New Options Within Microsoft Outlook's Quick Steps Feature

Introduction

In any work environment, collaboration is vital. Email communication is now the backbone of any workplace. We move emails to shared folders and forward critical emails to our team or managers multiple times on any given day. The Quick Steps feature is Outlook’s way of making your life easier by reducing the repetitive steps you perform to get your email-related work done. You can perform multiple actions to your email in a single click using quick steps!

Procedure

You can set up new quick steps using Outlook if the default ones available are irrelevant to your needs.

1. Launch the Outlook Desktop application.
   • You can see the "Quick Steps" button within the "Home" tab.
2. Click on the Quick steps button and select Manage Quick Steps option in the dialogue box that opens.
3. A new dialogue box appears in which you need to give a Name, Choose an action to be performed from the drop-down list.
   • You can add upto 5 actions by selecting Add another action button and give a description and shortcut if needed.

3. Select Save once the settings are as per your requirement.
4.              

Details

While the details required by all the individual quick steps would be different, we will list an introduction and the basic setup information for these:

1. The "Filling" quick step will provide 4 options:
   • Move to- Will move the selected email to the folder specified by you.
   • Copy to- Will copy the selected email to the folder specified by you.
   • Delete- Will delete the specified email and move it to deleted folder.
   • Permanently delete message– Will permanently delete the specified mail.

2. The "Change Status" quick step will provide 2 options:
   • Mark as read– Will mark the selected email as read.
   • Mark as unread– Will mark the selected email as unread.

3. The "Tag" quick step will provide 10 options:
   • Set retention policies– To apply a policy to the selected email, set an option from the category drop-down list.
   • Categorize message– Will color categorize the selected email, you can also need a new color category.
   • Clear categorize– Will clear the category of the selected email.
   • Flag– Will flag the selected email, you can also choose from the day available in drop down or choose a no date option.
   • Clear flags on message– Will clear the flag on the select email.
   • Mark complete– Will mark the selected email as completed.
   • Pin– To pin the select email to the top.
   • Unpin– To unpin the select email.
   • Snooze– Will snooze the selected email till the specified time period.
   • Create task– Will create a task of the select email and add it to the to-do list.

4. The "Respond" quick step will provide 10 options:
   • Forward to– Forward the selected mail to specific person.
   • Forward as attachment– Forward the selected mail as attachment to specific person.
   • Reply with meeting– Allows you to reply to a selected email by setting up a meeting.

5. The "Conversation" quick step provides 1 option –
   • Ignore messages in this conversation- Will remove all messages related to the conversation that you select and moves future messages in the conversation directly to your Deleted Items folder.