With the emergence of Outlook, Microsoft has taken emailing service to a brand new level of ease, reliability, and security. Moreover, there is no doubt that MS Outlook keeps your mailbox data secure and provides the simplest email exchange service. Just because you know how to use Outlook for different emailing transactions, you can say it is so easy to work with. Imagine if there was only a single inbox folder containing overall mailbox data, how difficult it would be to search an email.
On the other hand, if only desired emails appear in Inbox and for each sender you can create a separate folder. Well, things would get so easy. Thus, in order to make things easy and efficient, I am going to enlighten some tips to make you a master of Outlook 2013.
Set your Inbox view your own way
The moment you open Outlook, it by default launches Inbox and displays all received messages in a stack-like manner. Sometimes, you think that it should not display like that, or there should be some additional views of the mailbox also available. Outlook 2013 enables you do that. Simply click ‘View’ tab on the toolbar and choose ‘Change View’, and then many more preset views are available to switch to.
To customize a view, click ‘View Settings’, where Arrangement options enable setting emails by date, subjects, and in a like manner. To save the settings for the selected view, click Change View and choose ‘Save Current View As a New View’. Type in a name for the view and choose an option to apply these settings.
Set the way an Email is marked as ‘Already read’
In your Inbox, each mail that you have read looks different from those you have not read yet. However, just because an email is marked as read does not mean that you actually read it. To be more precise, you simply click an email and without looking at its contents, you click another. You cannot term that particular email as ‘already read’, even though Outlook marks it as ‘already read’.
Well, Outlook 2013 enables you manage it your own way. Navigate to File > Options > Mail and then click the Reading Pane button at the right. On the Reading Pane dialog, check the ‘Make item as read when viewed in the Reading Pane’ check box. The default time it takes before marking an item as read is 5 Seconds. You can change it as per your requirement. Suppose if you set it to 20, any message opened for less than 20 seconds remains unread.
Set rules for Message Appearance
In Outlook 2013, you can set a brand new way the unread messages appear, though a preset format to indicate unread messages is already applied. A blue bar to the left of the messages in the inbox and the message header is given. You can change both the color and font of the messages in your own way through conditional formatting, including assigning different colors to messages received from different users.
To customize these settings, navigate to View > View Settings > Conditional Formatting, and then you see a rule ‘Unread Messages’ and its corresponding blue color that you can change.
To change the fonts and color, click Font and choose a Font style and a color to apply them to the message header. You can also create a new rule by clicking the ‘Add’ button, and then you need to type-in a name for the rule in the ‘Name’ box.
Restore the To-Do bar
The To-Do bar in Outlook 2013 is hidden by default. However, you can bring it back quite easily. Simply click the View tab and choose ‘To-Do Bar’, and then choose the items in the list, which you want, should appear on the To-Do bar.
The ‘Off’ option (clicked by default) hides the To-Do bar, whilst selecting Tasks, People, and Calendar options makes them appear on the bar. Besides, the order in which they appear on the To-Do bar is the order in which you select them in the list. In comparison with earlier versions of MS Outlook, the To-Do bar does not do much. It displays only one calendar month, no matter how wide is the area acquired. No past appointments are shown on the Calendar, even if you scheduled some yesterday.
Set up a connection to your Social media account
Outlook 2013 allows you to connect to your social media accounts, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more. Once you establish such a connection, data and activities from your various contacts is displayed in the People module.
To set up such a connection, you need to navigate to File > Info > Account Settings > Social Networks Accounts. Simply choose LinkedIn or Facebook, or click ‘More’ to choose any other account. Provide the login information for the particular social media platform and give permissions to Outlook to access your account information. With the particular social account added to Outlook, you see the information from your contacts and their activities in the People area.
Manage default Search rules in Outlook
When you search for emails in Outlook, the search as per the query is conducted throughout your mailbox. Well, the area to look into is quite short, but you can increase it to the overall mailboxes attached to Outlook. With this, each mailbox is searched thoroughly, based on the query you execute.
In order to change the search area or the default search location, navigate to File > Options > Search, and check the ‘Include results only from’ checkbox, and then choose a search location out of ‘Current folder’, ‘Current mailbox when searching from the inbox’, ‘Current mailbox’, and ‘All mailboxes’, and then click OK. With this, the selected location becomes the default search location. However, you can change it at a later time, based on your requirements.
Though MS Outlook is easy to use and secure for email exchange, you must be familiar with certain features of Outlook, including the backup option. For this, simply export the mailbox data to a PST and keep it as the mailbox backup.
