15 Useful Tips from Microsoft Office

This is an excellent article with 15 quick tips for our Outlook users. The titles for each tip are included below with a brief description of each as provided by Microsoft. Explore them all and see which my help make your life easier.

Also, this is a link to Microsoft Office Support that will guide you to other resources.

http://goo.gl/yZ5Yt (a tiny URL)

Save face with MailTips

Have you ever hit “Reply All” to an email when you didn’t mean to? Or sent important information to someone and never gotten a response, only to learn later their email address was invalid? Microsoft Exchange 2010 and MailTips, a new Microsoft Outlook 2010 feature, can help prevent embarrassing mistakes, save you time, and alleviate frustration.

Learn more: Turn on or off MailTips

Share your schedule

You can share your calendar with others on a Microsoft Exchange Server---with permission, of course. Or you can publish your default Outlook 2010 to the web, which can allow more people to view it. If you publish your calendar to the web, you don’t have to have an Exchange account, and anyone can see it, even if they don’t have an Exchange account, either.

Learn more: Introduction to calendar sharing

Stop repeating yourself

Do you do a lot of the same things over and over with emails? Like frequently move messages to a specific folder that you’ve set up? Or often forward messages to your team? Quick Steps in Outlook 2010 can help by turning commands and procedures that you use most often into one click actions.

Learn more: Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps

Get in on the conversation-and manage it

At work you may often have conversations over email, where several people are weighing in on important issues. Have you ever missed someone’s response in one of these email conversations? Now you can see your email within the context of the conversation, with Conversation View. See the overall conversation, including your responses, find the most recent response, and easily figure out the message that is most important to you.

Learn more: View email messages by conversation

Get in on the conversation and ignore it

Maybe you are no longer needed in an ongoing email conversation---or maybe the subject matter is no longer important to you. Whatever the reason, you can prevent additional responses from appearing in your inbox. The Ignore command moves the whole conversation and any future messages that arrive in the conversation to the Deleted Items folder.

Learn more: Ignore all email messages in a conversation

Let colleagues know when your aren’t around

If you’re going to be heading out on vacation or even just away for the day, you can let your colleagues know your schedule and when they can expect to hear from you again. Customize automatic responses to emails you receive whenever you are unavailable.

Learn more: Automatically reply to email messages with an Exchange account.

Protect what you send

It’s easy to communicate with pretty much anyone via email. But there are times when you don’t want email you send to be forwarded to others, or printed out, or copied. You can use Information Rights Management (IRM) to help prevent sensitive email from being read, printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people.

Learn more: Introduction to IRM for email messages

Have it all in one place-and hear it, too

With Unified Messaging (UM), you can receive email, voice, and fax messages in your Outlook Inbox. If you have an Exchange Server 2010 account, you can get Voice Mail Preview, which delivers both a recording and text that’s been created from the voice recording using automatic speech recognition.

Learn more: Introduction to Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging

Contact info at your fingertips

Thanks to the Microsoft Outlook Global Address List (GAL), you no longer have to keep your contacts’ information stored on your computer--where it takes up space and gets out of date before you can manually update it. The Global Address List (GAL) tracks it all for you: phone numbers, building location, email addresses, and more. In the “Find Group” click the button for Finding a Contact. Please note there is no link for this item.

Make sure they get it

Need to make sure your boss reads an email that you send her? Want to get your team to vote on their favorite restaurant for your team outing? You can add many different types of tracking to your email messages, including delivery and read receipts, voting buttons and follow-up actions.

Learn more: Add tracking to email messages

Meet anywhere, anytime

Grab them for a meeting-just once or every week-find a meeting room, and even schedule meetings in a different time zone. Clicking the New Meeting button gives you access to everything you need to set up meetings with one or many.

Learn more: Schedule a meeting with other people

Let someone else mind your calendar

You need to hand over your scheduling responsibilities to someone else---for just a bit, or for a good while. Or maybe you need to manage someone else’s schedule. The Delegate Access feature in Outlook lets meeting requests be received, accepted, and even sent for you by someone else.

Learn more: Delegate access: Let someone else mind your calendar

Check your e-mail from any computer

Don’t worry about dragging your laptop with you everywhere you go anymore: You can access your email from any computer connected to the Internet using any major web browser---even if it doesn’t have Microsoft Outlook on it. Outlook Web App (OWA) is a web-based version of Outlook that lets you access and send email, manage your calendar, and more.

Learn more: Outlook Web App in Exchange 2010

It’s on your phone

Did we say forget about dragging your laptop with you? Well, forget about even needing to have a computer---Windows Phone 7 automatically comes with Office Mobile so you can check and send email, update your calendar, and keep on top of all that you need to.

Learn more: Office Mobile site

No more extra gear

It used to be that when you were outside of your organization’s firewall, like when you were working from home or traveling, you’d need to log in to Outlook using a virtual private network (VPN) connection, which often required a smartcard or special tokens. Now Outlook offers Outlook Anywhere, an alternative to VPN connections that lets you use Outlook just as you normally do at your organization, without the need for special connections or hardware.

Learn more: Use Outlook Anywhere to connect to your Exchange Server without a VPN