21 Tips and Tricks for Using Outlook 2013

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Organize the Way You See Your Inbox

One of the main features offered by Outlook is email management, which is why you should make sure you see the inbox exactly the way you want it. When you first update to the new version and open Outlook, you will see your email in the default view. To increase efficiency and be able to find everything easier, you can customize your view. In order to do this, you may go to the View tab and click on Change View. This will open a list of various preset views you can choose from, but you can also customize it to generate an entirely new view – add columns, rearrange the order, sort your email, choose if you want to only see the latest emails or more, decide how many lines of the email you’d like to see under its header, etc. Once you’re done customizing, you can go ahead and save your view by clicking on Change View, then Save Current View as a New View.

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Choose When You Want an Email to be Marked as Read

You already know that after keeping one email open for a while or moving up and down in your inbox can make certain emails appear as read, while others are still unread. This also changes the color they’re marked with, which can get confusing when you mistakenly marked an email as read, although you didn’t have time to go through it just yet. To avoid such situations, you can go to File, then choose the Options tab and click on Mail. To your right, you will see a Reading Pane checkbox that you should click on to view the various options. You can choose to check and uncheck any of them, as well as change the number of seconds before marking an email as read. Once you’re done customizing, click OK to save your options.

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Cache Your Email on Outlook You might have noticed that Outlook doesn’t cache your emails by default anymore. This is a way to improve efficiency, which in most cases you no longer need to have direct access to all of the items. The default period is now 12 months if your disk has a capacity of 128 GB. In case it’s smaller, it might be reduced to 6 months. In order to change these settings, you can go to File, then choose Account Settings and scroll down to click to Account Settings once more. Once that window open, you should double-click on Exchange Account Here, which will take you to a Mail to Keep Offline slider.

Customize Message Preview Outlook 2013’s default way of displaying a message is by showing only one line under the headline. While you can include settings for this aspect in your inbox view mode, there is also one other way to do it much quicker. Simply go to View – right under the tab you will see Message Preview, where you can scroll down to 1 line, 2 lines of 3 lines. You can also turn this preview off in case you don’t need to see the content of the email before opening it.

Using the Outlook Journal Feature

Outlook 2013 doesn’t offer immediate access to the Journal folder – it doesn’t show up in the Navigation Pane as it used to. To have access to the folder, you can click on the dots next to the Tasks tab in the Navigation Pane and then click on Folders. This opens all folders available, where you should also be able to find the Journal one. Alternatively, you can still use the CTRL+8 keys to gain instant access to the Journal folder.

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Where Did My Notes Go? You can access the notes with the CTRL+5 keys on your keyboard. In case you’d like to make it permanently visible in the Navigation Pane, you can go to Navigation options and move the Notes folder up or increase the number of visible items to have more space in the Navigation bar for the Notes tab.

Create a Signature It’s easier than ever to create a personalized signature with Outlook 2013. All you have to do is go to File and choose Options, then Mail and click on the Signatures tab you see to your right. This feature allows you to add as many signatures as you need – you simply click on New to add a name for your new signature and then write down everything you want to be included in the signature: your name, your position, your company, postal address, phone number, etc.

Check Your Calendar While Writing an Email Writing an email is now a lot easier with Outlook 2013 – there’s no need to leave your email in order to check the calendar for appointments. And to make it even more interesting, you can also take a quick look at your Tasks and Contacts while editing the email. In order to see your calendar, you simply move your cursor over the Calendar at the bottom and a smaller version of it will pop up next to your email. You can click through the various dates to see appointments just the same way as you can open a pop-up Tasks or People window by moving the cursor over these features.

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Change the Color of Your Calendar Not only can you change the theme of your Outlook, but you can also personalize the calendar to show under a certain color. In order to do so in Outlook 2013, you simply open your Calendar, click right and go to color. You will then see you have a couple of options to choose from: blue, pink, grey, green, but also the automatic version, which keeps your calendar white.

Change Your Theme and Background Outlook comes in new colors now – instead of the black, blue and silver themes that you might have got used to, you can now change the theme to Light Grey or Dark Grey, while you can also opt for keeping it White. To do so, you can go to File and choose Options then click the arrow down next to Office Theme in order to choose one of the three options. In addition to these themes, Outlook 2013 also allows you to change the background.

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Change the Weather to Celsius?

The default view of the weather is in Fahrenheit, but it can easily be changed to Celsius to adapt to each country’s needs and requirements. That one’s very easy to fix, by going to File and clicking the Options button. You can then go to Calendar and scroll down to the Weather category. It’s very simple to check or uncheck the weather option and change it from Fahrenheit to Celsius or the other way around.

Add an Additional Mailbox This feature hasn’t changed much from the way you used to add a mailbox with older versions of Outlook. In case you’re having trouble with it, all you have to do is go to File and choose Info. You will then see a tab named Account Settings, where you once more click on Account Settings. Once the Email options window opens, highlight the current email account then click Change. You can now go to More Settings, then Advanced and click Add. This allows you to type in any additional mailbox you may want to use.

