Outlook 365: as your personal Assistant

As an email program Outlook is well known and widespread. But sadly, users often don’t know much what else it can do for them. It can sort your mails, tag, and highlight them, answer independently, remind of tasks, follow-up on your mails and much more. Just like an assistant should support you.

This booklet won’t explain the last detail, i.e., how to write an email or where to click for an appointment. To do that, it would have to have many more pages. It is written for people familiar with the basic functions but would like to do more and better than before.

Office 365 is designed for continuous improvement and modernization. Therefore, it is possible that your version is slightly different from the one used when this book was written. That depends i.e. on the update frequency of your office package. Microsoft intended it to be this way. For us as users it means, we must be more flexible than before.

We have not test data – whether it works is something you will only see in real life. Still, I’m sure in your mailbox you will find examples enough to test the possibilities. Otherwise, you hardly would have bought this book .

If you’re familiar with Outlook, you’ll find several smaller and bigger changes between this and your previous version. First of all, you will notice a not only modernized but also reduced interface. Features Microsoft feels are less important are hidden by default. This is a simple matter of taste. If you like it the way I do, right-click any of the tab titles and select Use Classic Ribbon in order to get back the previous optics.

Of course, you’ll restore the simplified ribbon using the Collapse function if you like.

Also, in other ways the Outlook window can be customized several different ways. There is no absolutely best choice: it needs to suit your tasks and ways of working, nothing else. So, I will show you what I prefer and how I did it, so you don’t need to wonder why it maybe looks different on your screen. And I am pretty sure there are some details you like and enjoy using yourself on your machine!

For a beginning, let’s have a look at the reading pane. Since ages, Microsoft delivers it on the right side of the screen. And a while ago, I suddenly began to like it, too. But if you like it on the bottom or prefer to switch it off, you can do so in the View tab.

Some people like me are upset about the default behaviour of Outlook marking emails as read after viewing them in the Reading Pane. We can stop Outlook from doing this. On the bottom of the Reading Pane menu, we find Options…. My favoured settings look like this:

Sometimes, you may not like the font size of the emails received. If so, you can change it in the Outlook window. In the bottom right corner, you find a slider displaying the current percentage of font size. Double-click that percentage and get the following window:

Specify your preferred zoom factor and have it remembered. If then later a single mail has an unsuitable size, you can change that holding down the CTRL button and turning on the mouse wheel.

On the right side of the screen, you may want to display the To-Do-Bar that also is able to show appointments and contacts. Later, we will have a look at the appointments, but for now, display at least the tasks. We will need them when talking about tasks and follow-up of emails.

You now may find the display of the folders pane a bit to compressed. Dragging the divider, you can make it suitable as you like.

Click the divider with your mouse and drag it to the right until you see everything you missed, i.e., the row headers. Clicking any of these headers sorts the folder content by that property.

Still new is the Focused display of the inbox. The Other category is a kind of intermediate between important mails and spam. Maybe that suits your style. But if not, you can switch the display in the View tab back to the previous version.

As we are here, you may want to adjust the display of the first line of all the mails in the list. Many users prefer a more condensed line-up of their mails. In that case, you can fix it also in the View tab.

And finally, a mouse click that might save unnecessary excitement: Always have your current conversation expanded so really everything will be displayed when unfolding.

For a start, the rocket science: if you have a microphone, you can dictate Outlook from now on. To do so, open an email and select the appropriate language, if necessary.

Sometimes, it may take a moment to switch to record mode, but after that, the matter works well even with simple hardware. Outlook won’t be perfect, but one can save a lot of typing. Also, punctuation will be done, but with changeable success and maybe a bit of delay. Correct intonation can be helpful to have the right punctuation set, dictating ‘full stop‘ will work most of the times. Also, ‘comma‘, ‘question mark‘, ‘new line‘ and ‘new paragraph‘ will work out. Not sharing your office with anyone else, you may really enjoy working like this.

