Microsoft Outlook Tips and Tricks, and Code

We suggest you use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) instead of CC when you send out mass e-mails to many of your contacts.  That way you don't get everybody seeing everybody else's e-mail address –and possibly using them for spamming purposes!

If you have created your e-mail in Outlook and can't see the BCC box, click View > BCC Field.

Tip: Save Typing, Look More Professional – Use Signatures (Nov 2008 Newsletter)

It looks professional if all your e-mails have your contact details at the bottom.  You can set Outlook to automatically fill in a "signature" for you at the bottom of new e-mails, and a different (e.g. shorter) one for replies.  In fact it is a legal requirement that your company registration number appear on all official correspondence.  Some companies use it for their e-mail disclaimer, too.

To set up signatures, use Outlook's Tools > Options > Mail Format (tab) > Signatures.

You can use this for much more than just some automatic text at the foot of new e-mails and replies:  You can set up as many "signatures" as you like, and drop them into e-mails using Insert > Signature.  This is useful for any "boilerplate" text (text that you use repetitively and don't want to retype).  Examples: Your signature in Afrikaans, Sotho or Zulu, directions to your offices, disclaimer notice, favourite quotations, tip of the day.

Trick: Apply your Default Font

In the Outlook e-mail editor, if you change a text e-mail to an HTML e-mail (Format menu > HTML), Outlook in its wisdom changes the e-mail font to Times New Roman even if all your settings (in Tools > Options > Mail Format > Fonts) are Arial.  Microsoft have acknowledged this as a bug and may fix it sometime this millennium.  In the meanwhile, they suggest as a workaround that you select all text (Ctrl+A) and then press Ctrl+spacebar, an undocumented shortcut that will apply the default font to the text.  You could also use it on any selected text, instead of the whole document.

Tip: Automatically Check Spelling

You can set Outlook to automatically check your spelling before sending: Use Tools > Options > Spelling, the second option.

On the subject of spelling, the error I see most often is "its" vs. "it's".  Note:
It's = "It is" or "it has".
Its = belonging to it – no apostrophe!.
Here's how to remember it easily: You don't write Her's or Hi's, do you?

January 2009 Tip: Organise your Microsoft Outlook into Folders

Do you have an Inbox containing 500+ items, many of them unread?  (Including this newsletter?)  Here's a way to start getting organised for 2009.  The principle is to group things together in folders, using the same structure as you would use with a physical filing system.  You move items to these folders (leaving them unread or re-marking as unread) and deal with them at the appropriate time.

You might create a folder named "Customers" containing sub-folders for your regular customers, and use the "Customers" folder for and customers that don't have sub-folders.  I have Inbox sub-folders for Company matters, Business enquiries, Microsoft, etc.

To create a new folder, right-click on any folder in the tree view on the left of Outlook.  From the pop-up menu choose "New folder".  Type the name; check below that the new folder will be in the right place (if you right-clicked on the parent folder it will already be correct).  Click OK.

In the next tip we will see how to use Rules to automatically move inbound items to the correct folders.

February 2009 Tip: Organise your Microsoft Outlook with Rules

In the last tip we suggested that you organise your Inbox using sub-folders to mimic your physical filing system.  We talked about how to create these folders.  Now we will set up Rules to automatically move inbound items to the correct folders.

Click Tools > Rules and Alerts.  Click the button New Rule.  The Rules Wizard pops up.  The radio button "start creating a rule from a template" is selected.  In the list below ("Step 1"), choose either "Move messages from someone to  a folder" or Move messages with specific words in the subject to a folder". In Step 2 below, click on the underlined blue hyperlinks and fill in the data or select the folder.  Click Next > and make any changes or additions. Click Next > for the actions, and Next > for any exceptions.  Give it a name, set it to run on existing items if you want, and click Finish.  The rule will appear in the list, where you can change the order of processing.  Finally, click OK to save.

Outlook can handle about 20 such rules before it starts ignoring them, so you might need to make some of the less-frequent moves manually.