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Learn Outlook 2013

Table of Contents Chapter 1 – Introduction Information about Installation and Upgrade ............................................................6 What’s New in Outlook 2013 ................................................................................12 Chapter 2 – Using Touch Overview of Principles ..........................................................................................15 Chapter 3 – Help Online, Offline and Contextual Help .....................................................................18 Chapter 4 – Getting Started Outlook 2013 Workspace ......................................................................................22 Chapter 5 – The Ribbon and Toolbars The Ribbon.............................................................................................................27 Quick Access Toolbar ............................................................................................32 Mini Toolbars.........................................................................................................35 Contextual Menu....................................................................................................37 Status Bar ...............................................................................................................39 Chapter 6 – Outlook Options Customizing Settings and the Use of Outlook .......................................................40 Chapter 7 – Keyboard Shortcut and Key Tips List of Keyboard Shortcuts; Using Key Tips .........................................................44 Chapter 8 – Basic Tasks in Outlook

Setting Up an Account ...........................................................................................47 Sending and Receiving Email ................................................................................51 Creating appointments and Scheduling Meetings..................................................55 Adding Contacts.....................................................................................................60 Adding Tasks .........................................................................................................64 Creating Notes .......................................................................................................69 Chapter 9 – RSS Feeds Managing RSS Feeds .............................................................................................72 Chapter 10 – Printing Printing Emails and Contacts; Print Properties ......................................................77 Chapter 11 – Outlook Data Files Favorites; PST and OST Files; Folder Size ...........................................................82 Chapter 12 – Account Management Setting Up Gmail and POP Accounts ....................................................................87 Chapter 13 – Managing Folders Adding New Folder, Moving and Deleting Items, and Emptying Folders ............92 Chapter 14 – Backup and Restore Backup and Restore a PST file ..............................................................................96 Chapter 15 – Archiving AutoArchive and Manual Archive .........................................................................99 Chapter 16 – Import and Export

Import and Export Wizard ...................................................................................102 Chapter 17 – Calendar Management Calendar Options .................................................................................................104 Calendar Amendments and Rescheduling ...........................................................108 Calendar Recurrence ............................................................................................110 Calendar Attachments ..........................................................................................112 Calendar Events ...................................................................................................115 Chapter 18 – Reminders and To-do Management Managing Reminders ...........................................................................................118 Chapter 19 – Search Basics of Search; Searching Contacts ..................................................................121 Search Folders ......................................................................................................124 Chapter 20 – Categories Color Categories ..................................................................................................126 Chapter 21 – Task Management Managing Tasks ...................................................................................................130 Chapter 22 – Contacts Contacts Options ..................................................................................................135 Contact Information .............................................................................................137 Outlook Social Connector ....................................................................................141 Contact Views ......................................................................................................143

Contact Groups ....................................................................................................146 Chapter 23 – Email Management and Advanced Features Email Options ......................................................................................................148 Email Send and Receive Settings ........................................................................153 Composing Email.................................................................................................156 Email Signatures ..................................................................................................161 Email Inbox ..........................................................................................................163 Email Actions.......................................................................................................167 Touch Action Bar .................................................................................................171 Junk Email ...........................................................................................................173 Stationery .............................................................................................................177 Rules ....................................................................................................................180 Quick Steps ..........................................................................................................184 Outlook Journal....................................................................................................187 Mail Merge using Word .......................................................................................191 Chapter 24 – Safety and Security Trust Center .........................................................................................................195 Chapter 25 – Conclusion Microsoft Updates; Closing .................................................................................199

Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 1 – Introduction Video: Information about Installation and Upgrade Toby: Hello and welcome to our course on Microsoft Outlook 2013. My name is Toby and I’m your instructor on this course. Outlook 2013 is the latest version of Microsoft’s award winning personal information manager which grew from its roots as an email application in 1997 and is now probably the best known personal information manager for PCs in the world. Outlook is also a popular tool amongst Mac users and increasingly it’s being used by people with touch based devices and during this course I’m going to look at some of the newer features of Outlook which are intended for those people that use touch rather than a keyboard and mouse with Outlook. Whoever you are I hope that you’re going to get something out of this course on Outlook. But I am particularly going to be aiming at three groups of users. First of all, I’m going to talk to people who are completely new to Outlook. I’m going to explain how to use its many features, including email, contact management, and calendar management and I will be starting pretty much from scratch on these topics. I will be assuming that you have a good basic knowledge of how to use a Windows interface and that you’re pretty familiar with a lot of the terminology associated with this, such as dragging and clicking and using the mouse to select text. But I won’t be assuming that you’re a prior user of any kind of email management program. The second group of users are the people who’ve used a much older version of Outlook, people who perhaps who’ve been using an Outlook version earlier than 2007 and who are completely unfamiliar with some of the new features of Outlook such as the use of the Ribbon. The third group of users will be people who have used a more recent version of Outlook, for example, Outlook 2010, have used the Ribbon but need to know what the latest features are including some changes that affect the use of the Ribbon. On this course I’m not only aiming for breadth of coverage but depth as well. We won’t be going into very advanced features. So we won’t be looking at programming of Microsoft Outlook, but my intention is to look at all of the topics that we cover in a good enough level of

© Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 detail that most people will be able to achieve the things that they want to achieve when they’ve successfully completed the course. In this introductory section I’m going to cover a lot of the basic background information that you’re going to need both for the course and to use Outlook. Even if you’ve used Outlook before, I suggest that you follow this introductory section quite carefully because it does contain some important information. The first thing I’d like to talk about is the PC that I’m using for this course. The PC that I’m using has a mouse and keyboard. It’s a touch base device as well and it supports hand gestures in front of the screen. Now from a teaching point of view, the use of hand gestures really does not work in a teaching environment so I won’t be using that approach. So that leaves us with mouse and keyboard and touch. Now I’m certainly not going to go through every topic on the course twice. It would make it a very long and rather slow course. So primarily, I’m going to use mouse and keyboard because for most Outlook users that is still the way that they operate Outlook. However, I do recognize that there are going to be a lot of you that are going to want to be able to use Outlook on a touch base device and so I’m pretty regularly going to cover some of the topics using touch and particularly where there is a new technique, a new touch gesture that’s needed, I will take the time to explain that in a reasonable level of detail. So, primarily, mouse and keyboard but we’re going to be covering touch from time to time and hopefully whenever I really to need to cover touch. And just a small word of warning for those of you who’d really like to get moving with Outlook as quickly as possible, I will need to spend a little bit of time right at the beginning of the course just after this introductory section to cover some of the basics of the workspace, the use of the Ribbon, and so on. This time spent early on in explaining the terminology and describing how you can most effectively use Outlook you’ll find pays off well later on. So if you’re in a hurry to send an email, I think you’ll have to bear with me for just a little while, while we cover those basics. But you’ll be using Outlook for your personal information management much more effectively later on if we spend this early time on the basics. Now I appreciate that some of you may already have Outlook 2013 installed as part of Office 2013 or even as a standalone product, but for anybody that doesn’t let’s look briefly at the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 system requirements for Office 2013.

There is a page in the TechNet section of the

microsoft.com website, system requirements for Office 2013. I will be showing you a few of these pages from time to time. You can normally find them just by Googling or going to Microsoft and searching the Microsoft site. Some of these pages are very useful and this particular one gives you both the hardware and software requirements for running Office 2013 and by implication for running Outlook 2013 as well. So if you haven’t already installed Outlook and maybe you’re even just thinking about whether you’re going to install it or not, this is an important page to be aware of. If we scroll down that page, we have a list of current Office products, the 2013 range and the Office 365 range, and a little bit further down we’ve got a section giving the standard system requirements, first of all, from a hardware and operating system point of view. Now the hardware requirements, of course, are very important. You need to make sure that your device meets these hardware requirements. But also the operating system requirements which I think have surprised one or two people. In the operating system list, the PC operating systems that will support Office 2013 are Windows 7 and Windows 8. And if you want to run the 64-bit version, you need Windows 7 64-bit or Windows 8 64-bit. Office 2013 is not supported on Windows Vista or on Windows XP. It will run on certain Windows Server products but it’s not supported on Vista or XP. So if you’re still running Windows XP or Windows Vista, you’re going to need to upgrade in order to be able to run Office 2013. Now further down in this document, there is a section on which browsers are supported, the dotnet version that you’ll need, and requirements for touch devices; so a touch enabled device is required to use any of the multi-touch functionality. But note all features and functionality are always available by using a keyboard, mouse, or other standard or accessible input device. Now apart from these requirements, if I go further down still, there is a list of specific requirements for each of the components of Office 2013. So if I click on Outlook 2013, you see a list of its specific requirements. Now many of these requirements for Outlook 2013 refer to things like Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Link Server, and so on. But there are a couple of important ones; for instance, Outlook 2013 internet functionality requires an internet connection and Internet Explorer 8 or Internet Explorer 9. So you need to use an IE browser 8 or 9 for


