it off altogether or we do have some additional options just here and this goes back to something i mentioned at the beginning of this section if you want to be able to click on an email once so that it shows in the reading pane and have that mark that email as read you can select this option just here some people like to be able to click on an email read it in the reading pane but still have it there showing as unread so again that is entirely up to you now i'm going to switch my reading pane layout back to the right hand side now the final thing we have in here is the to do bar and this can be really useful now by default the to-do bar isn't turned on but what i could do is i could select calendar and it's going to open up this to-do bar at the side where i can see my calendar and then any meetings that i have coming up this week so i find this really useful if i'm replying to emails and maybe trying to arrange the date of a meeting or something like that to be able to very quickly see what i have currently coming up in my calendar if we go back to layout and to do bar i could maybe even show any tasks that i have coming up as well so we can see those at the bottom so this is like a electronic to-do list where you can keep track of any items that you need to action so the to-do bar can be really useful if you don't like that at all you can turn it off and that is actually the default so those are some of the options you have when it comes to determining the layout of your outlook view it's time now to complete exercise three where we're going to get to practice some of the skills that we've learned throughout this section so the first thing i'd like you to do is just to create a brand new email and add yourself as the recipient i'd like you to then type the subject line exercise 0 3 budget summary and just a short message of your choice i don't really mind too much what you put in the body of the email just as long as you have something in there i'd then like you to download the file exercise03budgetsummary.xlsx from the exercise files folder and once you've done that i'd like you to attach the file as a copy to the email and save the email to the drafts folder now i'd like you to repeat this process and create two more emails in exactly the same way but this time i'd like you to download and attach the files exercise 3 brand guidelines dot pptx and exercise03 blogpost.docx respectively once you've attached the files to both of the emails i'd like you to save them to the drafts folder once you've done that i'd like you to go to your drafts folder and send all three emails and then i'd like you to use the search facility to search in your sent items only for all emails that have exercise 0 3 in the subject line and that's an important point to note if you're struggling to find the emails in this folder make sure that you have the words exercise 03 in the subject line of each email and the final thing i'd like you to do here is simply customize the reading pane so it's set up in a way that suits you so that might be on the right hand side on the bottom or you might choose to turn it off altogether so now is the time to pause the video and have a go at this exercise but if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing i asked you to do here was to create a brand new email i'm going to use ctrl n to do that and address it to yourself so i'm going to type in my email address we now need to complete a subject line and some body text and the first subject line i asked you to input was exercise 0 3 budget summary and we don't have to worry too much about the text we enter in here so i'm just going to use a little trainer's trick to quickly get some text into this email i then asked you to make sure that you've downloaded the file exercise zero three budget summary summary.xlsx from the exercise files folder and when you download items to your pc in general and this isn't the same for everybody but the default is that they will go into your downloads folder so that is where you're going to need to pick them up to unless you specified a different folder for all of your downloads now i have mine saved off into a different folder but the process is the same so we're going to jump up to the insert ribbon i'm going to attach a file and we're going to go straight down to browse this pc so this is where you would navigate to your downloads folder i'm going to go to my outlook folder and exercise files and it's this one we want so let's click on insert and you can see by default it's automatically inserted this as a copy it might be that you get a little pop-up message asking you if you want to insert a copy or a link and the one you would have chosen there is copy next i asked you to save this email to your drafts folder a couple of different ways we can do this we can simply go file and save or alternatively if we close down the email we can say yes we want to save at changes now i asked you to repeat this process and create two more emails with different attachments so let's do them one at a time ctrl n i'm going to address it to myself again this time the subject line is exercise 0 3 guidelines once again i'm going to use my trainer's trick just to get some text in this email and i'm going to attach the message in a very similar way so browse this pc there's the attachment let's click on insert i've inserted a copy and now i'm going to save it to my drafts folder the final email ctrl n same process address it to ourselves enter in some text go to the insert tab attach file browse this pc and this is the one we want this time click on insert once again i'm going to click the cross and save it to my drafts folder the next thing i asked you to do was to move to your drafts folder and send those emails so if we take a look at our folder list i have one called drafts just here and this is where i'm going to find all of my draft email messages and i can see the three that i've just created so let's send these i'm going to click to view in the reading pane click on send click and send click and send next i asked you to use the search facility in outlook in order to find all emails with the words exercise 0 3 in the subject line in the sent items folder we're going to move up to where we have the search bar and the first thing we need to do here is change the scope now currently it's searching in the current mailbox but i only want to look in sent items and because i'm clicked on the send items folder in the folder list i can say current folder i'm then going to use the subject option and i can type in the keywords that i'm looking for so exercise zero three let's hit enter and you can see it's returned those three emails the final thing i asked you to do here was to customize