On the Tools menu, click Rules and Alerts.In the Navigation pane (the column on the left side of the Outlook window that includes buttons for the Mail, Calendar, and Tasks views and folders), click Mail.
#OUTLOOK QUICK STEPS FOLDER HOW TO#
Here’s how to create a rule from a template or from scratch: They’re easy to create and can be used to streamline common e-mail-related tasks. Outlook uses “rules” to automate common tasks. Two ways to help manage that avalanche of email if you use Outlook are using Rules and Quick Steps. Email has become a major clutter and productivity obstacle. Many have inboxes with thousands of messages in them. So I can now apply this Quick Step whenever I get a New Product Release, so I'll never worry about missing a key step in a Product Release process.Although email is supposed to make communication quicker and easier, it can often complicate things instead. Here's my email saying that I approve the release, I can click Send on that one and if I come to my Product Releases Folder, there it is. I can choose the time and the date for my meeting, choose Send. Now whenever I get one in my Inbox, I can click the button and all my actions take effect. Once I'm all done, I can click Finish, click OK and our New Product Release Quick Step is done. So I'm going to create a New Meeting, I can specify who I want to create the meeting with, and I can click on the two down arrows again and put in things like a Subject and Location. I'm going to create a meeting with somebody to talk about the Product Catalog Design. And then I'm going to come down and add one more Action. For example, I can append the word Forward, I can keep the original Subject or I can change it and I can actually add my own text. I'm going to forward it to somebody in my office and I can click to on the two down arrows and add more things. This time, I'm going to fire off an email, so I'm going to down the Respond Category and choose Forward. I'm going to add another action by clicking Add Action. Just like last time the Folder has to be made already and I've already done that, so I'm going to select my Product Releases Folder. The first one is, I'm going to move it to a Folder. I'm going to give it a name, and here's where I get to choose all the actions that's going to occur whenever I click on this Quick Step, in this case, I'm going to do more than one action. So I'm going to go down to my Quick Steps Dialog again, click on New, and this time instead of all this canned ones, I'm going to go down to Custom. For example, I have to send out an email saying that I approve it and then I need a meeting to talk about a product catalog design. I'm going to go back to my Inbox and you'll see that I have a lot of New Product Releases, in this case, let's say that there's a bunch of different actionable items that needs to happen whenever I get a New Product Release. Now you can actually get a little bit more complex. As you can see, it removes it from my Inbox and now if I come to my Reading List Folder, there it is. So here's something that I want to add to my Reading List, so I'm going to highlight it and click Reading List. I can click Finish and OK and now you'll see my Reading List is in my Quick Steps. I can mark it as Read or not, in this case, I'm going to uncheck Mark as Read, because if I did have one that was unread and I moved it to my Folder, it'll remind me that I have things to read in my Reading List. Now I'd already created this Folder called Reading List, so I'm going to select it. For Actions, I'm going to move it to Folder and I can choose a Folder. I can give it a name, I'm going to call this one Reading List. There are a couple of built in ones, so I'm going to choose Move to Folder. So let's expand the Quick Steps dialog box and this time, I'm going to select New. For example, here's a newsletter I have already created a Folder called Reading List so I'm going to create a Quick Step that will automatically take things and put them in my Reading List manually. We can actually create our own Quick Steps if these aren't enough for you. The first time you click on a Quick Step, it's going to ask you who your Manager is and you can put in their email address and it will remember that and next time you'll never have to put it again, it'll just automatically forward it to that person. For example, this one will forward a selected email that you specify to your Manager. You can hover your mouse over them and it'll tell you what they do. You can find Quick Steps in the Home Ribbon Tab under the Quick Steps Category. It's like a Message Rule in which actionable items occur and there can definitely be more than one actionable item, however, unlike Rules, which trigger automatically, you can easily trigger a Quick Step on whatever emails you want manually, and whichever ones fit your need at the time. A Quick Step is a neat feature in Outlook in which you can manually trigger a sequence of events to process the message.