
Most of the working time nowadays entails having a hook of emails, scheduling of calendar and going through the contacts. This time consumption have often lead to lesser productivity in the stipulated working hours as people keep struck to scheduling, organising and replying to their mails instead of working towards the work productivity. I have often seen people juggling away through their work and emails all the time, whether at home or in office.
Most of these problems occur because people do not know how to make the most of their email service, and organising it in the most appropriate manner that it suits your needs and desires. Outlook has been an email client that has helped businesses manages their communication for ages. The new Microsoft Outlook 2013 steps up in its effort of being better, sleek, swift and customized to help companies as well as their employees manage their tasks more easily.
Look at these 5 tips, appended below, which will make the email communication better, enhanced and speedy:
1. Ease of Access of Inbox:
The default view of inbox can be changed to suit user’s needs. You can customize the inbox way by going through the View tab in ribbon toolbar. Here select Change View. You will select multitudes of viewing themes that you can select from: Viewing your recent emails only.
Message previews can also be selected from the View Tab, or it can be turned off also.From View Settings, customize by adding columns or order rearranging. This lets you to customize or sort emails by subjects, date and other patterns.
These settings and customization's can be saved by clicking on – Change View, and then – Save Current View. You can specify the folder’s name for which you want to customize the new view.
2. Reading Pane:
Gmail offers a feature that can make a mail as unread. Outlook goes one step further through its feature: Reading Pane. Normally, when you open a mail, it gets marked as read, even while you haven’t gone through it completely. And this thing makes some important mails go unnoticed many a times. Reading Pane lets you organize your important unread mails in a better way.
Open – File – Options – Mail. Choose “Reading Pane” button. Then select – “Mark items as read when viewed in the Reading Pane Button”. You can time the appearance of message in seconds in Reading Pane. After this time, the Outlook marks the mail as read.
3. Social Media Accounts synchronization:
Nowadays, synchronization of social media accounts to all your mail and other online accounts has become the norm of every web application and tools. The feature that was not present in the Outlook before, and was never thought upon to be included in the business mail account system of Outlook is now present in Outlook 2013.When you can connect to the social media accounts to your outlook account, a special feature called as “People” lets you get updated about the activities of people in your account.
For synchronization, open – File – Info – Account Settings – Social Network Accounts. Through this option, you can link to Facebook and LinkedIn accounts (Most of the web applications offer Facebook account synchronization but not LinkedIn).
4. To-Do functionality:
To-Do functionality is a great feature that is available in almost all the email accounts. But its use of ease and helpfulness depends on its interface.Initially the To-Do bar is disabled in the Outlook 2013 by default. But you can enable this feature in the Outlook 2013, to make your mail client service a comprehensive service.
Go to – View Tab, then select – To-Do Bar. A drop down list will appear. From here you can select the features that you want to appear in your To-Do Bar. Select the options by the same order, in which you would like to see them ordered in the To-Do Bar. However, there are still some laggards in its functionality – Only one month calendar view, and no display of appointments scheduling for the following day if you don’t have appointments scheduled for preceding day.
5. Colourize your Message Appearance:
The different colour features of Outlook makes it easy to manage your email preferences by colouring them.A blue bar appears at the left of the message in the inbox, along with the blue message header. You can apply this blue colouring to your selected mails. However, you can change the colouring scheme and font according to your choice.Apply colouring scheme based to mails based on various purpose, like different senders, or according to their subjects.
Go to – View- View Setting – Conditional Formatting, and then select either the already present blue colour or customize different colours or fonts to unread messages.
Outlook has always been perceived as a business mail client, serving for only intellectual and business mind, but with these features, I am sure that you will see a completely different look for Outlook, which is sure to appeal to a greater mass.