Outlook 365: as your personal Assistant

By Koys

Nope, it won't make you a coffee right now. But Outlook can write, sort and tag your mail, find lost items, maybe throw away stuff instantly or re-present it at the time you find it suitable. More than that, Outlook can organize appointments, deliver route planning, present pictures of your contacts and much more.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Computertrainerin.de
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9783910233195

Koys

Ina Koys is an experienced instructor for Microsoft Office. Many questions are frequently asked in trainings, but seldom covered in books. Now she answers some of them in her originally German "short & spicy" series. A little accent will add to the fun :-)

Book preview

As an email program Outlook is well known and widespread. But sadly, users often don’t know much what else it can do for them. It can sort your mails, tag, and highlight them, answer independently, remind of tasks, follow-up on your mails and much more. Just like an assistant should support you.

This booklet won’t explain the last detail, i.e., how to write an email or where to click for an appointment. To do that, it would have to have many more pages. It is written for people familiar with the basic functions but would like to do more and better than before.

Office 365 is designed for continuous improvement and modernization. Therefore, it is possible that your version is slightly different from the one used when this book was written. That depends i.e. on the update frequency of your office package. Microsoft intended it to be this way. For us as users it means, we must be more flexible than before.

We have not test data – whether it works is something you will only see in real life. Still, I’m sure in your mailbox you will find examples enough to test the possibilities. Otherwise, you hardly would have bought this book .

If you’re familiar with Outlook, you’ll find several smaller and bigger changes between this and your previous version. First of all, you will notice a not only modernized but also reduced interface. Features Microsoft feels are less important are hidden by default. This is a simple matter of taste. If you like it the way I do, right-click any of the tab titles and select Use Classic Ribbon in order to get back the previous optics.

Of course, you’ll restore the simplified ribbon using the Collapse function if you like.

Also, in other ways the Outlook window can be customized several different ways. There is no absolutely best choice: it needs to suit your tasks and ways of working, nothing else. So, I will show you what I prefer and how I did it, so you don’t need to wonder why it maybe looks different on your screen. And I am pretty sure there are some details you like and enjoy using yourself on your machine!

For a beginning, let’s have a look at the reading pane. Since ages, Microsoft delivers it on the right side of the screen. And a while ago, I suddenly began to like it, too. But if you like it on the bottom or prefer to switch it off, you can do so in the View tab.

Some people like me are upset about the default behaviour of Outlook marking emails as read after viewing them in the Reading Pane. We can stop Outlook from doing this. On the bottom of the Reading Pane menu, we find Options…. My favoured settings look like this:

Sometimes, you may not like the font size of the emails