Outlook 2016 For Dummies®
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Copyright © 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Microsoft Outlook has become an essential business tool in the years since I covered its first pre-release versions in 1996. If you work in a company that employs more than a dozen people, it’s virtually certain that most of your communications and time planning will take place in Microsoft Outlook. Knowing Outlook well can make you more successful at work. Whether you’re taking directions from your boss, giving directions to your employees, organizing meetings, collaborating on important projects, or just keeping up with business, Outlook is what you’ll use to get it done fast.
Not understanding Outlook is almost like not understanding how to get to work. Because Outlook is so popular, hundreds of millions of people now spend their entire workday using Outlook one way or another. Now that more companies encourage telecommuting and hire employees who work from home, Outlook is the virtual workplace for so many people.
I’ve had the pleasure of training literally thousands of people on all the different ways Outlook can improve their workflows and simplify their lives. People are often surprised to discover how much faster they can work when they know how to use Outlook effectively.
Microsoft Outlook was designed to make organizing your daily work blindingly easy — almost automatic. You already have sophisticated programs for word processing and number crunching, but Outlook pulls together everything you need to know about your daily tasks, appointments, email messages, and other details. More importantly, Outlook enables you to use the same methods to deal with many different kinds of information, so you have to understand only one program to deal with the many kinds of details that fill your life, such as:
Outlook is a personal information manager that can act as your assistant in dealing with the flurry of small but important details that stand between you and the work you do. You can just as easily keep track of personal information that isn’t business related and also keep business and personal information in the same convenient location.
As you read this book and work with Outlook, you discover how useful Outlook is as well as find new ways to make it more useful for the things you do most. If you fit in any of the following categories, this book is for you:
Even if you don’t fall into one of these groups, this book gives you simple, clear explanations about how Outlook can work for you. It’s hard to imagine any computer user who wouldn’t benefit from understanding Outlook better. If all you want is a quick, guided tour of Outlook, you can skim this book; it covers everything you need to get started. Getting a handle on most major Outlook features is fairly easy — that’s how the program is designed. You can also keep this book handy as a reference for the tricks you may not need every day.
I assume you know how to turn on your computer and how to use a mouse and keyboard. In case you need a brushup on Windows, I throw in reminders as I go along. If Windows and Microsoft Office are strange to you, I recommend picking up (respectively) Andy Rathbone’s Windows 10 For Dummies or Wallace Wang’s Microsoft Office 2016 For Dummies (both published by Wiley).
If all you have is a copy of this book and a computer running Outlook, you can certainly do basic, useful things right away (such as send and receive email) as well as a few fun things. And after some time, you’ll be able to do many fun and useful things.
To make it easier to find out how to do what you want to do, this book is divided into parts. Each part covers a different aspect of using Outlook. Because you can use similar methods to do many different jobs with Outlook, the first parts of this book focus on how to use Outlook. The later parts concentrate on what you can use Outlook to do.
I learn best by doing, so the first chapter is a quick guide to the things that most people do with Outlook on a typical day. You find out how to use Outlook for such routine tasks as handling messages, notes, and appointments. You can get quite a lot of mileage out of Outlook, even if you only check out the things I describe in the first chapter.
Because Outlook allows you to use similar methods to do many things, I go on to show you the things that stay pretty much the same throughout the program: how to create new items from old ones by using drag and drop; ways to view items that make your information easy to understand at a glance; and the features Outlook offers to make it easier to move, copy, and organize your files.
Email is now the most popular function of computers. Tens of millions of people are hooked up to the Internet or an office network. The problem is that email can still be a little too complicated. As I show you in Part II, however, Outlook makes email easier. Computers are notoriously finicky about the exact spelling of addresses, correctly connecting to the actual mail service, and making sure the text and formatting of the message fit the software you’re using. Outlook keeps track of the details involved in getting your message to its destination.