Not that sparkling, but usable by anyone are the new Templates. Their improvement was long overdue. Now every mail window has a Templates pane that can be displayed or hidden as one likes.

Some ideas are provided by Microsoft and can be edited or deleted. Clicking the blue link on the bottom of the list we also can add any custom template.

The different templates then are lined-up on the right margin and can be used in any mail.

The templates are quick and useful, but without formatting and graphics. If you need these content types, you can still use the Quick Parts. You’ll find them in the email window in the Insert tab.

There is a more or less well-visible button in the Text area. If any content is highlighted, very welcome including graphics and tables, the lower entry Save Selection in Quick Part Gallery… is active. Click it.

Pick a name as you like. Do fill in the description so it remains clear what it does. By default, the new Quick Part is stored in the email template so it’s available in any new mail and every reply.

If the feature is inactive, you may need to click into the text part of the email. If your cursor is somewhere in the headers like the To-field or subject, you couldn’t use the Quick Part anyway and therefore, it’s greyed out.

If you like this possibility and would like to use frequently, you should store it in a more convenient place. The Quick Access Toolbar is designed to take your personal adjustments. Right-click any desired button, i.e. the Quick Parts, and select Add to Quick Access Toolbar.

Then, you’ll have it available there.

One needs to write longer emails sometimes and parts of them are only meant for certain recipients. To mark these certain sections, you now may use the @-mentions. Of course, one simply can type the name of a person in the text, but with the @, some more function is provided.

Let’s first write a message to a certain circle of people. Then, the writer remembers a certain topic is of special interest for somebody who is not yet a recipient of the mail.

By writing the @-sign in the text of an email one gets suggestions and the can click the desired contact. After that, two things will happen: clearly visible one gets the name of the recipient in the mail text along with the part meant for this one. Additionally, the email address of the new recipient is added to the others in the To-field of the email.

Doing that, one gets better overview for the recipient and support for the train of thought of the writer.

In some environments the inbox will display messages received via the @-mention in another tab along with All / Unread or Focussed / Other. If that is not provided in your mailbox, you anyway can filter by the feature.

Sometimes, you may want to ask people for their opinion on something. For more elaborate questionnaires, you have the Forms app in the Office 365 package. For simple purposes and one single question, a part of this feature is now embedded in Outlook and can be found in the Insert tab.

Then, you get a form to adapt to your needs. You can provide several different options and select whether only one or more answers are possible. Then, insert the poll.

The insert is a simple link to the online form, where people are asked to identify themselves.

Using the button and the link you can vote and examine the votes left.

Of course – if you can dictate, you can also get it the other way round. It works from the inbox and like here in the mail window.

The voices are pleasant and using the little gear symbol you can adjust some settings. Certainly a nice-to-have, if it’s not 5 people in the office having their mail read the same time.

If working with many folders, one can easily loose overview what happens with the most important ones. The options to fix that would be to re-sort them indeed or to link the key folders to the Favorites in the top part of the window. This is by the way is also a good spot for the Search Folders which can be enourmously useful especially in large mailbox structures. We will talk about them later. Anyway, the re-sorting of the folders and the display in the Favorites area can be done right-clicking the respective folder.

After the click on Add to Favorites the folder will be displayed there. And now, as we are looking at that area anyway, you may take the chance to remove the folders you do not need there -i.e. the Deleted Items. Just give them a right click, too and select Remove from Favorites. Doing this, you can reflect your priorities in the navigation pane. And if your tasks change, you can adjust again with only a right click of your mouse. The technical structure in the background remains unchanged.

Once you have many messages in one folder, very often certain senders are more important than others. Using a well-hidden feature, you can make them stand out of the crowd.

To get this done, click in the View tab on View settings.

After clicking Conditional Formatting… we get at first the settings provided by Microsoft and can change them, if needed. For now, we want to add a rule and therefore, select Add.

Pick a name for the rule and select Condition….