Your mail, your decision

Try it! Transcript

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Tackle tasks by moving a flagged item to a folder, so it's easier to find. Or you can have Outlook handle a lot of your everyday filing automatically with Rules.

Your mail, your decision

Now let's say you get in the habit of flagging and moving email, but would like to speed up the process. Outlook has tools for making repetitive jobs easier, too.

1. Click Home, and in the Quick Steps group, click the More button > Create New. Here you can create a Quick Step that automates processes for you.

2. Type a name for it. Then, click Choose an Action > Flag Message > Choose flag, and click when you want the flag to occur.

3. Click Add Action > Choose an Action >Move to folder. Then, specify the folder you want items moved to.

4. To make triaging even faster, you can add a shortcut key. Click Choose a shortcut > CTRL+SHIFT+1 > Finish. Now when you come across a message that you want to deal with later, simply press CTRL+SHIFT+1. The mail is flagged, and moved to the folder. Open the gallery to see your Quick Step and others that come with Outlook. Click Manage Quick Steps to edit, duplicate or delete a quick step.

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In most cases, it's easier to deal with email right after you read it. But as you saw in Movie 1 - make your job easier with Outlook - you can always flag email if you decide you want to deal with it later.

To take it a step further, you can move a flagged item to a folder, so it's easier to find.

Now let's say you get in the habit of flagging and moving email, but would like to speed up the process. Well, Outlook has tools for making repetitive jobs easier, too.

On the Home tab, go to the Quick Steps group, click the More button, and click Create New. Here you can create a Quick Step that automates processes for you.

Type a name for it. Then, click Choose an Action and select one. First, we want to flag the message.

To complete the step, click Choose flag. Let's pick This Week.

Next, click Add Action, click Choose an Action, and select Move to folder. Then, specify Flagged as the folder we want items moved to.

To make triaging even faster, you can add a shortcut key. Let's choose CTRL+SHIFT+1. Then, Finish.

Now when you come across a message that you want to deal with later, simply press CTRL+SHIFT+1.

The mail is flagged, and moved to the folder. Open the gallery to see your Quick Step and others that come with Outlook. Click Manage Quick Steps to edit, duplicate or delete a quick step.

Now if that isn't easy enough, you can have Outlook handle a lot of your everyday filing automatically with Rules.

Let's say you always want to move mail from this sender to a folder called Clutter. On the Home tab, click Rules.

At the top of the list, Outlook suggests a new rule: Always move messages from or to a recent sender. If we click this, Outlook will create a rule automatically, but let's create one from scratch to see how it's done.

Click Manage Rules and Alerts. Then, New Rule.

We'll start from a blank rule, and apply the rule to incoming messages. Click Next.

In the first step, you choose the conditions you want Outlook to check for. Let's check from people or public group.

When you do, it's added down here. This area shows the rule as it's being built. If you see blue underlined text, that means Outlook needs more information. Click the text. In this case you need to add email addresses for people or groups. And you can add them from the address book or contacts, or type them directly on the From line. Click OK, and then Next.

Here you specify what you want to do with the items that meet the criteria. Let's check move it to the specified folder. Note that you could also check here to flag the message. But let's keep it simple for now.

Down here, click specified, and choose the folder you want the mail moved to. Click OK.

Let's check one more item: stop processing more rules. This saves processing time by not running more rules on the current message. Click Next.

Here you can choose exceptions. These are conditions in which the rule's actions will not be performed. Let's leave this blank and click Next.

Type a name for the rule. Then, check the rule to make sure it's what you want. "Apply this rule after the message arrives, from Contoso Newsletter move it to the Clutter folder and stop processing more rules." Click Finish.

Now any message that arrives from Contoso Newsletter goes straight to the Clutter folder. Up next, we'll look at ways you can use the calendar to manage and organize your time more efficiently.