Outlook also allows you to receive email from a variety of sources and manage those messages in one place. You can slice and dice your list of incoming and outgoing email messages to help you keep track of what you send, to whom you send it, and the day and time you send it.
Outlook takes advantage of its special relationship with your computer and your office applications (Microsoft Outlook with Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Windows — notice a pattern?) to tie your office tasks together more cleanly than other such programs and to make it easier to deal with all the stuff you have to do. The chapters in Part III show you how to get the job done with Outlook.
In addition to planning and scheduling, you probably spend lots of time working with other people. You need to coordinate your tasks and schedules with theirs (unless you make your living doing something weird and antisocial, such as digging graves or writing computer books). Outlook allows you to share calendar and task information with other people and also keep detailed information about the people with whom you collaborate. You can also assign tasks to other people if you don’t want to do those tasks yourself. (Now … there’s a time-saver.) Be careful though — other people can assign those tasks right back to you.
Outlook has parts that many people never discover. Some of those parts are obscure but powerful — and others aren’t part of Outlook at all (technically speaking). Maybe you want to know how to do such things as create custom forms and set up Outlook to get email from the Internet. If you use Outlook at home or in your own business or if you just want to soup up your copy of Outlook for high-performance work, you’ll find useful tips in Part III.
Some parts of Outlook are less famous than others but no less useful. Part IV guides you through the sections of Outlook that the real power users exploit to stay ahead of the pack. You may want to understand how to make Outlook connect with social media, set up your home office, or take some first steps in email marketing. You’ll get that in Part IV.
Big organizations have different requirements than small businesses. Many large companies rely heavily on Outlook as a tool for improved teamwork and project management. Part V shows you the parts of Outlook that work best in the big leagues (or for people with big ambitions). You’ll get all the information you need to collaborate using Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange, beef up your security, customize the way Outlook looks and works, and check your Outlook account when you’re not in the office by using Outlook Web Access or your favorite mobile device.
Why ten? Why not! If you must have a reason, ten is the highest number you can count to without taking off your shoes. A program as broad as Outlook leaves a great deal of flotsam and jetsam that doesn’t quite fit into any category, so I sum up the best of that material in groups of ten.
Outlook has many unique features, but it also has lots in common with other Windows programs: dialog boxes, pull-down menus, Ribbons, and so on. To be productive with Outlook, you need to understand how these features work and recognize the conventions I use for describing these features throughout this book.
You deal with more dialog boxes in Outlook than you do in many other Microsoft Office programs. You can call dialog boxes forms. Email message forms, appointments, name and address forms, and plenty of other common functions in Outlook use dialog boxes to ask you what you want to do. The following list summarizes the essential parts of a dialog box:
The easiest way to move around a dialog box is to click the part you want to use. If you’re a real whiz on the keyboard, you may prefer to press the Tab key to move around the dialog box; this method is much faster if you’re a touch-typist. Otherwise, you’re fine just mousing around.
Outlook features a colorful strip across the top called the Ribbon. It’s adorned with festive-looking buttons. Many of those buttons are labeled with the names of the things that happen if you click them with your mouse, such as Save, Follow Up, or Delete. A row of tabs appears just above the Ribbon, with each bearing a label, such as Home, Send/Receive, or View. Clicking any of those words reveals an entirely different Ribbon full of buttons for a different set of tasks.
This arrangement came about because people frequently call Microsoft and ask the company to add features to Outlook that don’t need to be added because they’ve been there all along. The Ribbon is supposed to make those mysterious, hidden features more obvious. I think a better solution is to get more people to read this book. As a public service, I’m doing what I can to make that happen. I hope you’ll join the cause.
Normally, you can choose any Windows command in at least two different ways (and sometimes more):
One rather confusing Outlook feature is the way many commands are hidden within the tabs on the Ribbon. If you don’t know which tab has the button you need, you have to click every tab until you find the command you want. That’s fine if you’re a speed-reader, but hunting for rarely used commands slows down most of us. Fortunately, after you’ve done a task once, you can usually find your way back to do it again.