Learn Outlook 2013 certain functionality. And then a little bit further down here certain features require a Microsoft ID, a Windows Live ID and we’ll talk about that a little bit later on as well. One other thing I should point out here, you’ve already seen mention of browser versions, with all of the components of Office 2013 including Outlook 2013, you do generally need a live internet connection. Now to be fair you can do a lot of things without a live internet connection but there are certain things that you can’t do without. And this isn’t just things like sending and receiving email. It’s things like being able to get help because Outlook 2013 does not come with a full Help system installed on the device you’re running it on. It is basically online help. There is offline help available. There is installed help available but it’s only a subset, a relatively small part of the overall Help. So for this and some other reasons, you really need an internet connection to make Outlook 2013 work fully for you. Now having said that I do not always use it with an internet connection and as I’ll explain as we go along, there are still many things you can do in Outlook if you’re not connected to the internet. So let’s suppose that you’ve decided that you’re really going to try out Outlook 2013 and that in fact you’re going to try out a full version of Office 2013. What are your options for getting hold of a copy if you don’t already have a copy installed? Well, you can certainly go to your local computer store to buy a copy or download one either from a store or from Microsoft themselves. But at the time of recording this course, Microsoft were also offering a 60-day free trial of Office 2013 and I think 60 days should be plenty of time to cover this course and probably some of our other Office 2013 courses as well. If you want to try the trial version, if you go to the TechNet area within microsoft.com or just Google Office 2013 trial, you will get to this page or an equivalent of this page depending on how long after recording this course you’re looking for a trial version. And from here you can go through a pretty straightforward process to download a trial version. Now having bought or downloaded either a commercial version or a trial version, the next question then will be how to install it on your device. Now one thing I’m not going to go through on this course is how to install Office 2013. That is adequately covered by Microsoft on microsoft.com. This is a part of a blog on TechNet and this explains page by page, step by step how to do an installation. This is actually instructions for the Office 2013 customer preview, but the installation instructions are the same on the release version and you will be given access to instructions with the copy that you bought or © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 downloaded as well. But there’s plenty of information from Microsoft about how to do the installation and there’s plenty information in the forums about how people overcome some of the problems that may occur. But from this point onwards in the course, I’m going to assume that you have Outlook 2013 installed on your device and that it’s ready to run. I’m also going to assume that you’re running it for the first time. Now, of course, you may have been using Outlook 2013 for a while. You may have already set some things up. You may have been using it. You may have customized it and so on. But this is really intended for people who are literally are about to start it up for the first time and that’s the point really at which the course proper gets started. So the next thing we’re going to do is to start Outlook 2013. What you see may be a little different from what I see. I’m running on Windows 8 and I’m using a screen resolution of 1024 by 768. If you’re using a different screen resolution and if you’re using Windows 7, several things may look a little different for you from what I see. But I’ll try to explain any points at which these differences will be significant. The screen resolution I’m using is fairly square. It’s not a widescreen presentation, so sometimes I’ll see less. Things like what I see on the Ribbon, etc will probably be quite different from yours if you’re using widescreen. But whichever operating system you’re using and whatever resolution you’re on, the next thing to do is to start Outlook 2013. That may be by using a shortcut on the taskbar. It may be by using the start menu if you’re using Windows 7 or you may be running it from the start screen in Windows 8. But whichever way you’re using it, the next thing to do is to start Outlook 2013. So the first time that you run Outlook 2013, you will see this introductory screen and the first thing it does is to ask you to add your email account. Now 99.9% of people will have an email account and they’ll start by setting up this email account in the following steps on this screen. I’m going to assume for the moment that you don’t have an email account and we’re going to get started with Outlook 2013 without an email account because some people won’t have one and they won’t know what to do if we start with the assumption that you’ve got an email account. We can set the email account up later on. That’s what a lot of people will do. In fact, we’ll be setting up a few email accounts later on. So let’s just click on Next. Use Outlook to connect to email accounts. Do you want to setup Outlook to connect to an email account? We are going to say No at this stage and click on Next. We get a warning about what happens if we don’t add an © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 email account. And now we’re going to say Use Outlook without an email account for now and click on Finish. And there we are; Outlook 2013 is started. We can see the main Outlook window. It normally opens in something called Outlook Today that I’ll talk to you about later on. But we’ve started and from now on we can start learning how to use Outlook 2013. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: What’s New in Outlook 2013 Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In the introductory section, we looked at the requirements for running Outlook, made sure that you were able to get a copy and I pointed you at the directions for installing it. By now you should have an installed copy. You’re probably raring to go with Outlook 2013 but we have a couple of other things to cover first. And the thing we’re going to cover in this short section is something that will be of interest to those of you in particular who’ve used earlier versions of Outlook and it’s the What’s New in Outlook 2013. Now there are a couple of sources for this information. I’m looking at the one that is in the Office section on microsoft.com. There’s a specific section; What’s New in Outlook 2013. It begins with a video which gives a summary of the main points. And then the main points are listed in the same document and I’m going to quickly go through what those new and improved features are now. Now, first of all, we have a batch of new and improved features related primarily to email. So you can know at a glance which messages to read if you get a lot of email by previewing messages in the message list using the improved facilities. And also if you want to respond to a message with inline replies, that’s a technique that a lot of us use quite a bit, you can reply with one click by typing your response in the Reading Pane, or you can start a link IM, instant messaging conversation for a real time chat. You also have a facility to use commands in the message list for quick action. So for instance, you can flag a message, delete a message, or mark it as read or unread with handy commands that are actually available to you right in the message list. You can also with the All and Unread buttons in the Inbox focus on the messages you want. So by choosing between All and Unread, you can either show all messages or just the unread ones. So they’re a batch of facilities that can really help you with processing you email quickly. One of the other things that often causes delay when you’re using Outlook is switching between email, calendar, tasks, and so on. In Outlook 2013, there is a new facility that’s called Sneak a peek which lets you grab a quick glance at your schedule, an appointment, or details about a contact without switching between email and calendar and so on. So while you’re basically


