What’s To Like About the New Outlook?
The new Outlook rolling out to business and consumer users is a significant departure from the Microsoft’s Outlook software that has been mostly unchanged since the Ribbon appeared in Office 2007. If you are a power user of Outlook you may be disgruntled with the new Outlook experience. Others, who prefer Gmail and the browser version of Outlook, may prefer the new Outlook. While there are a lot of features missing, what are some options that might win you over to the new version?
Custom Folder Order
You can add folders to Favorites, so they are always in view at the top of the list in the left folder panel. But for your complete list of folders, they are organized alphabetically. To force a folder to appear towards the top of the list you can use characters and numbers, like / or 1, to display the folder higher in the alphabetized list. Now, in the new Outlook, you can organize your folders however you want to! In the View tab click on Folder Pane – Sort Folders – Custom Folder Order. Then you can drag and drop your folders in whatever order works best for you.
New Out of Office Options
You have some new and helpful settings in the Out of Office auto reply settings. Go to the gear icon in the upper right corner, click on “Accounts” and then choose “Automatic replies”. You can still set the date and time when the auto reply goes out and send different responses within your organization and outside your organization. Once you click on the box to “Send replies only during a time period” three new options appear: Block my calendar for this period; Automatically decline new invitations for events that occur during this period; Decline and cancel my meetings during this period. This is super-duper handy for standing meetings that you may forget to cancel if you are out of the office for a few days.
Files and Messages in Contacts
When you double click on an email address, whether the person has been saved to your contacts or not, you can see contact information, recent messages (email or Teams) from that contact, and also files that were recently shared with you from that contact. That information is quite handy, as are meeting insights at the bottom of calendared events.
Mail Merge
Microsoft has hinted that there will be a fully baked mass mailing option coming soon, but in the meantime, this is a handy new feature. If you need to send an email to multiple parties but don’t want to BCC for fear of a recipient hitting “reply all” and inadvertently creating issues (confidentiality, privilege, represented third parties), when you create a new outbound message in the Send menu click the arrow and choose “Start Mail Merge”. The “to” line changes to “recipient” and a notification shows up to let you know that every recipient will receive their own copy of this email without the other recipients listed.
Sweep Messages
Sweep is essentially a rule, but Microsoft has added it as a stand-alone button in the Ribbon (Move group in the Home tab). Open a message or select on from a list and click “Sweep”. You will see a list of options: to move all the messages from the Inbox folder to a folder or your choice; move all messages from the inbox folder and any future messages to a mailbox of your choice; always keep the latest message and move the rest from your Inbox folder to a folder of your choice; or Always move messages older than 10 days from the Inbox folder to a folder of your choice.
Undo Send
The new Outlook still has a “recall” (Home tab – Respond group), and it still alerts someone outside of your firm or organization to read the message they ignored at first because you don’t want them to see it. However, like Gmail, now there is also an Undo button. Send an email and realize you didn’t check the “to” line, forgot to cc someone, or didn’t spell check it? You have 10 seconds to find the Undo button at the bottom of the screen. While it does work better than recall with 10 seconds you need to act fast.
More Control Over Email Address from Suggestions
In the General Settings (gear icon in the top right) under Privacy and Data there is a section called Suggested People. This is the dangerous but useful feature that shows suggested names from your address book, contacts, and addresses based on your email conversation and activity. Now you have the possibility to clear the auto complete list of the addresses that fill in based on your email conversations and activity. Click “clear data and turn off”. They offer the option of downloading the expanded people data before you take this step, as you can’t recover the list once you delete it. Now the suggested email addresses that appear will be restricted to only those in your organization’s address book or your personal contacts.
Two other improvements regarding suggested people. When you add an address to an email anyone outside of your organization is highlighted in yellow. If you want to remove an address from the auto complete list without turning off the setting, click on the X to the right of the name on the list of addresses that populates to the right. A warning will pop up and ask if you are sure you want to remove this address from your suggestions and search results. This is very handy if a contact has changed their email address, but their old email address continues to populate.
Move to Folder
To help you clean up your inbox without having to drag and drop, simply select the email messages you want to move and then click on “Move” in the ribbon. It will show a list of recently used folders, or you can type the name of the folder. From this menu you can also add a new folder or see your entire folder structure. Want to move messages at once upon receipt? Select the message and click V (web shortcuts) or Ctrl + Shift + V (Outlook for Windows shortcuts) to make the Move option appear as a floating control.
Interested in other keyboard shortcuts? Click Shift +? to pull up a list of keyboard shortcuts. Note there are web-style shortcuts and Outlook for Windows shortcuts. You can toggle your preferred shortcuts in Settings.
Conditional Formatting
Want to highlight an email from a particular person with a distinct color to make it stand out? New Outlook has a dedicated button for conditional formatting. In Settings (gear icon) go to Mail – Conditional formatting. Give your rule a name, add conditions (from, subject includes, etc.) and add conditions to further refine the conditional formatting. Then pick a color and save. Now emails that meet the conditions will appear in the color of your choice. In classic Outlook you had more options, like changing the font size and type, but it was difficult to find the settings to apply conditional formatting as it was buried in advanced View settings.
Easy Attach
In a new email in the body of the message a prompt appears to remind you to type / to insert files and more. If you type the forward slash over that prompt a list of files you have most recently worked on appears. This will probably only work for documents stored in OneDrive. You can then click on the file link to change permissions, attach as copy and other options.
Select Text Floating Menu
When you select text in an email a little menu appears. You can highlight the text, add it to a OneNote feed that ties back to the entire email, respond to the email with the selected text called out, or add a task in To Do with the selected text in the task and linked to the email.
Conclusion
Microsoft is rolling out the new Outlook for home and personal use. They will soon force business users to adopt it as well. If you are a power user of classic Outlook, you will find the new Outlook to be lacking in many features. However, there are some new and useful ones to explore. Microsoft is constantly changing the list of what is and is not in the new Outlook. The best way to see the complete list is to check the Feature comparison between new Outlook and classic Outlook.