Another fast way to get at your favorite Outlook features is the Quick Access Toolbar — a tiny strip of icons in the upper-left corner of your screen. In Chapter 10, I describe how that works and how to make it do what you want.
Sometimes, the fastest way to go through a book is to look at the pictures — in this case, icons that draw your attention to specific types of useful information. I use these icons in this book:
Part I
In this part …
Chapter 1
In This Chapter
Reading and creating email
Sending files by email
Checking your calendar
Entering appointments and contacts
Managing tasks
Keeping notes
I’m kicking off this book with Outlook’s Greatest Hits — the things you’ll want to do with Outlook every single day. The list sounds simple enough: sending email, making appointments, and so on. But most people only use about 5 percent of Outlook’s power. Even if you move up to using 10 percent of Outlook’s features, you’ll be amazed at how this little program can streamline your life and spiff up your communications. People get pretty excited about Outlook, even if they take advantage of only a tiny fraction of what the package can do. But there’s more here than meets the eye; Outlook does ordinary things extraordinarily well. I know you want to do the same, so read on.
Millions of people use Outlook because millions of people use Outlook. That’s not redundant — Outlook is the standard tool for communicating, collaborating, and organizing for hundreds of millions of people around the world. When so many people use the same tool for organizing the things they do individually, it becomes vastly easier for everyone to organize the things they do together by using that tool. That’s the case with Outlook. It’s a powerful tool even if you work all alone, but that power gets magnified when you use it to collaborate with others.
Well, okay, maybe you can’t use Outlook to decipher hieroglyphics, but if you know a little about basic email techniques, you can do a lot in Outlook, such as click an icon to do something, to view something, or to complete something.
Does that seem too simple? No problem. If you have an itch to complicate things, you could try to use Outlook while hopping on a pogo stick or flying a jet plane. But why? These four tricks can take you a long way.
Outlook can also do some sophisticated tricks, such as automatically sorting your email or creating form letters, but you’ll need to understand a few details to take advantage of those tricks. The other 300-plus pages of this book cover the finer points of Outlook. If you only wanted the basics, I could’ve sent you a postcard.
Email is Outlook’s most popular feature. I’ve run across people who didn’t know Outlook could do anything but exchange email messages. It’s a good thing that Outlook makes it so easy to read your email, although it’s too bad so many people stop there.
When you start Outlook, you normally see a screen with three columns. The leftmost column is the Folder pane, which lets you switch between different modules in Outlook to perform different tasks. The second column from the left is your list of messages; the right column (called the Reading pane) contains the text of one of those messages. If the message is short enough, you may see its entire text in the Reading pane, as shown in Figure 1-1. If the message is longer, you’ll have to open it to see the whole thing.
Figure 1-1: Double-click the message you want to read.
To see an entire message, follow these steps:
Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar.
You don’t need this step if you can already see your messages.
Double-click the title of a message.
Now you can see the entire message.
Press Esc to close the message.
The message form closes.
If you feel overwhelmed by the number of email messages you get each day, you’re not alone. Billions and billions of email messages fly around the Internet each day, and lots of people are feeling buried in messages. In Chapter 6, I show you the secrets of sorting and managing your messages, along with the Conversations feature, which makes it easy to deal with extended email discussions.
Anytime you’re reading an email message in Outlook, buttons labeled Reply and Reply All appear somewhere near the top of the screen. That’s a hint.
To reply to a message you’re reading, follow these steps:
If you’re reading a message sent to several people besides you, you have the option of sending a reply to everyone involved by clicking the Reply All button.
When you reply to a message, by default, Outlook includes the text of the message that was sent to you. Some people like to include original text in their replies, but some don’t. In Chapter 5, I show you how to change what Outlook automatically includes in replies.
At its easiest, the process of creating a new email message in Outlook is ridiculously simple. Even a child can do it. If you can’t get a child to create a new email message for you, you can even do it yourself.