Learn Outlook 2013 working on one thing, for instance while you’re working on email, you can sneak a peek at your calendar without actually switching into calendar mode. Nowadays with so many different sources of information about our contacts it’s really useful to be able to see all your contact details in one place and the people card in Outlook 2013 really helps in this sense because you can keep all of the key details about a contact in one place. This might include phone, email address, company information, and social media related information as well. Another useful feature of Outlook 2013 is just above the Status Bar and here these links to the various Outlook elements of Mail, Calendar, People, Task can really make it easier to switch between the different modes of operation within Outlook 2013. In Outlook 2013, you can customize your Inbox, rename the folders in your Inbox, and move them around to support the way that you like to work. And if you have access to not only Outlook 2013 but Exchange and SharePoint, you can give other members of your team shared access to calendars and task lists for example. Now if you’ve traditionally used Outlook to access you Hotmail account, you will have been using the add-in for that purpose. Well, with Outlook 2013 the support for Hotmail accounts is built into Outlook 2013 and you no longer need that add-in. If you’re like me and you have a lot of content in Outlook sometimes finding things can be a real challenge. Well, the improved Find facilities in Outlook 2013 let you search email, attachments, calendar appointments, and contacts to find information more quickly and more thoroughly. And the last of the new features to focus on is the new Weather Bar which enables you to see a local weather forecast pretty much at a glance. It’s right there in Calendar View and it also shows the current weather conditions. There is another page within the Office section of microsoft.com which lists the discontinued features and modified functionality in Outlook 2013. Now particularly for those of you who are new to Outlook, most of this won’t really mean very much. Some of it is really quite technical and involves Microsoft Exchange and so on. And at this stage in the course, I don’t think it’s necessary or useful for me to go through this list. One or two of these items will crop up later © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 on. But if you are interested in the more detailed and technical aspects of Outlook, this is a good page to look at if you’ve used earlier versions. And within TechNet on microsoft.com, there is another page also called What’s new in Outlook 2013 that lists from a more technical viewpoint the new features within Outlook 2013. Now some of these I’ve mentioned already within this section but there are some which I haven’t. They’re much more technical and detailed items. And also in some cases, let me find an example, let’s say the Weather Bar here which I did mention, there are quite a more details included. So if you want some more detailed information or to look at some of the more technical changes and additions then this again is a good page to look at. Although some of it relates again to Exchange Server, to Exchange ActiveSync, and so on. So that’s it, a lightening quick tour of the new and improved features in Outlook 2013 and some references there to the more detailed sources of information available from microsoft.com. Most of those items we’ll be covering on the course. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 2 – Using Touch Video: Overview of Principles Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this short section, I’d like to just introduce you to some of the features related to the use of touch devices with Outlook 2013. I appreciate that many of you starting this course will be using touch devices; therefore it’s important at this stage that I give you some good pointers so that you can work along with us right from the beginning. Having said that, some of the features and some of the touch gestures you’re going to need will not really be used until quite a bit later on in the course. So in this section, I’m going to just introduce you to the basics and then as each new gesture becomes necessary, I’ll try to make a point of demonstrating it and talking about how best to use it within Outlook 2013. Now during this section, I’m going to refer you to two very useful documents. One of them is in the Office section on microsoft.com and that is the Office touch guide which basically shows you the main gestures that you’ll be using with a touch device. And apart from the little picture in each case to show you what it means, it’ll introduce the terminology that I’m going to use. So tap will be the equivalent of click with keyboard and mouse. Tap is just where you tap on the screen somewhere. Pinch will be where you use normally your thumb and index finger, put them both on the screen, pinch them together. You use this sort of thing for things like zooming out on a picture or maybe out on a document that you’ve got open from Outlook. Stretch, where you put your, normally your thumb-index finger together and stretch them apart. You’d use this for zooming in on a particular document. And then we have two other gestures, slide and swipe. Slide where we tap on something and hold, pull it to where we want it to go and release it again. And then swipe which is subtly different from slide in that of course you just really swipe across only touching the screen for part of that time; typically used for quickly swiping through a long document, for example. So these main gestures are ones that I will refer to throughout the course and that’s the terminology that I will use. Now one gesture that I didn’t mention there was the equivalent of right click and I’m going to refer to that in this course as tap and hold. And basically to do a right click, you tap on the screen, keep your finger down, and hold normally for about two seconds. And what tells you © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 that the right click has worked is a bit context sensitive, it depends what you’re doing. But there will usually be a visual signal that your right click has worked. In the case of Office 2013 in general, you’ll very often get a little mini toolbar that pops up to tell you’ve successfully right clicked. But other things happen in other situations, as you will see, and so the visual signal will vary to some extent. But tap and hold is what I will refer to right click as when using a touch device. Now this first document is a general Office document and although it’s very useful, it doesn’t contain some of the very important things that we’re going to need in Outlook. But if we just quickly look through the rest of this, there are a couple of very important things. Within Office in general and Outlook included, we have the ability to switch between touch mode and mouse mode, and the instructions on how to do this are here. I’m actually going to show you how to do that in a later section anyway. And then there is also there a set of instructions about how to deal with a touch keyboard. Now I’m using a physical keyboard on this course. If you’re using a touch keyboard, so that’s one that pops up on your screen, the instructions for showing and hiding it are here, and the instructions for docking it and undocking it are here as well. Generally speaking, it’s very difficult for me to run a course like this using a touch keyboard because it just uses up so much of the screen. I may refer to it from time to time but generally speaking I avoid it for just that reason. Things like moving around in a file using the scroll facilities, using the zoom in and zoom out that I’ve already mentioned. Another very important action that we need to be able to do in Outlook is the ability to make a selection, to select text and so on. And doing that in Outlook 2013 with a touch device will also look different as well and I’ll cover that when we get to that point. Now in the later parts of this section, there are particular additional gestures related to Excel and PowerPoint but none specifically in relation to Outlook and to some extent that’s where the second document comes in. Now this second document is actually an office.com blog from I think its July 2012. So it’s quite an old blog but it’s got some extremely useful information, and some of the information related to Outlook is particularly helpful. Now if you’re not a user of a touch device you might well find © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 this about the most uninteresting part of the course, but if you are going to use a touch device it’s a very interesting read because it explains why some of the things in Office in general and Outlook in particular are the way that they are and I think it will help you to use touch well with Outlook in that it will explain why you do some of the things that you do. Now one consequence of this is it’s quite a long document and there’s quite a bit of it that you may well not be interested in. But I would like to just point out one or two of the very specific Outlook related items in this document that are particularly useful. One important area is the area of targeting and by this we mean the ability to actually touch an item on the screen accurately. Now if you’re using mouse and keyboard you can be incredibly accurate down to virtually the pixel level, but with fingers and particularly if you’ve got fairly fat fingers like mine that’s now very easy to do. Now as we’ll see in a later section when we come to using the Ribbon in touch mode the Ribbon becomes much easier to use. But specifically in Outlook, there are also issues with targeting the list of folders in Outlook and one of the changes that’s been made in Office 2013 is that when you go into touch mode the folders are easier to target. Now this is typical of the sort of thing specifically related to Outlook that is covered in this document and if you actually go through the document, you could even sort of search for the term Outlook and find the particular things related to Outlook. You’ll find out some of the things that you can adapt and adjust to suit your purposes if you’re using Outlook 2013 on a touch device. And the second specific thing I’d like to point out here is this section called In-Canvas Commands that discusses some of the thinking that went into how to deal with just processing email through Outlook on a touch device. And there’s actually a very helpful video here that shows you how to use Outlooks new touch action bar. Now we’ll be talking a little bit about that during the course as well, but this is another source of information where you can see to a large extent why Microsoft chose to do things that they do in the way that they do and how what they’ve tried to do is to make it very efficient for touch screen device users to process their email. So that’s a quick run through of some of the main issues and ideas related to the use of touch screen devices. I’ll be using touch at various points during the course as I pointed out before. That’s it on this section. I’ll see you in the next one. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 3 – Help Video: Online, Offline and Contextual Help Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at the Help that’s available with Outlook 2013 and in Outlook, as in the rest of Office 2013, the Help is offered in a pretty consistent way. Now as I mentioned earlier on you need to be connected to the internet to access the full online Help for Outlook 2013. I am currently connected to the internet and there are basically two ways of accessing Help. First of all, virtually every window that you’ll see in Outlook 2013 has a little question mark symbol like that one and if you click on that it will bring up the Help. Let me just hover over the symbol because you get a screen tip subject to some settings that we’ll talk about later that says Microsoft Outlook Help F1 and F1 is the second way of invoking Help. F1 there refers to the keyboard shortcut F1. So if I either click on the question mark or press the F1 key, I will bring up the Outlook 2013 Help. The Outlook Help opens in its own window which I can resize as normal. What I’m going to do here is to maximize that window. The Help in Outlook is browser based Help. So it works in pretty much the same way that your internet browser works. You have a number of pages and you can step backwards and forwards through the pages, but you also have specific features such as if we looked just here, the picture of the house, that’s Home. So the Home page for Outlook Help is the one we’re looking at now. Anytime you want to come back to home click on Home. We have a print facility here so you can print the help to an attached printer or another device that you use to print to. And then we also have this button which says Use large text, and if for some reason or other you need the text larger, you can click on that button and the Help text is increased in size. If you press on it again, it goes back to the previous setting. There is then a Search facility. I’ll come back to the search facility in just a moment. Now below this row of tools here there is a section called Popular searches which basically lists some of the terms that are popular for Outlook users that are searching Help. Below that there are two more sections. There’s Getting Started, and Basics and Beyond. The Getting Started section is pretty useful help if you really are getting started. The first section is What’s New in © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Outlook 2013. Note that as I hover over one of these subjects, its underlined indicating that it’s a hyperlink. Click on the hyperlink and it take me through to this page, What’s New in Outlook 2013. And this might by now look quite familiar to you. If from this page I want to look at one of the topics that’s linked to on this page, for instance Basics tasks in Outlook 2013, I can tell by the color difference that it’s a hyperlink. When I hover over it, it changes to an underlined hyperlink. Click on that and it takes me through to a page with some of the basic tasks in Outlook 2013. Now, of course, virtually all of these basic tasks I’ll be covering on the course, but it is useful to go through these in the Help. It gives you a different take, a different aspect on these different tasks. I’ll generally go into these in a bit more detail than the Outlook Help does, but the Outlook Help as I say gives a very good alternative view. Now when you’ve been working your way through Help, perhaps following a few links, the browser based nature of Help is such that you can go back a page. So if I click on Back from this page, I get back to the What’s New page that I was at before, Back again, and I get back to the Home page. And, of course, at any stage I could’ve clicked the Home button to take me straight back here. In a later section, I’m going to talk to you about keyboard shortcuts. But if you’re keen to start using keyboard shortcuts straightaway, there is a link on the Help Home page here to Outlook 2013 keyboard shortcuts that’s well worth a look. There is also a very useful Getting Started link here to Make the Switch to Outlook 2013. This gives you a link to a page in the Office section of microsoft.com and from there you can download four pretty short videos about getting started with Outlook 2013. They’re pretty useful videos. They’re not particularly detailed, but if you’re new to it or even if you’re an experienced user and you really want to see a different view of what’s changed and what’s new, then they’re well worth a look. I’m afraid the ratings on the right aren’t particularly encouraging but I do think they’re worth a look and they’re pretty short so it won’t take you long to go through them. And then in the bottom section here, Basics and beyond, there are about half a dozen links to specific tasks. Well, in fact, the first one is one to basic tasks and then five other specific tasks that you can perform within Outlook 2013. Of course, the Help overall has many, many more than this and that is really where the Search facility comes in. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So we have the popular searches here: Archive, Reading Pane, Search. Let’s try say Set reminder. If I click on Set reminder it basically does a search as though I had typed Set reminder into that Search box. So let me click there and what I get is a list of links to pages within the Help system and elsewhere to deal with setting reminders. Now in each case, the first item is the link itself. If I hover over it, it becomes underlined and becomes an active hyperlink. Set custom reminders for special occasions. Next one, set or remove reminders. Next one, add or remove a reminder. And then immediately under the phrase with the link, there is basically a description of what it is. These are mostly articles but there’s one down there, a video, Video: Calendar views. And if I want to follow one of these up; let’s suppose I want to say set or remove reminders and by the way you can see that relates to Outlook 2010 messages. But if I click on that it tells me, in fact it’s Outlook 2013 after all, but it basically takes me through how to set reminders. There will normally be other links from here to other pages within the Help system or other articles, videos, etc. Whenever I’ve finished, I can go back by clicking on Home. So that’s one of the popular searches. If I wanted to search on pretty much any term I like, all I need to do is to type that term into the Search box and then either click or tap on the Search Online Help button. So far in this section we’ve basically been using click, so tap would be the same on a touch device. Click on that and there we are. Number of links through to topics related to touch, such as for example roughly in the middle there, Phone and tablet setup reference which if you’re using a phone or a tablet device to access email, you might find that useful as well. So now I’ve closed down Help and I’ve also disconnected this PC from the internet. So I’m now going to call up Help again. So I’m going to click on the question mark icon this time. In that situation, you get the offline version of Help which will look something like this. As you can see it says Outlook Help Offline.

You can still do a search.