the reading pane so it's set up to suit you so in general i tend to prefer my reading pane on the right hand side but you might be someone who prefers it on the bottom or not to have a reading pane at all maybe you prefer to double click on an email to open it in a new window as opposed to a reading paint whichever you prefer you're going to find your options on the view ribbon under the layout drop down so where we have reading pane all i needed to do here was to select right bottom or off if you went further and customize your reading pane options that is absolutely fine junk messages are an unavoidable consequence of having an email account these days but there are many tools available in outlook which help us deal with junk messages in the most efficient way possible now a junk message is pretty much defined as an email message that maybe you've received that you didn't necessarily want so maybe you've subscribed to some kind of newsletter five years ago and you find yourself still getting updates and you're no longer interested or maybe your email address has been added to an email list and you're getting all of these emails from a specific company that you don't have any need for all of these things would be classified as junk and one of the good things about outlook is that we can kind of train outlook to recognize when messages are junk messages for example if i take a look at my email list i can see that two weeks ago i got an email from microsoft effectively about windows 11. now i'm not interested in this so i might want to move it to my junk email folder so it's a simple case of right clicking on the email message going all the way down to junk and i have a few different options so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to choose to block this sender so it means that when i block this sender i'm not going to receive any more emails from this specific sender so email at engage.window so let's click on block sender it's telling me that this particular sender has been added to my block senders list and the message has been moved to the junk folder so let's click on ok now when it comes to your junk email folder if you take a look over in your mailbox notice that by default you're always going to have this junk email folder if i click on it i should find in there the message that i just marked as junk now if i decide at any point that this actually isn't a junk email i can once again right click go down to chunk and i can choose the not junk option so this is going to move this message back to the inbox folder and it's going to remove this specific email address from my blog senders list so when i click on ok it's going to disappear from the junk folder and it's going to be there back in my inbox now i'm just going to mark this as junk one more time so let's go down to junk we'll say block sender and click on ok because i want to show you your junk mail settings so let's just right click on any email let's go to junk and let's say junk email options now this is where i can see things like my blocked senders so in these tabs across the top if i click on blocked senders you can see there is the email address that i just blocked and of course i can come in here and i can manually add additional emails that i want to block so i don't necessarily have to wait to receive an email from a specific email address in order to block it i can also remove email addresses from my blog senders list from here as well now if we backtrack a little bit and go over to the options setting this is where we can really determine the level of automatic junk email filtering we require so at the top here it says outlook can move messages that appear to be junk email into a special junk email folder and that's the folder we just looked at and i can choose a level to apply to my outlook account so you can see currently i have no automatic filtering the only thing that's going to happen here is that if i have any senders on my blocked senders list their mails are going to be moved automatically to junk but pretty much everything else is free to come through to my email account now i can change my settings in here maybe i want to modify this to the low setting so outlook is going to take a look at the emails coming in and if it's obviously a junk email it's going to move it to the junk email folder if i was to choose something like hi this is going to catch most of the junk email that comes into my account but it might also catch some regular mail some mail that's important to me and move it to the junk email list as well so be a little bit careful with hi you don't want to set it so high that you're then not receiving emails that you actually want to read so i'm going to set mine to low now if you really wanted to lock down your account you could choose to only accept emails from people on your safe senders list and if we take a look at the safe senders tab this is where we can add in specific emails so earlier i added in this to my safe senders list i'm actually going to remove that but i know that i always want to receive emails from these people so just be aware of these different options that you have when it comes to dealing with junk mail now because i've made a change here i'm going to click on apply and then okay the ignore conversation option in outlook allows us to deal with unwanted conversations in a discreet way by using the ignore feature we can effectively remove ourselves from a conversation that doesn't have anything to do with us without offending or upsetting anybody so what exactly do i mean by that well let's take a look at a scenario maybe jen has sent an email out to 10 different recipients and i'm included as one of those recipients maybe the conversation starts out related to a subject that i'm interested in but soon diverges off into a different topic entirely so maybe jen is now already speaking to olivia and ben about a different project that's not related to me and because there are 10 recipients i'm receiving email messages into my email account every few minutes as this conversation pretty much continues without any of my input now i don't really want my inbox filling up with all of these messages that i'm not interested in so there are a couple of different ways that i could deal with this now the most obvious way in the way that we've done it historically is we simply send a quick email to jen and say hey can you take me out of the cc field or the reply field in this email conversation and that will effectively stop any messages coming through to you but that's time consuming and has the potential to cause offence to the original email sender so if you want to be more discreet about it then you can use the ignore conversation feature so i'm going