If you see a button labeled New Email in the upper-left corner of the screen, just click it, fill out the form, and click the Send button. How’s that for simple? If you don’t see the New Email button, follow these steps instead:
Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar.
Your message list appears.
Click the New Email button on the Ribbon.
The New Message form opens.
Fill out the New Message form.
Put the recipient’s address in the To box, a subject in the Subject box, and a message in the main message box.
Click the Send button.
Your message is on its way.
If you want to send a plain email message, that’s all you have to do. If you prefer to send a fancy email, Outlook provides the bells and whistles — some of which are actually useful. For example, you might send a High Priority message to impress some big shots or send a Confidential message about a hush-hush topic. (Discover the mysteries of confidential email in Chapter 4.)
Some people swear they do nothing but exchange email all day. Swearing is exactly what I’d do if I were in their shoes — believe me. If you’re lucky, you probably do lots of things other than exchange email; you probably do most of your daily work in programs other than Outlook. You might create documents in Microsoft Word or build elaborate spreadsheets with Excel. When you want to send a file by email, Outlook gets involved, although sometimes, it works in the background.
To email a file, follow these steps:
Open the document in Microsoft Word.
The document opens on-screen.
Click the File tab in the upper-left corner of the screen.
The Backstage view opens.
Choose Share.
The Share page opens. Yes, I know you learned how to share in kindergarten, but this is different.
Choose Email.
A list appears, detailing different ways to send your file via email.
Click the Send as Attachment button.
The New Message form opens with your document listed on the Attached line, as shown in Figure 1-2. If you want to type a message in the main part of the screen, you can, but it isn’t necessary.
Figure 1-2: You can email a document right from Microsoft Word.
Whew! When you’re just sending one Word file, these steps seem like a long way to go, but they’ll always get your document on its way. For some reason, the folks at Microsoft made this task more laborious as the years have passed. But don’t be discouraged. If you email documents frequently, I describe a more powerful way to attach files in Chapter 5.
Time management is a myth. You can’t get more than 24 hours in a day — no matter how well you manage it. But you can get more done in a 24-hour day if you keep your calendar current. Outlook can help you with that.
If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned paper planner, the Outlook Calendar will look familiar to you. When you click the Calendar button and then click the Day tab, you see a grid in the middle of the screen with lines representing each segment of the day. You can adjust the length of the segments from as little as five minutes to as much as an hour, as shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3: Track your busy schedule in the Outlook Calendar.
To enter an appointment at a certain time, follow these steps:
If you want to enter more detailed information about your appointment — such as ending time, location, category, and so on — see Chapter 8 for the nitty-gritty on keeping track of all the details in your calendar.
Time management involves more than just entering appointments. If you’re really busy, you want to manage your time by slicing and dicing your list of appointments to see when you’re free to add even more appointments.
If you need a more elaborate collection of Calendar views, choose one of the views listed under the Change View button on the View tab on the Ribbon. To really master time management, check out Chapter 8 to see the different ways you can view your Outlook calendar.
When it’s not what you know but who you know, you need a good tool for keeping track of who’s who. Outlook is a great tool for managing your names and addresses, and it’s just as easy to use as your Little Black Book.
To enter a new contact, follow these steps:
Click the New Contact icon on the Ribbon.
The New Contact entry form opens.
Fill in the blanks on the form.
Figure 1-4 shows an example.
Click the Save & Close button.
Presto — you have a Contacts list.
Figure 1-4: Use your Contacts list to keep detailed information about everyone you know.
Outlook’s Contacts feature can be a lot more than your Little Black Book — if you know the ropes. Chapter 7 reveals the secrets of searching, sorting, and grouping the names in your list — and of using email to keep in touch with all the important people in your life.
Knowing what you need to do isn’t enough; you need to know what to do next. When you’re juggling 1,000 competing demands all at once, you need a tool that shows you at a glance what’s up next so you can keep your work moving forward.
