Book Image

Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook

By : Staci Warne
Book Image

Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook

By: Staci Warne

Overview of this book

Millions of users across the globe spend their working hours using Microsoft Outlook to manage tasks, schedules, emails, and more. Post-pandemic, many organizations have started adopting remote working, and the need to stay productive in workspace collaboration has been increasing. Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook takes you through smart techniques, tips, and productivity hacks that will help you become an expert Outlook user. This book brings together everything you need to know about automating your daily repetitive tasks. You’ll gain the skills necessary for working with calendars, contacts, notes, and tasks, and using them to collaborate with Microsoft SharePoint, OneNote, and many other services. You’ll learn how to use powerful tools such as Quick Steps, customized Rules, and Mail Merge with Power Automate for added functionality. Later, the book covers how to use Outlook for sharing information between Microsoft Exchange and cloud services. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll get an introduction to Outlook programming by creating macros and seeing how you can integrate it within Outlook. By the end of this Microsoft Outlook book, you’ll be able to use Outlook and its features and capabilities efficiently to enhance your workspace collaboration and time management.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1: Introduction to Outlook
3
Part 2: Email Essentials
8
Part 3: Beyond Email – Calendars, Contacts, Notes, and More
13
Part 4: How to: Share, Search, and Archive in Outlook
17
Part 5: Outlook Collaboration and Integration
19
Part 6: Powerful Ways to Automate Outlook

Organizing notes

Hopefully, by now you have taken down all your paper notes and created digital notes in Outlook. Now it's time for us to organize these notes so that we can find what we need quickly. I recommend that you use the first written line of the note to help you organize your notes as well. You could enter the first word as the intended action of the note. Use terms such as To-do, Call, Reminder, and Lunch as possible ideas, and try to stay consistent in your naming, which will help you refer to your notes in your free time. For instance, if you only have 10 minutes, you could look at a note whose first line/word action helped you complete that task in 10 minutes. One example could be the call item, which would allow you to find a note and make a quick call.

There are multiple ways to organize your notes, and the top three ways I suggest are as follows:

  • Categories: If you apply a category to your note by right-clicking on the note and selecting Categories...