to scroll down to another email that i have in here so let's say this one here from vanessa if this is going backwards and forwards to lots of different people i can simply right click and i have an ignore option in the contextual menu so if i click on ignore it's telling me the selected conversation and all future messages will be moved to the deleted items folder so i'm going to say yes i want to ignore this conversation and you can see it removes the email from my email list and any related emails now they haven't disappeared entirely so if i do want to go back and check to see if the conversation has moved back on to a topic i'm interested in i can find it in my deleted items folder and there it is so if at this stage the topic of conversation has come back round to something that's important to me i can then right click go to ignore and i can stop ignoring the conversation and that's going to put it back into my inbox and i can effectively pick up from where i left off cleanup conversations is another way that we can remove unwanted messages from our outlook email account for example if we take a look at this top mail from jennifer green we've got a few replies to this email now the top email here which was the last one i received which just says call if we take a look through this email we can see that the entire conversation is contained within this one email so i can see my response so thanks so much and then i can see the original message at the bottom here so the last email i receive is always going to contain the entire email string so all of the information so these other emails that i have in here the individual ones with the replies aren't really needed so instead of having three emails here i can simply keep the first one which has the entire email conversation in it and this is where the cleanup conversation utility comes in handy so what i'm going to do here is right click on this email and right at the bottom we have cleanup conversation you can see here it says all redundant messages in this conversation will be moved to the deleted items folder so i'm fine with that let's click on clean up and it says this action will apply to all items in the selected conversation so let's click on ok again now notice here as soon as i did that the little expand arrow disappeared next to the email from jennifer green and that's because it's got rid of those additional messages that were in this conversation and it's just left me with the message that contains every single reply so instead of having three mails clogging up my inbox i now simply have one and if i want to see those individual mails remember it moves them to the deleted items folder and i can see them sitting in here so it's just a nice quick way of cleaning up your conversations now it's also worth noting that aside from cleaning up individual conversations you could clean up an entire folder so if you want to remove all of the unnecessary emails from your entire inbox or maybe a subfolder that you have you can go up to the delete drop down on the home ribbon and you can see we have some cleanup options in here so the top one is just going to clean up the current conversation that's selected we can clean up an entire folder or we can clean up the folder and all of its sub folders and remember all of those redundant messages are going to be moved to your deleted items folder it's very easy to forget to action an email so in outlook 2021 we can use follow-up flags to remind us now you'll find your follow-up flags on the home ribbon and it's this icon just here when we hover over it says follow up so let's have a quick read of the screen tip it says set a flag to remind you to follow up on this item later flagged items appear in the to do bar daily task list and tasks and this is one of the most important things about using follow-up flags when you flag an email to remind yourself that you need to action something on this particular email it's going to appear in multiple other locations to help remind you for example the to-do bar that we looked at earlier so before we flag this email i'm actually going to turn on my to-do pane so let's go back to the view ribbon and into layout and to do bar and i'm going to get it to show my tasks and in here i can see a current list of everything that i currently have flagged across all of my inboxes and that is why i have so many because we're not just limited to the cellmates outlook account it's picking up flags across the other two inboxes that i have attached to my outlook so let's keep this open let's go to our top email just here jennifer green now effectively i need to do something with the images that she sent me i need to upload them and update our website so i might want to flag this item to remind myself to do that now there are a couple of different ways i can do this if i simply just want to flag it the quickest way is to click on the little flag icon as you hover your mouse over the email when i click this the item is now flagged and i can also see it in my to-do list so if i scroll all the way down to the bottom you can see there where we have today there is my flagged item now it's not too great having this right at the bottom of the list so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to click where we have today to order that in a slightly different way so now i can see anything i flag today at the top of this list now another way that we can flag items is simply to click on the email and use the flag option on the home ribbon so let's go up to here now if we click the drop down we have different types of flag that we can add so we can add flags for today tomorrow this week next week or even set a custom date so it really depends what the due date is on this task so i'm going to flag this one for tomorrow and you can see now i get a new group at the top my to-do pane that tells me i have this item to do tomorrow so this is a really nice way of managing your emails and being able to see exactly when those are due and of course once you've started flagging items in your mailbox you can then do things like search for items by their flags so if i click up in the search bar i can choose the flagged option and that's going to show me everything that i've just flagged i can also use filters just to show me the flagged items as well so if we go to the filter drop down i can say show me only the flagged items and it's going to filter my message list accordingly now if i click on this item in the to do pane notice that i get a brand new contextual ribbon called task list and this enables me to change the type of flag that i'm using i can change how i'm arranging my flagged items i can remove the item from the list or i can mark it as complete so if