Note the message there about

connection. Obviously, I’ve forced the disconnect this time and normally if this happened you’d say, Oh what’s happened to my internet connection and you’d investigate why it was not there. But for basics help, you can use the Search box and what it really does about all that you get in the offline Help is help on the location of buttons on the Office Ribbon. Now believe me that’s a very small proportion of Help and I don’t think a lot of people use this Help very much. But © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 with offline Help that’s pretty much all you get. So if you need help, you almost certainly need online Help. Now whichever version of Help you’re using, online or offline, when you’ve finished with it, you can click on the Close button in the top right hand corner of the screen to close it down. So that’s pretty much it on Help except for one thing just to quickly mention and we’ll see more on this later. With some of the things that you do in Outlook 2013, you use things called dialog boxes. We haven’t really talked about any of those so far. We’ll come to those in a little while. But very often within a dialog box or when you’re using some other type of command, you’ll see that question mark symbol come up again, that little button there, that Help button. When you see that in a particular situation clicking on that will give you access often to what we’ll call contextual Help. So it will take you straight to a Help page related to the thing that you’re doing at that time. Now in this particular case in Manage Quick Steps, if I click on the Help button there it takes me into contextual Help and it comes up with a section recommended Help. In this case, it says we don’t have anything in particular to recommend for what you’re doing but feel free to look around; so when that happens you can actually search on the term. So if I typed in here Quick Steps and then hit the Search key, it’ll come up with help related to Quick Steps. And apart from showing me the location of various commands, right down at the bottom, Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps. If I click on that, it tells me about Quick Steps. So although in this case the contextual side of it didn’t work automatically I was able to go into Help and find help on Quick Steps just by using the search facility. So that’s it on Help in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 4 – Getting Started Video: Outlook 2013 Workspace Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look at the Outlook workspace. We opened Outlook a couple of sections ago in what’s called Outlook Today and in this section we’re just going to do a tour of what you can see in the Outlook workspace and talk about some of the main features, some of the main panels, views, etc. And then in subsequent sections we’ll start to look at each of them in more detail as we start to get involved in personal information management. Now for those of you who are not familiar with a Ribbon interface, this rectangle is the Ribbon and a little bit later on we’re going to look at the Ribbon in quite a bit of detail. The Ribbon is basically made up of a number of tabs and as you click on a tab, you see a number of commands. These give you access to basically the tools that you use to maintain whatever particular type of information you’re dealing with. So if for example you’re working on your calendar you would see commands on the various tabs related to working on your calendar, some of the commands are shared and pretty much there all the time. Some of the others are dependent on what you’re doing at the time. Just above the Ribbon and to the left of it is the Quick Access Toolbar and, again, I’ll come back to that later on. At the top right of the screen, there’s a whole set of buttons. There are five there shown at the moment. We’ve already looked at the Microsoft Outlook Help button. Next to that is a button that’s associated with the Ribbon. I’ll talk about that later. And then we have the standard Windows buttons; in this case, Minimize, Maximize, and Close. And clicking on the button on the right there, the X, is the simplest way of closing Outlook. Now right at the bottom of the workspace, we have the Status Bar. It’s currently shown here as a blue bar. And although there’s very little shown on the Status Bar at the moment, at the right hand end, you can see some buttons and a slider. Now the slider, that’s the horizontal line with the little vertical bar in the middle, is a facility that we use in some situations to zoom the view, to get close in or farther out on viewing something. What the something’s are will become © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 apparent later on in the course. To the left of that, we have a couple of buttons which enable us to quickly change the view, and exactly what these are and what they do will, to a large extent, depend on what we’re doing at the time. So, again, with those I’ll come back to them later. But in the view that I’m in now, I have two of those buttons and if I click one of them, it changes the view, click back, I’m back to where I was. Now exactly what that change was and why it happened will become apparent later on. Now one of the features that’s going to be a little bit of a surprise to those of you who’ve used Outlook before, particularly if you’ve last used a fairly old version of Outlook, is the ability to switch between mail, calendar, what was contacts and now generally referred to as people down at the bottom here. If I click on Calendar, I switch from Outlook Today into my calendar view and here I can see the month of February displayed with a brief summary of what I’ve got scheduled for each day in February and then on the left a calendar, one for February, one for March, and then some other details about other calendars that I may have available. We’ll look at Calendar View in much more detail later on in the course. I can then switch into People. That was more generally referred to as contacts in the past. There I can see a list of contacts and I can do things like switch between lists of contacts but also connect to a social network using the link there on the left. I then also have a display for tasks. Now each of these we’re going to look at in a lot of detail later on in the course. There’s a set of three dots at the right here that lets us switch into one of the other available options; Notes, Folders and Shortcuts, and I’ll talk about those more later on. Now we’ll spend quite a bit of time switching between mail, calendar, people, and tasks. And also when we’re working on one of these, I’m currently looking at calendar at the moment, there’s also a number of alternative views. At the moment, as I said earlier, I’m looking at February 2013 in my calendar. On the View tab when I’m looking at my calendar, I have options for showing a week, showing a working week, my work days are Monday through Friday, or just showing an individual day. Now I can also adjust the time scale. Again, I’ll go into this in more detail later on. If I go to say People; I haven’t actually got any people setup yet, but I will later, and click on the View tab, then I also have a number of view options here. So in each of these modes of operation, if you like, I have view options that can exactly what I see.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now in addition in each of these views, there are a number of other optional windows and panes of information and I want to talk about a couple of those now. So let’s go back to the Mail View. In fact, we’re back in Outlook Today. This panel on the left is called the Navigation Pane and the Navigation Pane will, in the case of mail, contain a list of mail folders. Now if you’re not at all familiar with using email and I appreciate that almost everybody doing this course will have used email before, but there will be a few people that haven’t, then basically think of these folders as the folders in a filing cabinet and you can put email as though they were paper documents into one or more of these folders. Now there are various ways of arranging these folders that we’ll look at later, but when you’re working in mail the main thing you see in the Navigation Pane here normally is a list of folders. And you can always move the Navigation Pane mostly out of the way by minimizing it. Now if you look at the screen tip that appears there, it’s called in Outlook 2013 the Folder Pane. It’s actually a bit of an interchangeable term, Navigation Pane and Folder Pane, but we’ll get into the habit of calling it Folder Pane in Outlook 2013. And if I want to minimize it, give myself more working space, I’m going to click on that left pointing arrow there and it’s minimized over to the left. Not only is it minimized, and note that there’s a right angled bracket there to expand it again, but the main folders that I have, Inbox, Sent Items, Delete Items, if I click one of those it’ll immediately give me access to the contents of that particular folder. Now at the moment, I have nothing in my Inbox because I’ve not even setup my email account yet, but normally I would have some content in there that I could immediately see listed in this pane here. Now I’m currently looking at my empty Outlook Inbox and when I’m looking at that, if I’ve got a question about say what’s in my calendar, I have a couple of options. I could switch back to calendar and look at Calendar View or I could use the new Sneak a Peek feature. Now if I’m in Mail View and I hover over the word calendar down there, I actually see a summary of what I’ve got scheduled for today. Now as you can see, I’ve got nothing scheduled for today. I’ve got no meetings in there. At the top right of that Sneak a Peek panel there, there’s a little icon that if I click on that icon it says Dock the Peek. And if I dock the peek, that actually puts a copy of that little summary of my calendar over on the right hand side of the window here and keeps it in view. So although I’d be working on email, I can see a summary of my calendar on the right.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now, that is quite a useful feature but the actual placement of that there can be achieved in a different way as well. If I go to the View tab still in mail, there is a feature which was in earlier versions of Outlook as well called the To-do bar, and the To-do bar also gives you access to information about other aspects of your personal information while you’re viewing mail for example. Now at the moment, if I click on the drop down next to To-do bar, I can see that calendar is ticked and that’s because I put it there using that Sneak a Peek feature. If I un-tick it, then I don’t see that there anymore but I could look at people instead. Favorites, right click a person. Well I haven’t got any people setup yet. But if I do Sneak a Peek over people, I see exactly the same thing. So Sneak a Peek is really a quick way of seeing what has been in the Todo bar before this version already. So there’s a few of the main features of the Outlook 2013 workspace, how we switch between mail, calendar, people, and tasks, the main options you’ll be using, the significance of the Sneak a peek feature which is basically a different implementation of what was in the To-do bar, the Folder Pane, what was called the Navigation Pane on the left, and with all of these depending on what you’re doing, exactly what you see will be different. There’s one other aspect of the workspace to look at in this section and that is what’s called Backstage View. On the left hand end of all the Ribbon tabs or to the left of all the Ribbon tabs, there’s a File button. It’s not the same as the old style File button. If I click on File it takes me into Backstage View, and Backstage View is where I get access to many of the main sort of administrative functions associated with Outlook 2013. For example, on the top tab, the Info tab, so make sure you’ve got Info selected there, there are two big buttons. There is an Account and Social Network Settings button where we can setup and modify and in fact delete accounts associated with our use of Outlook and we’re going to be setting up our first email account pretty soon. And we also have a Mailbox Cleanup button where we can manage the size of the mailbox by emptying deleted items and archiving items and so on. We’ll be looking at that a bit later on. There are also a number of other options. There are open and export options where we can open calendars, open Outlook data files, I’ll explain all these to you later, and how we can import and export files and settings. Backstage View also gives us access to print facilities. We can setup, modify the Office account associated with this installation of Outlook. And then we also have


