Maximize Your Efficiency With These Outlook Tips

Is your Outlook inbox getting a little too cluttered for your liking? Use the Clean Up feature to tidy up your inbox.

From your inbox, click the Home tab and choose from one of three Clean Up options:

• Clean Up Conversation– reviews an email thread or a conversation and deletes redundant messages
• Clean Up Folder– reviews conversations in a selected folder and deletes redundant messages
• Clean Up Folder & Subfolders– reviews all messages in a selected folder and any subfolders, and deletes redundant messages in all of them

Countless companies preferMicrosoft Outlookover other web-based email and calendar services because of its ease of use and convenience. Aside from being handy for managing business communications and setting up meetings, it can also be used for coordinating projects and organizing contacts. Here’s a quick guide to making the most out of these and other nifty Outlook features.

Besides redundant messages, group conversations that aren’t relevant to you can clutter up your inbox. The Ignore button helps you organize your inbox and focus on relevant emails.

To activate this feature, select a message, then clickHome > Ignore > Ignore Conversation. Alternatively, you can open a message in a new window and clickIgnoreunder the Delete function. You can easily revert this action by going to the Deleted Items folder and clickingIgnore > Stop Ignoring Conversation.

This function is especially useful when you need to send large files to your coworkers or clients. You can send a link to the file instead of the file itself as well as set permissions to allow recipients to edit and collaborate on linked files in real time.

To do this, upload the file you wish to send to OneDrive. Then from the message box, clickAttach File > Browse web locations > OneDrive.

To get the attention of a specific person in a group email or meeting invite, use the @Mention function. This works particularly well for emails sent to multiple recipients or if you want to convey the urgency of your message.

In the body of your email or invite message, type the @ symbol followed by the name of the person you want to tag (e.g., @johndoe). Doing so will highlight the name in the message and automatically add it to the To line of your message.

You can also search for messages you’re tagged in by selectingFilter Emailfrom the Home tab, and then clickingMentioned.

With Outlook, you can add sticky notes to specific parts of an email. To add a sticky note, simply drag your cursor to highlight your chosen text in the email, and then release the mouse button to trigger a pop-up object menu. On that object menu, selectAdd Note. This will open a OneNote feed within Outlook, where you can add text or images to your sticky note.

Teams is Microsoft’s unified communication andcollaboration platform, and it includes the Outlook add-in. This feature allows you to set up Teams meetings directly from Outlook. It also lets you view, accept, or join meetings while in either app.

1. Switch to the calendar view on Outlook. Click the New Teams Meeting tab.
2. Add individual participants or entire contact groups to the Required or Optional fields.
3. Type in the topic, start time, and end time of the meeting. There’s no need to add the dial-in phone numbers and conferencing IDs to the invite, as Outlook does this automatically for you.
4. Create a message inviting the recipients to the meeting, then clickSend.

1. Select the email you want to share.
2. Click the Share to Teams button.
3. On the Share to Microsoft Teams pop-up menu, type the name of the person or channel you want to share to. Check the “Include attachments” tickbox if you want to include the email’s attachments.

These are just some of the things you can do to improve your Outlook experience. As a Microsoft Partner, Wolf Consulting will help your business scale and utilize everything from your Microsoft Office Apps, Cloud Services, and Microsoft 365 security.Contact us to get started!