Microsoft Outlook is a great tool for managing e-mail, contacts, calendars, and tasks, but learning to use it effectively takes time and effort. To help you with this process, we have compiled several articles that focus on Outlook tips, tricks, and shortcuts. Using the tips featured in these articles, you can learn how to convert multiple e-mail addresses to contacts, how Outlook tasks can save you time, and how you can use signatures to personalize your sent messages and avoid repetitive typing. Here are some more examples of what you’ll find in our indispensable Outlook tips download.

Convert multiple e-mail addresses to Contacts
If you’ve ever had to send the same reply to multiple e-mails, or you’ve just been lackadaisical about saving new addresses in your Contacts folder, this trick will brighten your day. And, if you’ve got a classroom full of salespeople or other professionals who receive lots of e-mail, they’ll love you for giving them this bit of knowledge.

First, let’s set the scene. Suppose you’re Fred, the widget salesman, whose Web site has generated tons of responses to a sale ad that mistakenly offered 12 widgets for $1. You now have an Inbox full of e-mails that you must respond to with the same correction message. Should you send each one separately? No! Should you copy and paste each address into a new message window? No!

You could take the time to open each message, right-click on the sender’s address, and choose Add To Contacts. But that would take forever, and those addresses would become jumbled with the addresses of others who are already on your Contact list but don’t need to be notified. For step-by-step instructions on how to convert multiple e-mail addresses to contacts, download our indispensable Outlook tips now!

Use Rules to get organized fast
Wouldn’t it be great if we could establish exact rules of behavior for common occurrences in our lives? For example, “Let the cat out every night at 10 P.M.,” or “Feed fish at noon and 6 P.M.” Unfortunately, we can’t program the real world to work that way. Outlook, however, offers us a taste of that carefree organization with its Rules feature.

Wouldn’t your students like to automatically flag messages from their boss for follow-up; redirect messages to a group of committee members; or move messages to a particular folder based on who sent them? Rules allow users to do these things as messages arrive in their mailboxes. A rule is a set of actions, conditions, and exceptions that process and organize messages. If you’re ready to start using Rules today, download our indispensable Outlook tips!

Download our indispensable Outlook tips
You can download our indispensable Outlook tips by following this link or by clicking on the Downloads link in the navigation bar on the top of this page. TechRepublic has many useful documents, templates, and applications available for download, so be sure to check out our other offerings.

Our indispensable Outlook tips download is available both as a Microsoft Word document and an Adobe PDF file. To increase download speed, we have zipped these two files together into one file named outlook_compilation.zip. You will need an unzip utility such as WinZip or PKZIP to expand the zipped file. You will also need either Microsoft Word or the Adobe Acrobat Reader to view each respective document. You can download the Adobe Acrobat Reader here.
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