Learn Outlook 2013 access to the Outlook Options that I’ll be looking at in a later section. And last of all, we have an alternative way of exiting Outlook here. So they’re the main features of the Outlook workspace. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 5 – The Ribbon and Toolbars Video: The Ribbon Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a closer look at the Ribbon and Quick Access Toolbar and, in fact, at Mini Toolbars and the Status Bar as well. So let’s get started by looking at the Ribbon. Now perhaps the first thing to say about the Ribbon or the first thing to do with the Ribbon is to point out that it’s one of the key components of using Outlook and therefore it’s very important if you’re using a touch screen device that you know about the difference between touch mode and mouse mode. And, in fact, the easiest way to switch between them is to use one of the commands on the Quick Access Toolbar. Now I’m using mouse and keyboard at the moment but over here there is a Touch/Mouse Mode button. If I click on the drop down, there I can see the two options Mouse and Touch. Now watch what happens to the Ribbon if I click Touch. What happens is that everything on it gets spread out more and, in fact, you’ll see it’s not just the Ribbon. Very many other components of the Outlook workspace become much more spaced out, and the primary reason for this, of course, is to enable you to operate these various commands using your fingertips. I’ve got pretty fat fingers but with the settings that we have here, I can pretty easily, pretty reliably tap the commands on the Ribbon instead of using a mouse and keyboard to click them. It’s pretty easy to switch back again. You can use the same drop down or, in fact, if you just tap on the command, it comes up with those two options. If I tap on Mouse, I’m back into mouse mode again. Pretty easy. I’ll use my fingers again, back into touch mode. So if you’re following through this using a touch device get yourself into touch mode first and you’ll find everything from now on much easier. Of course, there are a couple of pretty obvious disadvantages and one of them is that you actually see less things on the screen and, in fact, although everything that you can do in mouse and keyboard mode you can do in touch mode as well, because of the relatively smaller amount of space, sometimes you don’t see as many commands on the Ribbon. So sometimes you have to use a different approach to get to a particular command. They are still all available to you. You can still do all the same things but sometimes the commands are not available to you in quite the same way when you’re using touch mode. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So for the purposes of the rest of this section, I’m going to go back into mouse mode and I’ve already mentioned the tabs on the Ribbon. So there’s a Home tab here, a Send and Receive tab, Folder tab, View tab and with each of the tabs, there are a number of groups. The groups are separated by these little vertical lines. So on the View tab when we’re looking at mail, we have a Current View Group, a Messages Group, an Arrangement Group, a Layout Group, a People Pane Group, a Window Group. Within the groups there are commands and the commands vary quite a lot in their nature. Obviously they all tend to do different things but the way they work is different as well. You have some sort of one shot commands like this one, Reset View. If you’ve been doing some work to change the current view to customize it in some way, you can reset it to the default settings by just clicking that button. Other commands might just be option boxes, checkboxes like this one: Show as conversations. I can click in there to show messages in a conversation or I can uncheck it to show messages not in a conversation. We’ll talk about conversations later. Other buttons like Reverse Sort just are toggle buttons that go reverse it and then un-reverse it which puts it back the way that it was. And then with others, you have options which usually you can access using drop downs. Folder Pane. Do you remember earlier on we minimized the Folder Pane? We can maximize it again. We can minimize it. But the Folder Pane button here with the little drop down on it. If I click on that, it gives me access to options of Normal, Minimized, and Off. Minimized is currently selected. Watch what happens if I click Normal. It’s the same as operating that button at the top there, the Maximize button. So again, I could minimize it by selecting minimize here. So, some of the options on the Ribbon illustrate that there are usually several ways of doing key things in Outlook 2013. Another important point about the Ribbon in Outlook 2013 and in fact in the whole of Office 2013 is that although on a particular tab, you have a number of groups and within each group you have a number of commands. Some of the commands at any one time will be available and some of them won’t be. So for instance, at the moment with exactly the situation I’m in now, all of these commands in the current view group, Change View, View Settings, Reset View are available to me. But in the messages group, the one that says Conversation Settings is grayed out. Now the reason it’s grayed out is that I’m not actually looking at an email conversation at the moment. In fact, I haven’t got any email at the moment. When something is not available it’s grayed out. If I go to the Home tab, on the Home tab I’ve got a mixture. I’ve got a New Email button which would let me create a new email which is interesting because I haven’t setup © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 an email account. But I can assure you that if I try to do that it would insist on me setting up an email account. But the Respond buttons in the Respond Group, they’re all grayed out because I’m not responding to an email. I haven’t even got an email at the moment. I haven’t received anything. So at any one time some of the commands are enabled and some of them are disabled. The next thing I’d like to look at is the contents of the Home tab here while I’m working on mail. You can see that I’ve got a New Group, Delete, Respond, Quick Steps, Move, Tags, Find. Now let me go into Calendar. So I’m going to click on Calendar, see my current calendar and again I’m on the Home tab but look at the groups: New, Go To, Arrange, Manage Calendars, Share, and Find. Now a couple of the groups have the same names, most of them don’t, and even the groups that have the same names, like New, have different buttons and different commands in them. So exactly what you get on these tabs, Home, Send, Receive, Folder, View, will in many cases vary depending on what you’re doing at the time. So although you have a Home tab, the Home tab is different in different situations and, in fact, there’s even more variation than that. Let me just go back into Mail for a moment and let’s suppose that I click on New Email to create a new email. Now as I mentioned just now, I couldn’t actually send an email if I created one, but let’s suppose I want to create a new email. I’ll click on New Email. Now what I get is effectively a dialog which enables me to create an email. You’ll see a lot of this dialog later on. But note it also has a Ribbon in it and this Ribbon has got different tabs. It’s got a Message tab, an Insert tab, and Options tab, a Format Text tab, and a Review tab. And on, say, the Review tab, you have groups that include Proofing where I can do a spelling check, Language where I can choose my language, and Ink where I can ink a document. So apart from the more obvious, if you like, standard tabs that you get in Outlook 2013, those tabs themselves can have different contents in different situations and when you come to do something, perhaps to create an email or to create an appointment to go in your calendar those dialogs that you see, the various windows that come up can have their own Ribbon with their own tabs as well. So as you see there’s an awful lot to Ribbons and tabs in Outlook 2013. But you’ll find after you’ve been using it for just a little while you soon get used to this and you soon get to know pretty much where everything that you need is, which brings us neatly I think to the next point. And the next point is that particularly if you’re working on a device with a small screen, maybe you’re using a tablet, you constantly have the problem that there’s an awful lot to try to squeeze © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 on to the screen and if you operate Outlook 2013 in touch mode it makes things even worse from the point of view of fitting things in because it spaces everything out more to make it easier to operate with your fingers. Once you’ve been using the Ribbon for a while, you’ll get used to where things are and it’s actually a bit of a luxury having all this content displayed in this fairly big bar here. Even in mouse mode, it takes up quite a bit of space on the screen. To the bottom right hand end of the Ribbon here, there’s a Collapse the Ribbon button. Now if you click on this button, what happens is it collapses the Ribbon; the Ribbon disappears. You can still see the tabs but you can’t see the Ribbon anymore. And now you may say, well, hang on a minute. How am I supposed to operate these commands? How am I supposed to click on a command if I can’t even see it? Well, the answer is that if you know where it is, let’s suppose that you need a command on the View tab. If you click on View, then the Ribbon reappears. And let’s suppose you wanted to do Reset View, click Reset View which is the command you wanted to execute, and when it’s been executed, the Ribbon just disappears again. You get the normal, in this case, confirmation. Are you sure you want to reset the view? I’m going to say no. And so in fact when you click on the tab that you want, you’ll see all the commands anyway. So you can choose the command you want, execute the command, and then the Ribbon is hidden again. Let’s suppose now that you can’t remember where the command you want is and you think well it might be on View and it might be on the Home. All you’ve got to do is click on Home, look around for it. Oh, it’s not there, click on View, oh it’s not there. And you just keep looking around until you find the command or commands that you want, execute the command. Let’s suppose that I wanted to say reset view, click on that, and it’ll execute it anyway. Now at any time that you want to go back to seeing the Ribbon there all the time the second of those five buttons that I mentioned much earlier on in the course, the second one of those, click on Ribbon Display Options. If I have Show tabs selected, that’s what I’ve got now, show tabs and commands. I’m back to seeing everything again. So that’s everything as it was. Now in addition to that there is another option, again from the second of those five buttons, which is Auto-hide Ribbon which if you use that option it hides the Ribbon and the tabs. Now this can be useful when you don’t actually need any of the commands on the Ribbon, where you’re doing something where all you want is plenty of space. If you use that option, then all


Learn Outlook 2013 you have to do is to click again at the top of the application to reshow the Ribbon and tabs. I’ll leave you to try that one out yourselves. And there’s just one more thing to quickly mention about the Ribbon here. If you right click on the Ribbon or if you’re using a touch device, just tap on the Ribbon and hold which is what I’m doing now. You have an option there to customize the Ribbon. So I’m going to tap on Customize the Ribbon. If you’re using a mouse just click on Customize the Ribbon. That takes you into the Outlook Options. We haven’t looked at those yet. We’re going to come to those in a little while, and from there you can actually customize the contents of the Ribbon. Now we’re not going to cover customizing the Ribbon on this course. I am going to quickly show you how to customize the Quick Access Toolbar in the next section and from that I’m pretty sure you’d be able to figure out how to customize the Ribbon if you wanted to. But it is a useful facility, particularly if you want to put together your own Ribbon tab with its own groups containing the commands that you use the most. So that’s it on the Ribbon for now. In the next section, we’ll take a look at the Quick Access Toolbar. So please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Quick Access Toolbar Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at the Quick Access Toolbar that normally sits in the top left hand corner of the Outlook 2013 window. Now the main reason for having the Quick Access Toolbar is that you can put some of the commands that you use most often together in one place and that you don’t, for example, have to keep switching between Ribbon tabs to find those commands. When you first get Outlook 2013, it’s first installed, there is a default list of commands available and some of those will be enabled. Some of them will be switched on and some of them won’t. To the right hand end of the Quick Access Toolbar, there’s a little drop down arrow and its screen tip is Customize Quick Access Toolbar. If you click on that, you can see the list of commands that’s available. It begins with Print and goes right down to Find a contact. And if you look at the list here, you’ll see that just three of them are checked, that is they have tick marks against them, and they’re the ones that are currently shown on my Quick Access Toolbar. So I’ve got Send/Receive all folders, Undo and Touch, stroke, Mouse Mode. If I hover over those commands, I can see them. That’s Send/Receive all folders, that’s Undo, and that one is Touch/Mouse Mode. If I wanted to show an additional command such as for example Save As, all I need to do is to click it to check it, that button is now shown. And similarly if I want to stop one of them being visible, all I need to do is to uncheck it. Now the ones that are in this list are available and the ones that are ticked are shown. That doesn’t necessarily mean that a command can be used because if we take, for example, the Undo command at the moment, the one here with the arrow pointing up and to the left, Undo is currently unavailable because I haven’t actually done anything yet so I can’t undo it. So my default installation of Outlook 2013 gives me about a dozen commands that are available to show on the Quick Access Toolbar, but I can customize the Quick Access Toolbar. All I need to do is to click on that drop down again and just above the bottom there is an option, More Commands. If I click on More Commands that takes me into the Outlook Options and the page that’s selected is Quick Access Toolbar. Now using this page, I can customize the Quick Access Toolbar. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Now let’s suppose that I wanted to put on to the Quick Access Toolbar a command to make text bold. Now the drop down control at the top here shows that I have popular commands selected and the gallery underneath that lists the popular commands in Outlook 2013. If I select the drop down and choose a different list, what about All Commands.

