Best Outlook tips: 10. Send text messages from within Outlook
When email won’t cut it,
Outlook supports sending SMS text messages directly to your contacts. You’ll need to register with a third-party messaging service to use this feature, however, and if you want to send more than a handful of text messages you’ll inevitably have to pay. To set up SMS, click the New Items dropdown under the Home tab, select Text Message (SMS) and, in the dialog that opens, click “Find a text messaging service for your mobile operator”.
Best Outlook tips: 11. Automatically clear out unneeded messages
If you want to save space or tidy up an unwieldy email trail, the Clean Up tool in
Outlook 2010 and 2013 can help. It analyses a complete email conversation and deletes any messages that have been quoted in their entirety inside a subsequent message – the logic being that you can still see what’s been said by checking subsequent messages.
To use Clean Up, click its dropdown on the Home tab and choose whether you want to tidy up a single conversation or a whole folder. Click the Settings button in the alert that opens to choose what sort of messages should be culled and what should be left alone.
Best Outlook tips: 12. Delegate access to your mail and calendar
If you’re going away, you can temporarily let someone else manage your inbox and appointments. To set this up, open the File tab (or
the Orb in
Outlook 2007), then click the Account Settings dropdown and select
Delegate Access. Click Add and enter the name of the person (or people) to whom you want to grant
access. You’ll see a set of dropdowns for permissions: by default, your
delegate can
access and update your calendar and task list, while email and contacts remain private.
Note that your
delegate must be using the same version of
Outlook as you, and the items you want them to
access must be stored on an
Exchange server: they won’t be able to get at a mailbox that lives on your hard drive.
Best Outlook tips: 13. Manage read receipts
Happily,
Outlook is well-behaved enough to ask permission before sending a read receipt; you can customise its behaviour further by clicking on the File tab, opening Options, selecting the Mail view and scrolling down to the Tracking section. Here you can choose whether receipts should be sent always, or never, and you can also configure your own receipt request settings. One useful option is the ability to request a delivery receipt, which confirms your email has reached the recipient’s mail server, without insisting on a notification when it’s actually opened.
Best Outlook tips: 14. Time zones
If you travel for work, you’ll know the frustration of finding meetings and appointments in
Outlook show up at the wrong local time. Under File | Options | Calendar you’ll find the option for setting your local time zone: once you’ve done this, email timestamps and calendar entries will be shown with the appropriate offset.
You can also configure a second time zone to be shown so that (for example) you can keep track of what time it is back home, or see what time it is for your colleagues overseas, to ensure you catch them during office hours and don’t contact them at an inconvenient time of day. Click Swap Time Zones to easily switch from one location to the other.
Outlook includes a built-in sticky notes feature. Press Ctrl+Shift+N from anywhere in the
Outlook interface to create a new note, which can be dragged and positioned anywhere on screen. By default, notes appear in pale yellow, but you can assign them to categories, which causes them to switch to the associated colour. To manage your notes, click on the Note icon at the bottom of the View pane: From here you can copy, organise and print notes, and also search, via
the field at the top-right of the window, for notes containing specific text.
Best Outlook tips: 16. Encrypted email
If you want to prove your messages are really from you,
Outlook can cryptographically sign your emails. You can even go a step further and encrypt the text and attachments, so that only recipients with whom you’ve shared the key can read them. To set this up, open the Trust Center Settings (you’ll find the button under File | Options | Trust Center) and click on E-mail Security. Enabling digital signing and encryption is as easy as ticking the relevant boxes, but you’ll need to create and import a digital ID if you don’t already have one. Click “Get a Digital ID…” to see links to a range of providers, including Comodo, which offers free email certificates.
Best Outlook tips: 17. Access your personal email within Outlook
www.office.com/setup Blogs: To add a personal mailbox to Outlook, go to the File tab and click Add Account to open the wizard: if you’re using a web service such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail, check the provider’s instructions for setting up access via POP or IMAP. If you’re using Outlook.com with Outlook 2013, simply enter your email address and Outlook will handle the rest.
To
access Outlook.com mail from earlier versions of
Outlook, click “Manually configure server settings or additional server types”, then select the
Microsoft Outlook Hotmail Connector from the window that opens. This
lets you
access not only your webmail but also your personal calendar from within
Outlook.
In
Google Calendar, move your mouse over your calendar in the left-hand pane, click on the dropdown that appears and select Calendar Settings. Click Private Address |
ICAL to obtain the URL of your calendar’s
iCal feed. Now, in
Outlook, go to File | Account Settings | Account Settings…, click on the Internet Calendars tab and paste the URL into the dialog that opens. After a few minutes the calendar will start to update and your events will appear in
Outlook. If you want to make
Outlook events appear in
Google Calendar, you’ll need a third-party tool: One option is
gSyncit by Fieldston Software, which offers a free trial version that
lets you sync one
Google calendar with one
Outlook calendar.