Outlook has several task management tools that help you organize your lengthy to-do list for peak performance. Those tools include the Tasks module, the To-Do list, and the To-Do bar. Chapter 9 describes all of them, but here’s a quick way to get started in a jiffy.
To enter a new task, follow these steps:
Click the text that says Type a New Task.
The words disappear, and you see the insertion point (a blinking line).
Type the name of your task.
The task you typed appears.
Press Enter.
Your new task moves down to the Task list with your other tasks, as shown in Figure 1-5.
Figure 1-5: Entering your task in the Task list.
Outlook can help you manage anything from a simple shopping list to a complex business project. In Chapter 9, I show you how to deal with recurring tasks, how to regenerate tasks, and how to mark tasks as complete — and earn the right to brag about how much you’ve accomplished.
I have hundreds of little scraps of information I need to keep somewhere, but until Outlook came along, I didn’t have a place to put them. Now all the written flotsam and jetsam go into my Outlook Notes collection — where I can find them all again when I need them.
To create a new note, follow these steps:
Press Ctrl+Shift+N.
A blank note opens.
Type the text you want to save.
The text you type appears in the note, as shown in Figure 1-6.
Press Esc.
The note you created appears in your list of notes.
Figure 1-6: Preserve your prose for posterity in an Outlook note.
After you’re in the habit of using Outlook to organize your life, I’m sure you’ll want to move beyond the basics. That’s what the rest of this book shows you. When you’re ready to share your work with other people, send email like a pro, or just finish your workday by 5 p.m. and get home, you’ll find ways to use Outlook to make your job — and your life — easier to manage.
Chapter 2
In This Chapter
Examining the many faces of Outlook
Choosing menus
Getting the big picture from the Information Viewer
Using the tools of the trade
Fine-tuning with the Folders list
I recently heard that the average office worker now spends 28 percent of each workweek answering email. No wonder times are tough — everybody’s too tied up with email to get anything done! When computers were invented, people thought they’d use them for something much more exciting than email. Oh, well. Welcome to the future — it’s already here and it’s already booked solid.
Fortunately, everyone gets more done now than in the past, partly because of tools like Microsoft Outlook. In fact, hundreds of millions of people worldwide use Outlook to get more done every day. But most of those people use a fraction of Outlook’s power, so they work harder than necessary while getting less done. The people I’ve trained find that knowing even a tiny fraction more about what the program can do for them makes their lives easier. Let’s hear it for making your life easier!
Outlook is a part of Microsoft Office. It’s called an Office suite, which means it’s a collection of programs that includes everything you need to complete most office tasks. Ideally, the programs in a suite work together, enabling you to create documents you couldn’t create as easily with any of the individual programs. For example, you can copy a chart from a spreadsheet and paste it into a sales letter you’re creating in your word processor.
Microsoft Office includes a group of programs — each of which is designed to address specific sorts of tasks easily but that also work together as a team when you need them to. It’s a little bit like the utensils you use for dining: You can eat your turkey dinner entirely with a fork, but it’s much easier if you have a fork and a knife. And, of course, you want a spoon for the cranberry sauce. Each program in Microsoft Office specializes in something important: Microsoft Word for documents, Microsoft Excel for calculations, and Microsoft Outlook for communications and organization. It’s easy to use them separately and hugely productive to use them all together.
Until now, Microsoft has sold each program as a packaged, store-bought product you could buy and use for years. They’re changing their approach and encouraging everyone to rent Microsoft Office for a monthly or annual fee as part of a program called Office 365. I’ll have more to say about Office 365 in Chapter 12, but at the moment, Microsoft is offering some packages of Office 365 services that are very economical and worthwhile. Time will tell which approach is better; some people prefer a small monthly fee, whereas others prefer to pay a few hundred dollars for a permanent copy. Microsoft clearly believes that software rental is the way of the future, so stay tuned.