There are an awful lot of

commands in Outlook 2013, so let me scroll down those. I’m going to use the Bold command, the command I can use to make some text bold. So I’m going to click that and then I’m going to click Add and what happens is that command is added to the Quick Access Toolbar. So having added that command let me click OK on the Outlook Options page and if you now look at the Quick Access Toolbar, I’ve got a Bold command. Now that Bold command is actually grayed out at the moment because I’m not working on text. I’m not editing text. I haven’t got any text selected. But if did want to work on text, so for instance, if I selected some text and I wanted to make it bold I could use that command button on the Quick Access Toolbar to do it. Now if you look at the list, the drop down list here again for the available commands, you’ll see that this list of available commands, the standard list hasn’t been changed by adding that Bold button to it. If I go into More Commands again, I could add other commands or could indeed remove one of the commands. So if I for instance didn’t want the Save As command, I could select it and remove it. At this stage what I’m going to do is to select the Bold and remove that. So I’m pretty much back where I started from. There is also a Reset button here that will delete all customizations you’ve made to the Quick Access Toolbar and reset it to its original values. You can also import and export Quick Access Toolbar customizations, but that’s really outside the scope of this course. So by adding and removing buttons from the very long list of available commands in Outlook options, I can customize my Quick Access Toolbar. I’m going to click on OK to confirm the removal of the Bold button again and things are pretty much back how they were. Now exactly what you want on the Quick Access Toolbar is entirely up to you and I’m going to leave it to you to customize it to your own requirements. It is occasionally the case that you may be doing perhaps a long or complicated or repetitive job and you might temporarily want to put a couple of extra commands on the Quick Access Toolbar to avoid constantly switching between Ribbon tabs and so on, but most people setup the few commands they want to see on the Quick Access Toolbar and pretty much leave them there, possibly changing a little bit over time. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 One other thing about the Quick Access Toolbar just to note and that is you probably noticed there was one more option on the drop down here which was Show below Ribbon. You can probably guess what that does. When you’re working in the main window of Outlook 2013 rather than constantly going up to the top left hand corner, going across the Ribbon to click the buttons, some people when they’re trying to work fast, they’re perhaps working on something repetitive, having the buttons just there immediately to hand does make things slightly quicker. And if you’re doing a very repetitive job it can avoid a little bit of error. So that’s it on the Quick Access Toolbar. Apart from showing you how to customize that, just seeing that may give you some ideas about customizing the Ribbon, although as I say we’re not going to cover customizing the Ribbon in this course. That’s it on the Quick Access Toolbar. In the next section, we’re going to take a look at Mini Toolbars.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Mini Toolbars Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’m going to take a quick look at Mini Toolbars in Outlook 2013, and to demonstrate Mini Toolbars first I’m going to look at this task that I’ve started to enter here. I’ve just typed some text into the body of a task for Outlook. We’ll talk about tasks later. All we’re interested in here though is the text. If I’ve typed some text in and using the keyboard I just select that text, watch what happens when I release the mouse button. I get a tiny little toolbar here called a Mini Toolbar, and on there I have a selection of commands. One of the commands, the one that’s highlighted at the moment is the Bold command. You can see the screen tip there, Bold. Then I’ve got Italic, Underline, and so on. And depending on exactly what I’m doing and exactly the situation that I’m in, I may well see a Mini Toolbar like this which I can use to choose a setting, select an option, choose a color, or in some cases execute a command. Exactly which toolbar I see and exactly what commands are on it depends very much on the situation. But I can use these commands in the same way that I can use the equivalent commands from the Ribbon. Now all of these commands will be commands that are on the Ribbon somewhere but they probably won’t be organized on here in the same sets, groups that they are on the Ribbon. Now let’s look at the equivalent situation using touch. Now first of all, let me just explain how to make a selection using touch. Now one way of doing this is to do it all in one fell swoop, to touch in this case on the left hand end of that sentence and swipe across until it’s all selected. Once the selections made you get selection handles, those round handles at each edge of the selection, now what I’m effectively going to do is a right click, but a right click with touch will be a tap and hold. And when I do the tap and hold, what’ll happen is you’ll see the marker where my finger is change to a rectangle and then the touch equivalent of the Mini Toolbar will appear. Now this toolbar actually contains just about the same commands as the other one. It’s not quite the same, but you can see how much more spread out it is, how much more spaced out each of the commands are. So if I wanted to make the content of this text, all of that selected text bold, the Bold command is there. I could just tap on Bold. And if I wanted to change the color, the A © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 to the right of it, about four to the right of it, if I tap on that that will bring up a Color Picker. Note that it’s a touch color picker, so the size of the touch buttons is much bigger than the ones that you normally see in Office applications. But if I wanted to change that text to be say a very deep red, click on the deep red standard color, and I will have changed the color. Let me just now tap away and there you can see that I’ve now got bold red. And that’s really how Mini Toolbars work in touch mode. That’s it on Mini Toolbars. In the next section, we’re going to look at contextual menus so please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Contextual Menu Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. So far in this course, we’ve seen how to use the Ribbon and to locate commands in the groups on the tabs and various tabs that are available in Outlook 2013. Well, sometimes the best place to find the command that you need is not on the Ribbon at all, it’s not even on one of the Mini Toolbars. It’s available on what’s called a Contextual Menu. Now in general terms, you access contextual menus by right clicking on an object or in the case of touch by doing tap and hold. So what I’m going to do is to demonstrate contextual menus in relation to the folders that we see when we’re looking at mail in Outlook 2013. So let me just open up the Folder Pane here. You can see a list of mail folders which I pointed out to you before. We’re currently in mouse mode and if I right click on the name of one of the folders, let’s right click on the Sent Item folders, watch what happens. When I right click, I get a menu and it looks much more like the old style of menu that you used to see in Office applications before the Ribbon came along. Now the options that are available on every one of these menus are relevant to the particular object you have selected. So here I’ve selected a folder. It’s a Sent Items folder. It will hold email items, eventually. And from there I can see that I have options like Open a new window which means open that folder up for me and show me the contents but in a new window, not in the Outlook window that I’m looking at, at the moment. I can say create a new folder. I can say copy this folder and then I could, of course, paste it somewhere else. Mark all as read means for every email that I’ve got in this folder mark it as being read. And then there are half a dozen other options as well. Now these will always be relevant to the particular object that you have selected at the time. And as with the Ribbon and the tabs and the groups and the commands at any one time, you would expect that some of the options are available like Open a new window or New folder and that some of them would be grayed out like Rename folder. You can’t rename this folder. Move this folder, no. Delete this folder, no. So there are certain things you can’t do and certain things you can do and that’s a common feature when you’re looking at contextual menus. Now let’s do the same thing with touch. I’m going to switch to touch first. So tap on the Quick Access Toolbar Touch Mode button, switch to touch. Now, Sent Items folder again. This time


Learn Outlook 2013 I’m going to touch it with my finger and wait to see the rectangle and you will see with this tap and hold the contextual menu appear, and there is the contextual menu. You can’t quite see the top of it. It’s a little bit too big for this screen. It’s really because of the way that the course is being recorded. So you’re going to have to take my word for it, but basically that’s got the same commands on it as the other one, but as you can see they’re much more spaced out on the touch version of this contextual menu which as we know makes it much easier to operate each of those commands with your fingers. So that’s really the features of contextual menus. You’re going to see contextual menus all over the place. I’m sure you’ll find them very helpful, very useful and a good alternative to the Ribbon in many situations. That’s it on this section. In this last of the short sections related to Ribbon and toolbars and so on, I want to have a very quick look at the Status Bar in the next section. So please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Status Bar Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this very short section, I’m going to take a quick look at the Status Bar. I spoke about it earlier on and pointed out a couple of the things that appear on it. In fact, at this stage in the course many of the things that might appear in the Status Bar are not there simply because we’ve not got any email in our copy of Outlook yet. But I want you to be aware of the sort of things that are going to start to appear and also to be aware of the fact that many of the things that would normally appear in the Status Bar are only likely to be there if for example you’re connected to Microsoft Exchange Server. Now the Status Bar as I pointed out to you earlier is at the bottom of the screen. In my case, it’s this blue bar at the bottom. And if I right click on it, you’ll see that it’s got a list of content and all of the items that are ticked are shown on the Status Bar. Now you might look at that and say well there’s an awful lot more ticks than there are things shown. And that is because many of the things shown will show if there is something there. So for instance, we are saying show me reminders but at the moment I have no reminders so they’re not shown. Later on in the course we’ll start getting ourselves reminders. They will appear on the Status Bar. We have got View shortcuts ticked. The shortcuts in the view we’re in now are these two buttons down here which enable us to switch between two views when we’re reading email. Zoom slider, again that’s ticked. We can see the zoom slider. Zoom is shown. That means we see the 100% button over there saying the level of zoom at the moment. These other things, although they’re ticked they’ll be shown when something is there and relevant. If there isn’t anything there and relevant, they’re empty. The number of items selected in the email folder currently we have, the number of items, items in view zero. Note that it says there on the Status Bar Items, zero.