i've uploaded these images to the website i might want to say mark complete and it removes it from my to-do list and you can now see that i have a green tick next to this item now aside from adding just simple flags to our emails we can also set reminders a reminders will pop up on our screen to make sure that we don't miss a due date for an actionable item so for example if we take this email just here if i click the drop down next to the flags i can choose to add a reminder so i'm going to say that i need to follow up this email notice that i also have other options in here so maybe this is just an email for information maybe i need to forward it maybe i need to read it maybe i need to reply so you can choose whatever you like in here i'm just going to stick with follow-up i can choose the start date of this item and also the due date so i could set this to be due tomorrow at let's say this needs to be done by 10 am and i can choose if i want a sound reminder so i'm going to say yes play this sound when this reminder pops up so if i click ok just here you can see next to this message i now have my follow-up flag but i also have this little bell icon which lets me know that i'm going to get a pop-up when that item is due also notice in the to-do pane we have the email and i can also see the little bell reminder just there so follow-up flags are a great way to remind yourself of actionable items that still need to be done another effective way that we can organize our emails is to assign them to different categories for example i might receive a lot of emails that are related to our website so i might want to create a category called website and assign all mails to that category maybe i want to create another category that's related to sales and assign all mails that are related to sales to that particular category so let's take a look at how we would do that now once again we're going to go up to the home ribbon and if we go towards the middle so next to where we have the flag icon we have the categorize button now if we click the drop down what you're going to see in here the first time you open outlook is just a bunch of default categories so we simply have blue green orange purple and yellow category now obviously these aren't particularly meaningful at the moment we can rename all of these and we can also add additional categories so let's start out by renaming some of these and then i'll show you how you can assign them to emails so let's click on all categories now here this is where i can rename them so when we have blue category i'm going to click the rename button and this one is going to be for all emails related to the website let's click on green and rename this is going to be related to sales let's go to the orange category we'll rename this to let's say information so things like newsletters and other things like that i'm going to have another category which i'm going to call let's say new joiners yellow category we'll just call this admin and if i want to add more categories i can simply click the new button i can give my category a name so let's call this one marketing i can assign a color to this category so we'll go with a nice bright pink and i can even assign a shortcut key if i want to so assigning a shortcut key makes it really quick and simple to assign this particular color category so if i for example select control plus f2 and click on ok you can see here the shortcut key and for any of these if i for example click on new joiners i can assign a shortcut key from just here so you can carry on going through adding as many categories as you need once you're happy we can click on ok so now when we click this drop down you can see that all of those categories have been renamed so if we go to this top email from jennifer green this is related to the website so there are a couple of different ways i can assign this to the website category i can right click my mouse go to categorize and choose website from there alternatively i can just use the drop down that we were just looking at so let's choose website and you can see automatically i get that little blue rectangle and when we take a look at the mail you can see the category that that's been assigned to now i can assign multiple so let's select the next two by holding down the control key and these one are going to be assigned to the information category let's carry on going down i think this one here that's let's assign that to admin i'm going to assign this one and this one we're going to put those in the sales category and then i have a couple of emails down here about new joiners so let's select those and assign those to the new joiners category and at this stage i might think oh treats in kitchen things like that i'm going to add another category so let's go here and click on new and we're just going to call this fun stuff and let's give it a color of dark green and click on ok so now i can simply right click and assign that to the fun stuff category so very simple to assign categories to emails now another thing that you have in this categories option is the set quick click so if you have a category that you use all the time so maybe more frequently than the others you can choose which category that is so maybe let's say website click on ok and then what you can do is simply assign that category with the click of your mouse now it's worth noting that this doesn't work if you have your reading pane on the right hand side so if i was to switch my reading pane let's go to switching it to the bottom what i could then do is if i go to this mail just here and i want to assign that website category notice as i hover over i get a little outline of that rectangle if i click once it's going to allow me to assign that to that default category that i selected in that quick click option so just remember that some people get caught out by the fact that it's not available when you have your reading pane on the right hand side and much like when we flagged specific items we can then use these categories to search for and sort our email so if i click up in the search bar at the top what i could do here is go to categorized and maybe pull up all of the emails that are related to new joiners so that's a really nice quick way of filtering your messages now it's worth noting that you can add two categories to one mail so for example this one here login details that's part of the new joiners category but what i could also do is simply select another category so maybe information and it's now part of both of those categories and you can see that reflected in here we can also filter by categories as well so i can filter out all of the emails that are just informational and you'll also see these categories reflected