Over the years I’ve assisted multiple people with Outlook and one feature that I commonly use stands above the rest as far as being a time saver that most people seem to have not discovered. Quick Steps allow you to take multiple actions on an email message with just a couple mouse clicks or a single key press.
Office has a comprehensive support article on this feature.
As an example, most know about filters to sort email into different folders. As handy as this can be, I often find I might forget to check a certain folder or otherwise want to read the email before filing it away. With a Quick Step, I can turn this into a single key press. In my case CTRL+Shift+2 is my hotkey to archive any email message. I have five or six Quick Steps I routinely use and the hotkeys for those have become as automatic as CTRL+r for reply or CTRL+f for forward.
One way to start using Quick Steps is to have focus on a message in an Outlook message list in the Windows Desktop version of Outlook and press Shift+F10 and arrow down to Quick Steps. Outlook comes with some default but most likely you will want to create your own. Choose Manage Quick Steps, followed by tabbing to the New button and finally choosing Custom. From that point, choose the actions you want taken on the message, such as moving to a folder, deleting, replying and more. You can apply multiple actions. There is also an option to assign a hotkey. You are limited to key combinations of CTRL+Shift+1-9 here.
One nice benefit of Quick Steps is that it is an Outlook setting that is saved to the cloud if you are using Outlook in an environment with that option. That means as soon as I add my email account to Outlook on a new computer, my Quick Steps are present too.
You can read the support article for more details or give the feature a try and discover how it can save you time as well.
Comments