Quota information relates specifically to Microsoft Exchange Server. This

feature is actually switched off in my installation and I’m not really going to talk about this at all during the course. Most of the other things will at various times appear and in particular when we start processing a bit of email, doing a bit of filtering and so on, we’ll see things start to appear on the Status Bar. So for the moment, don’t be fooled by the fact that it usually appears to be mostly empty because it will actually prove to be quite useful later on, on the course. So that’s all I need to say at the moment about the Status Bar. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 6 – Outlook Options Video: Customizing Settings and the Use of Outlook Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to take a quick look at something else you need to know about before we really get stuck into Outlook, and that is the Outlook Options. We’ve already seen a couple of the pages in relation to for example customizing the Quick Access Toolbar, but some of the other pages contain some settings that you really need to be aware of and to get set correctly very early on. And that’s what we’re going to look at now. So we start in Backstage View and we go down to Options. The Options arranged into pages and, as I mentioned just now, we already saw the page for Quick Access Toolbar. We’ve actually seen the one for customizing the Ribbon as well. But I want to start with the General page at the top here. Now a couple of these options are pretty straightforward, a couple of them are not so straightforward. Right in the middle, for instance, user name and initials; particularly if you really want to identify yourself properly when you’re using Outlook and also particularly if you’re working in a team, then having your user name and you initials here is very important. Very often the user name is used in various aspects of Outlook but sometimes initials are used as well, for instance when you’re marking up changes to something initials are often used. So make sure you’ve got those set correctly. You can choose the Office background and Office theme here as well. There’s a drop down for each of those. I’ve got background set to no background and Office theme set to white partly to make it easier for you to read what I’m doing. Now down at the bottom there is a very important setting and this is the one that says make Outlook the default program for email, contacts, and calendar. Most people have this checked, which means that you’re planning to use Outlook as the main program for handling your email, looking after contacts, managing your calendar. But it doesn’t have to do all of those things and you may for example want to use a different program to manage your email but use Outlook for your contact management or your calendar management or maybe both of those. Now you can be more selective about what you use Outlook for by clicking on this button at the right here and © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 changing the default program setup. But it is important that you identify in particular which program is the default program for email. I always have this checked because Outlook is what I use for all of these things. But if you’re not planning to use it for all of those things, then you’re going to need to look selectively at setting it up for the ones that you do want it setup for. If we have time at the end of the course, I may have a quick run through of this. But at the moment, I’m really just making you aware of that particular option. Now let’s go back to the top of this General page. The very top option under User Interface Options is a straightforward one, Show mini toolbar on selection. We’ve already looked at the mini toolbars. If you don’t like mini toolbars, if they get in the way which they do for some people and if you think well I can do all of that using contextual menus and the Ribbon and you don’t want the mini toolbar, just uncheck that option there. Now we haven’t so far seen an example of Live Preview in our use of Outlook. We’ll be seeing that a little bit later on in the course. Not everybody like live preview, although most people seem to prefer having it switched on. If you do want to switch it off, there’s an option here. But the next one is another one in the category of Mini Toolbar in terms of this really does annoy some people and this is the screen tips and there are options for screen tip style. Now I will show you this one because during the course, screen tips, you’re probably going to find quite annoying. So let me just cancel the options and show you what we mean by screen tips. You’ve seen screen tips already and, in fact, if I hover over one of the buttons on the Ribbon here, say that one, a screen tip pops up. It says Filter email. Filter email messages to only show certain items such as unread or flagged items. Now that’s not only a screen tip, that’s a screen tip with description. So the paragraph Filter email messages, etc. is the description. Now a lot of people once they get used to the main commands in Outlook 2013 no longer need those tips all the time and people tend to get a bit annoyed about having all that stuff on the screen getting in the way. And when I’m trying to show you things, very often I have a great strong tendency to turn screen tips off because I realize how distracting they must be. And for some of the course I will indeed turn them off. Now if I go back into Options again. So Backstage View, Options, and I change the screen tip style from “Show feature descriptions in screen tips” to “Don’t show feature descriptions in © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 screen tips” and click on OK. Now let me hover over that same command and all I get now is Filter email which considering that’s what written on the button anyway it’s not a particularly helpful screen tip. If I go back into the Options again and choose the final option, Don’t show screen tips, of course, then I no longer see a screen tip when I hover over the button. Now for the moment I’m going to switch those back on but if they do annoy you and you get to the point that you don’t really need them, that’s how you adjust what’s shown in screen tips or indeed whether they’re shown at all. So now let’s look at the other pages of the Outlook Options and the next four are arranged according to those particular major activities. So we’ve got a page of mail options. We’ve got a page of calendar options, people options, and task options. And with all of those, I’m going to cover those options when we get to those particular topics in the course. I’m also, at this stage, not going to talk about search options. Again, when we come back to search we’ll look at those. But there is one which we do need to talk about now and that’s the Language options because it’s very important that you have your language set correctly. Now in the work that I do in Outlook, I use two languages. I use English United States and English United Kingdom, and believe me they are very different languages although they do share some elements in common. And you can actually have as many editing languages setup as you like. I’ve got two here. If I wanted to add French say, there’s a drop down here, click on the drop down, there is a long, long list of languages that I could add. Select a language, click on Add, and I can start to use that language as an editing language. If I wanted to remove one of my languages, select it and remove it here. So make sure that you have your language or languages set correctly. In addition, you have display and Help languages. So even if you’re working in one language, you may want your Help, for example, in a different language. Perhaps you’re working in French but you’re a natural English speaker or vice versa. You can set that up accordingly. You can even choose a different screen tip language. Look down at the bottom here as well if you want to. So setting languages is very important when you’re using Outlook 2013. Then let’s move on to the Advanced tab. Now again most of the things on here related to AutoArchive, to RSS Feeds, etc. these are all things that we’ll be coming back to later when we © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 cover those particular topics in Outlook 2013 in the course later on. Similarly, we’ll go the Trust Center and look at what the Trust Center can do for us when we start looking at security and protection later on in the course as well. But I think in this section now we’ve covered all of the main things that you need to make sure that you’ve got set before you start. And as I say, virtually everything else within the Options we’ll be referring to at the appropriate point later on in the course. So that’s it for this section on Outlook Options. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 7 – Keyboard Shortcut and Key Tips Video: List of Keyboard Shortcuts; Using Key Tips Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at the use of keyboard shortcuts and key tips in Outlook. Now for many people although they may have the use of a mouse, they may have a use of a touch screen device, their preference is to use the keyboard. For some people they really need to use the keyboard because of discomfort or other issues when using a mouse or using a touch device. So the use of the keyboard is actually very important and it’s quite strongly supported in Outlook 2013 as we will see. Now perhaps the first thing to point out is that I am not a great user of keyboard shortcuts myself partly because I use so many different pieces of software and there are so many different keyboard shortcuts that it’s very difficult to remember them. However, for the main keyboard shortcuts, particularly the ones that are common across the elements of Office, I do tend to use them. Many of the common shortcuts as well are particularly easy to remember because they appear in screen tip when you’re using the Ribbon. Let me give you an example of that. I’m looking at mail here in Outlook and on the Home tab at the left there’s a New Mail button. You can see the screen tip New Item and then in brackets Control + N, and Control + N in Office is generally the shortcut to create a new something.

If you’re in Word, it would be a new

document. If you’re working on mail in Outlook, it’s a new email. So that is a pretty consistent keyboard shortcut.

But not all keyboard shortcuts are that easy to remember and not all

commands have keyboard shortcuts. So for instance, if I go over to the Address Book command at the other end of the Ribbon here and hover over that the keyboard shortcut for the Address Book is Control, Shift, and B. Now that’s the sort of keyboard shortcut that I have trouble remembering to be honest with you. If I go to the View tab and hover over Open a new window, there’s a command that doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut. It just says Open a new window. And in effect, I have to operate that command manually without using keyboard shortcut, although as we’ll see in a moment there is a very clever way around that.


Learn Outlook 2013 So given that we can use keyboard shortcuts where they exist, how do you find out what all the keyboard shortcuts are? Well, I mentioned this earlier on in the course. If you go to the Help, one of the standard options on the Home page there is Outlook 2013 keyboard shortcuts. So click on that and that gives a list of, first of all, the basic navigation shortcuts. Now this really enforces the reason why I have great trouble remembering all of these. You may be better at remembering than I am. Some people take these lists, print them out, and stick them on the wall. But basic navigation shortcuts, so switch to mail Control + 1, switch to calendar Control-2, switch to contacts or people Control-3, and so on. So there’s a long list of those. And then you get down to categorized lists of further keyboard shortcuts. Now to be fair, if you’re using keyboard shortcuts, if that’s what you prefer to do, there is actually a high level of consistency in these. But on the other hand as you can see there, an awful lot of keyboard shortcuts in Outlook 2013. And there are certain things, for instance, that I always do such as selecting text or selecting objects that I virtually always do using the mouse. You can do virtually all of those with keyboard shortcuts but it would take me a very long time to remember, to memorize all of those keyboard shortcuts and I doubt I’d have the patience to do it. On the other hand, if you want to use them or you need to use them, there is a very long comprehensive list of those keyboard shortcuts available via the Outlook Help. So okay, I mentioned just now that there is a rather clever way of getting round situations where there aren’t keyboard shortcuts, and one of the most obvious problems if you look at the Ribbon as it is now is how would you select say one of the other tabs if you were just using the keyboard. Well, one of the simplest ways to do it is to use what are called key tips and this is particularly easy in Office 2013 in general and certainly in Outlook 2013 because all you need to do if you’re using the keyboard is when you’re looking at Outlook like this, just press the Alt key and what you see are a set of key tips. Now the key tips in this case correspond to, first of all, the numeric ones, 1, 2, and 3 are on the Quick Access Toolbar and notice that the key tips are grayed or otherwise depending on whether the particular command on the Quick Access Toolbar is enabled or not. So if I actually just press the one key now nothing would happen because one, Undo, is disabled. I haven’t done anything so there’s nothing to undo. If I pressed 2, that would invoke the option to switch between mouse and keyboard mode. That is enabled. Press 3, that’s also not enabled at the moment.