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Connect Outlook to Social Media

Connecting your Outlook to various types of social media might be a useful way to keep up to date. This way, your People feature will be populated with information taken from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or others. To link one of these accounts to Outlook, simply go to File and then choose Info, scroll down to Account Settings and click on Social Network Accounts. This gives you permission to manage all such connections – to add a new one, but to also remove one of the accounts you previously connected to Outlook.

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What Does “Link Contacts” Do? As Outlook can connect to multiple sources which provide a contact listing (like from Facebook, LinkedIn and Windows Live Messenger via the Social Connector), you’ll probably have some duplicate entries of a single contact but each provides additional unique information or is updated differently. By linking these contact items together, you’ll get a single aggregated overview of all the information for that contact. It that regards, it is similar to the People Hub on Windows Phone or on Start Screen of Windows 8.

Where is the To-Do Bar? The To-Do Bar is turned off by default in Outlook 2013. You can turn it back on via the View-> To-Do Bar button in the Ribbon. Note that it now also holds the option to show your contacts. To mark a contact as a favorite, search for the contacts and then right click on it to see the “Add to Favorites” option. You can also directly right click a contact from your Contacts folder.

The reason why it is off by default is to allow for more horizontal viewing space and because the individual To-Do Bar modules are also available merely by hovering on the word Calendar People or Tasks at the bottom of the Outlook window.

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Why Aren’t My Upcoming Appointments Being Shown? When Outlook 2013 got released, it only showed appointments in the To-Do Bar and Peek for the selected day. Due to large amounts of feedback, this behavior first got changed with Hotfix KB2768340. If your version of Outlook is 15.0.4551.1004 or higher, you have the fix applied. Outlook 2013 will now show up to 7 days of appointments from the selected day onwards.

Add a Hotmail or Outlook.com Account Outlook 2013 no longer needs the Outlook Hotmail Connector to connect to Hotmail or Outlook.com accounts. Instead, it uses the Exchange ActiveSync Protocol (EAS). To add a Hotmail or Outlook.com account, simply add a new account and in the Add Account dialog specify your name, Hotmail or Outlook.com email address and password and Auto Account Setup will find the settings for you. When you configure the account manually, for instance when you are using a Hotmail account with your own domain, select Exchange ActiveSync and use m.hotmail.com as the mail server.

Control Where Outlook Searches by Default

You can configure Outlook 2013 so it defaults to searching in the folders of your choice. When you search for emails in Outlook, the default location is your Current Mailbox. However, this is often too limited. If you

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want a search to return all matching entries in all mailboxes, for instance, you'll need to select this option from the list in the Search box for every search you make. Alternately, you can change the default location that Outlook uses for searching. To do this, choose File > Options > Search. In the Results area you can select to include results, choosing one of these four options: Current Folder; the Current Folder, Current Mailbox when searching from the inbox; Current Mailbox; or All Mailboxes. Select the option that you want to use and click OK. This will then become the default for Outlook searches although of course you can change it on a search by search basis when needed.

Decide Whether to Use Quick Steps or Rules

Quick Steps were introduced in Outlook 2010 to give you a method of quickly performing tasks in Outlook. However, you might wonder why you would use a Quick Step rather than a Rule? Quick Steps are flexible so you can choose to apply them when you want to use them - Rules are less flexible and once they are set up they are applied automatically. The answer to which of these you should use depends on your task. Use Rules, for example, when you can identify a message that should always be handled in a specific way every time. So you would use a rule if you want to move all incoming messages from your boss to a particular folder. A rule will work well here because your boss' emails will be easy to identify by the unique email address. On the other hand if you store incoming press releases in a special folder this may be a task for a Quick Step if you don't know ahead of time who these emails will come from. Without a way to uniquely identify an email as containing a press release you can't write a rule to automatically process the message. However, you can create a Quick Step that you can click to move any selected message to a specific folder. The Quick Step can't identify that an email contains a press release – you have to do that - but it will speed up the process of moving the email if you decide it needs to be moved. You can create Quick Steps and Rules in the Mail area of Outlook using the tools on the Home tab.

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Make Use of the Favorites

If you have a few email accounts your folder pane can become crowded with folders making it time consuming to navigate to find those folders that you use most of the time. You can simplify finding these folders if you add them as Favorites. Favorites appear at the top of the Folder list when you are in the Mail module. If the Favorites area does not appear switch to Mail and choose View > Folder Pane and click to enable Favorites. Now you can add any folder to the Favorites by right-clicking it in the Folder pane and choose Show in Favorites. You can even set a Search Folder to be a Favorite so it is easy to find and use.

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Understand the Consequences of Using IMAP

If your email account uses the IMAP protocol, certain common functions won't work in Outlook 2013. This will be an issue for an increasing number of users, since IMAP enables you to access email from any device. Services like Hotmail and Gmail for example, use IMAP for email. When you are using IMAP email, in Outlook you can no longer download only the message headers and decide from there which messages to download. Instead, now all emails download automatically. In addition, with IMAP you can't add detailed flags to messages. Flags are either on or off, and can't be set to mean different things. You won't be able to allocate messages to Categories either, except for Hotmail account messages.

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