5 Microsoft Outlook Hidden Features You Should Know About By Now
In this day and age, it’s rare for most people to go through an entire day without opening or creating at least one email. In fact, a report byStatistahighlights how emails have become a central part of daily life — users in the United States spend 149 minutes on work-related emails and 172 minutes on personal ones per day. With such extensive use of emails, you’re likely already familiar with your email platform’s basic features, from text formatting tokeyboard shortcuts that increase productivity.
However, if you’re on Microsoft Outlook, there are a host of nifty features that you might still be unaware of but should definitely know by now. These features, designed to elevate your email experience, are tucked away in the many options and buttons of the app, hidden in plain sight. Let’s go over five of these hidden yet valuable features and explore how to use them to your advantage.
Custom shortcuts for your favorite emojis
You likely don’t think of using emojis when messaging your supervisor or client, but there are other types of emails where they are quite fitting. For instance, when you’re having a casual conversation with a work bestie or sending a company-wide email about the upcoming year-end party, emojis bring a touch of fun and personality to the otherwise boring messages.Adding emojis to your Outlook emailsis as quick and easy as pressing the keyboard shortcut Win + . (period) for Windows and Command + Control + Space for Mac and clicking on your emoji of choice from the panel.
However, an even more convenient way is to just set a custom shortcut for the emojis you use daily. Here’s how you can do so from Outlook on your desktop:
Reusable phrases and sentences
If your work involves sending countless emails throughout the day, you’ll inevitably find yourself typing the same responses over and over again. Perhaps you regularly share a list of training materials with new hires, or yourOutlook out-of-office repliesare the same. To streamline this process and avoid the tedious task of typing the same message repeatedly, just use Outlook’s Quick Parts. Quick Parts serves as a repository for frequently used messages that you can easily insert into your email body whenever you need to. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to use Quick Parts in Outlook:
Color-coded emails
With the hundreds of emails you receive every day, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and miss important messages. An easy solution is to color-code your emails using Outlook’s conditional formatting. This feature lets you assign different colors to emails from specific senders or those with specific content, effectively organizing your inbox and distinguishing critical messages from the rest. Follow these steps to apply conditional formatting to your existing and incoming emails:
Existing and incoming emails that fit the criteria in your rule will now show up with a different color in your inbox. However, this color-coded scheme will only appear in your desktop app and not the web app.
If you’re part of a big organization, chances are you usually mention specific colleagues in your emails. Perhaps you’re endorsing a client to your manager or mentioning the presenter in a meeting invite you’re sending. In such cases, you’ll typically style your text with underlining or highlights to make the mentioned names more noticeable. To make messages with mentioned names stand out without much hassle, you can use Outlook’s @mentions feature instead.
@Mentions work just like how you would tag friends in a social media post. When you mention someone in your email, their name gets highlighted, and clicking on it will pull up that person’s contact details. On top of that, using @mentions also automatically adds the person to the recipient list. Another nifty advantage of this feature is that such emails are marked with a special symbol in your inbox, so you can quickly identify the messages that directly involve you. Here’s how to use @mentions:
Image attachment resizer
Isn’t it annoying when you attach a photo to your email, but it’s too large to be sent successfully? When this happens, you have to hop on an image resizer site, upload your photo, set it to a size you think is small enough, download it to your desktop, and reattach it to your message. But the most frustrating part is doing all these only to find out the image still exceeds the allowable file limit for the email.
Fortunately, Outlook has a built-in image resizer feature that can do the resizing for you without much hassle. This feature resizes your image attachments to a maximum of 1024 x 768 pixels, ensuring your messages get delivered without issues. To use the image attachment resizer, here’s what you need to do:
