23 Oct Tips and Tricks for Outlook 2013: General Shortcuts
There’s no way around it. Microsoft Outlook is the most common email client in offices. If you spend more than 5 minutes a day checking emails and managing your calendar, then you’re probably familiar with the basic functions of Outlook. But who doesn’t want to be more efficient? Here are some Tips and Tricks to make your day easier.
Outlook 2013 Shortcuts
Like every other office app, Outlook 2013 Shortcuts saves you time moving your mouse around or drilling down through names. Learn the ones you use most and you’ll speed through your Outlook tasks. MakeUseOf has a great downloadable PDF of Outlook shortcuts. Here are a few that we thought were helpful:
- Ctrl + R: reply to email
- Alt + W: forward email or switch to the weekly calendar view
- Alt + S: send email
- Ctrl + G: open the “Go to Date” dialog to jump to any date in the calendar
You can also switch between mail, calendar, contact, and other items in the navigation pane by hitting Ctrl + [the place number of the item]
Take advantage of Outlook’s Quick Steps.
For those unfamiliar Quick Steps is the killer feature Microsoft introduced with Outlook 2010. If you find yourself regularly performing a particular task – such as forwarding an incoming email to a colleague, or inviting a group of recipients to a meeting – then Quick Steps can save you time. They’re shortcuts to any multi-step action you can think of, such as moving emails to a specific folder and marking them as read or forwarding an email to you team and flagging it at the same time. It was short work of repetitive tasks, and you can create your own Quick Step Actions. 
Copy any text to your clipboard, then in Outlook press Ctrl+V.
Outlook creates a new message (or note or whatever item, depending on the folder you’re viewing) with the text already pasted. So instead of opening an item, then pasting, you do both in one step.
When we set out to write some tip and tricks for using Outlook, we were expecting to learn a thing or two… but two thousand? There is a wealth of information out there on using Outlook. Too much for one post. So we’ve broken it into 3. Come back soon for our next post, Tips and Tricks for Outlook 2013: Email
Do you know any tricks for Outlook 2013? We’d love to hear about them!