in the to do pane if you have that open so take a look at the top three just here i can see the categories that they've been assigned and when we hover our mouse over you can actually see what category that color represents in that little screen tip pop-up another thing we can also do is if we click the by day drop-down we can sort our emails by their categories as well so if i select that option i'm now seeing first all of the emails that don't have a category assigned but as i scroll down i can see all the emails that are part of the admin category fun stuff information new joiners so on and so forth so categories a really great way of organizing your emails one of the most popular ways to keep email organized is to create subfolders and you can have as many subfolders as you like and you can even have subfolders of sub folders so let's take a look at how we can create new folders and subfolders so if we take a look in our folder list you can see currently i'm clicked on the inbox and i already have a couple of subfolders underneath so i have one called client requests and one called youtube subs and as soon as you create subfolders you're going to get this little arrow so that you can collapse them up and also expand them out so let's create a couple more subfolders and then we'll create some subfolders of those subfolders now as with everything in microsoft there are a couple of different ways that you can do this if you're somebody who likes to right click you can simply right click on the inbox and you have a new folder option just here so i'm going to call this one let's call this clients nice and straightforward it organizes into my list and these are all going to be in alphabetical order now if you're not using the simplified ribbon so if you're still using the classic ribbon what you'll find is that on that classic layout you have a folder ribbon which we don't have in the simplified view so let me just very quickly switch to the classic ribbon this is what i'm talking about you have a folder ribbon just here so if you are choosing to use this view you have an additional way that you can create new folders we have a new folder button just here let's click it and i can now add in the name of my folder so maybe i want to call this a new joiners and click on ok and it's going to add that folder in so just be aware of that depending on what ribbon you're using you may have a few more options for me i'm very much a right clicker and so i prefer to use this method so we have a few different subfolders in here right now what we can do is create subfolders of subfolders and the process is exactly the same so maybe i want to create a subfolder for each one of my clients so let's click on the clients folder right click new folder and that's pretty much it i'm going to say microworld is one of my clients and let's create another subfolder let's say tech info is another notice we get that little collapsible and expandable menu now when it comes to moving and organizing our mail into folders it's a very simple process so if i scroll down and find let's find the email about the new joiner which is this one just here if i want to move that to the new joiners folder there's a few different ways i can do this i can right click on the email and i have a move option and it's going to show me all of the folders that i currently have access to if i can't see the folder i want to move it to in this list i can choose other folder and then i can select from here now that option is also available on the home ribbon we have a move drop down just here and pretty much exactly the same options now i have to say that isn't the way that i like to move mail i find it much quicker and easier simply to drag and drop so i'm just going to click on this email and drag it over to the correct folder you can see it disappears from my inbox and if i click on the new joiners subfolder there is that email so nice and straightforward remember you can drag multiple emails by simply selecting holding down the control key and clicking to select more than one email another thing we can also do is we can copy emails to folders as well so for example if i want to copy this login details email to the new joiners folder but i also want to leave a copy of it in my inbox i can simply right click go to move and we have an option to copy to folder i can then choose the folder i want to copy it to so in this case new joiners click on ok you can see that i still have that email in my inbox but if i go across to new joiners i also have that email in there now while we're here i just want to talk a little bit more about this favorite section that we have at the top because this is a great way of making the process of moving mail a lot simpler if you add all of the folders that you use frequently into this favorites section so for example maybe i use the new joiners folder all the time what i can do so i don't have to hunt through a very long list of folders is i can right click and i can say that i want to add it to my favorites as soon as i do that that folder is now available in this favorites section so it doesn't matter if i have all of this collapsed up i can still access the emails in this folder it also makes it really easy to simply drag and drop items across to folders that you use frequently the final option i want to show you in here related to moving mails to specific folders is this option just here always move messages in this conversation so if for example we take this email just here about price offers maybe i always want to move messages related to this conversation into the sales folder now i don't currently have a sales folder so let's create one i'm going to right click new folder we're going to call this one sales and hit enter and now i'm going to say move always move messages in this conversation to the sales folder and click on ok so now any conversation or replies that we get to this mail are automatically going to be filed in the sales folder it just means i don't have to move them manually myself if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on youtube from simon says it

Channel: Simon Sez IT

Views: 21,600

Keywords: outlook tutorial, outlook, outlook email, outlook 365, microsoft outlook tutorial, ms outlook tutorial, microsoft outlook, how to use outlook, ms outlook tutorial for beginners, ms outlook, how to use microsoft outlook, outlook tips, Outlook 2021, office 365, office 2021, microsoft outlook 2021, outlook tips and tricks, email management, outlook search, outlook folders, add new email account to outlook, gmail outlook, outlook filters, how to add gmail in outlook, o365

Id: ZZQyzOewYNE

Length: 146min 16sec (8776 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022