But to select a tab, I would press H for Home, S for

Send/Receive, O for Folder, V for View, and to go into Backstage View I just click F. So let’s © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 suppose I want to go into View. I just touch the V key and that shows me the commands on the View tab, and for each of those I have a keyboard shortcut. So if I wanted to see the People Pane I would press P and P, so P, P, and there’s People Pane. That brings down a little menu, N for Normal, M for Minimize, O for Off, and so on. Now that can be a little bit laborious but believe me once you do it a few times and particularly if you’re good at using the keyboard, you can really whiz through, get into any location you want to very quickly using those key tips. That’s a very useful facility, particularly if you’re not that good at remembering this vast number of keyboard shortcuts. And also if you don’t really use keyboard shortcuts very much, maybe there’s a particular reason you want to use them in a particular situation, the key tips are pretty much help as you go really. Now when you’ve finished using the key tips, you just press the Alt key and they’re gone again. So for those of you who want or need to use keyboard shortcuts and key tips, I do hope that’s enough to get you started. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 8 – Basic Tasks in Outlook Video: Setting Up an Account Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this and the next few sections we’re going to look at the basics of using Outlook 2013. Everything you need to know is in place now. If you’re using a touch device, you should be able to manage all this using touch. You should know about keyboard shortcuts, understand the Ribbon, the Status Bar, and the Quick Access Toolbar and so on. And what I’m going to do in these sections is to go through each of the main elements of Outlook 2013 reasonably quickly, just a couple of examples of the usage of each just to get you really up and started so that you can start working with Outlook yourself. And then after that I’m going to start going through each of the subjects in much more detail. So for example, with email we’re going to setup an account in just a moment and then we’ll send one or two emails later on, we’ll receive one or two emails, and I’ll quickly go through how to reply to them and so on. But then later on we’ll have a couple of sections totally devoted to dealing with email in much more detail. So let’s get started. Now I’m going to take email as the starting point. So the first thing we need to do is something that we could have done right at the beginning and that is to setup an email account. Now, of course, if you actually need to create the email account in the first place, so for instance, if you wanted a Microsoft account, you’d have to go and do that via Microsoft. If you wanted a Google mail, a Gmail account, etc. or if indeed you use an account from work. You may have an account using the domain of your employer. Now what I’m going to try to do in this course is to cover several different types of account and what happens with them, how they look, and so on. But initially I’m going to start with a straightforward Microsoft account.

It’s actually a

Microsoft Live account. It’s already created. It’s been in existence for some time. It’s got a few emails in it. One of the things I have to be very careful about on a course like this is not to include any really personal emails or indeed to send or receive anything that I shouldn’t. So the emails I’m afraid are a little bit on the boring side. We’ll create one or two as we go along. They will also not be particularly personal and I appreciate that many of yours will be. But for obvious reasons, I mustn’t sort of expose anybody else to the outside world in terms of emails


Learn Outlook 2013 they’ve sent me or emails that I’ve sent to them. So I apologize now if some of the email seems a little bit stilted, but I’m sure it will do the job. So we go into Backstage View. Now under Account Information on the Info tab it says No account available. You probably remember when the course started that I did make the point that I wasn’t going to setup an account then. You may well have done in which case you may be sending and receiving emails already. But I have no account available for email at the moment. Note that when I installed Outlook and in fact when you installed Outlook, if indeed you did, it wasn’t pre-installed. You probably used an account then, probably a Microsoft related account in order to register and activate your copy of Outlook. That is not to be confused with this. Even if you did that and in fact I did and I’ll come back to that later on in the course, that does not mean that you’re managing the email of that account in this installation of Outlook. At the moment, in this installation of Outlook, I’m not managing any email accounts at all, even though this copy of Outlook is activated using one of my Microsoft accounts. It’s an important point to bear in mind. So I click on Add Account. Now we get to a very interesting situation because one of the things that’s happened over recent versions of Outlook is that Outlook has got better and better at interacting with existing accounts. In earlier versions of Outlook, when you wanted to start managing email from, say, one of your Microsoft accounts, you’d have to do quite a bit of setup, you’d have to know quite a lot about your account in order to make that work. Particularly over the last couple of releases of Outlook, it’s become almost totally automatic unless you have a specific problem or a pretty esoteric kind of email account to connect to you can almost always connect automatically to an existing account, provided of course you know the authentication information, usually the password. Now there are two options on this Add Account. The first one, email account, is the one we’re going to use in this section. There are occasions when this won’t work and those occasions are getting rarer and rarer. And there may also be cases where you have some very specific setup to do. Later on in the course I’m going to demonstrate manual setup because there may be an occasion when you do need to do a manual setup of an email account and I’m going to go through that with you later. But for this section we’re going to do an automatic setup.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now again as we go through the course, I’m going to be connecting a couple more email accounts as well. So I’m going to identify my email accounts by some rather funny looking naming just so that we don’t lose track of which is which. So this account I’m going to call Toby Microsoft. That isn’t actually my surname by the way. Now I’m going to put in my email address and having entered my email address, I now enter my password and then retype the password to make sure that I’ve entered it correctly. And when I’m happy with all of that, I click on Next. Now what will then happen is that Outlook 2013 will try to find the mail server settings it needs to setup this account. And as you can see and believe me this will almost always happen with a Microsoft account, it does find those settings. Congratulations. Outlook is complete in the setup for your account and everything looks ready to go. Now having completed this, we’ve got a couple of options. One of the options here on the right is Add another account. So if I wanted to now setup one of my other accounts, I could do that. If you have more than one email account to setup, then fire away and setup the next one. I can also check this box and when I finish I’ll go into change the account settings. I’m not going to do that on this occasion. I’m going to show you the account settings but via a different route. So that’s done. I click on Finish and I have my first email account setup. Now one of the most notable things here is that that email account now appears down here. I can see the name of that email account and if I click on the little marker to the left of it, it will expand the set of folders related to that account. Now for this email account and in fact for each email account by default, I get an Inbox, a Drafts folder, a Sent Items folder, Deleted Items, Junk Mail, Outbox, and Search box. I’ll talk about each of these later on. The most obvious one is the Inbox and this tells me that I’ve got five messages in my Inbox. I’m going to come back and look at those messages a little bit later on. So the account [email protected] has got folders and I can see those folders in the Folders Pane. Let’s go into Backstage View again and note on the Info tab the Account Settings button; click on Account Settings. Select the top setting, Account Settings, and that brings up a dialog that’s quite similar to the one in the previous couple of versions of Outlook in that you have a list of your email accounts. Now there are different sorts of account, such as RSS Feeds, that we haven’t looked at yet; we’re going to look at later on. At the moment, primarily we’re looking at email accounts and there’s one email account setup, [email protected]. The type is an Exchange © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 ActiveSync account. In previous versions of Outlook, as I mentioned much earlier on in the course, we used the Hotmail-Outlook connector to handle this kind of Microsoft account. It’s now completely handled by something called Exchange ActiveSync. You don’t really need to worry about what that means, but for those of you that are using Hotmail accounts or live.com or live.co.something accounts, Exchange ActiveSync will be significant in that it will manage that for you. And if I select one of my accounts, I’ve only got one, and click on the Change button, there I can actually look at the settings for that account. And as I mentioned before, you could manually set these up. So you’ve got user information, server information, and so on. Click on Next and you get access to a testing system and so on. Now I’m going to look at all that much later on in the course so I’m going to leave that for now. But you can see in there the account settings for each of your accounts and if like me you’re going to finish up with more than one email account and perhaps an RSS Feeds as well this is the area you go to, to check the setup of everything and make sure that everything is setup correctly. From here you can also, of course, remove an account and there are options to do things like repair, but more of that later. Now from this point onwards in the course, I’m going to assume that you have at least one email account setup. I think for the vast majority of you, you’ll use an account like a Microsoft account or a Google mail account and if you don’t have one they are free to setup. You have to go through a process of recording a certain amount of information but they’re pretty easy to setup. It’s probably a good sort of account to run a course like this with because you can maybe experiment a bit and throw away the emails and even close the account after we’ve finished. If you want to use a more complex account or some with some unusual features, then I hope it will be able to be setup automatically by what we’ve seen already. If you need to look at the manual setup, you’re going to have to skip forward in the course, I’m afraid, because I’m not going to go through the manual setup yet because I’m keen for people to be able to get on to start using Outlook using one of the more straightforward types of email account. So you may need to skip forward to account management later on in the course and then perhaps come back to this area of the course when you’ve got at least one account setup. You are going to need an email account successfully setup from here if you’re following the course. So that’s it on this section. We’re now going to move on to sending and receiving some email. I’ll see you in the next section. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Sending and Receiving Email Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. We’ve now got our first email account setup and in this section we’re going to take a look at sending and receiving email. So let’s get started. I’m going to send an email to my friend Steve who works with me and I’m going to ask him when he needs a certain document by. I’ve been working on preparing a presentation for him and I know he’s going to need it within the next couple of days but I’m not quite sure when that is. So I’m going to send him an email. I’ve got his email address which, of course, I will need in order to send him an email. So I go to the Home tab and one of the buttons there is New Email. It has a keyboard shortcut of Control-N so I could just use that to start a new email but I’m going to click on the button for now, click on New Email, and up comes this little window where I’m going to enter the details of the email. Now if you’ve not used an email package of the complexity of Outlook before, you may be a little bit intimidated by what’s on the screen here. Not only has it got quite a complicated window but you’ve got a Ribbon with five tabs on it as well. Now most of this we’re not going to cover at the moment at all. We’re going to come back to virtually everything on here later in the course. But for the moment, I’m just going to cover the basics and the first basic is that to send the email, I click on the Send button. Now watch what would happen if I click Send now. I get a message: We need to know who to send this to. Make sure you enter at least one name. Now you can’t send an email if you don’t specify somebody to send the email to. On this occasion, I’m going to type Steve’s email address in which is always a feasible thing to do, but normally I would get his address from an address book. So as I say, on this occasion, I’ll just type his address in. Now if I want to send the message, I’ve clearly got to include the message and apart from actually typing the message and the message goes in the main body here, I want to give the message a title. So I put in a subject for the message. So pretty succinct title, Presentation when? and now I click in this part of the message, the main window where the message itself goes and I’m just going to type my message in. And there we are. I’ve typed my message. Now, one of the things that you can see here is that some of the words, a couple of the words in the message have been underlined with a sort of red © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 squiggle. And one of the things that you can do in Outlook is to have Outlook check your spelling as you type. Now that’s how I’ve got this installation of Outlook setup. Later on I’ll show you how to change that if you want to and you also have an option here on the Review tab to run a spelling and grammar check on your message. Now as I said earlier on, I’m going to leave basically all of these options until later on in the course and, in fact, we will go over this in detail later on in the course. But I’ve got a particular thing about spelling and grammar and I try not to let any mistakes creep out so I’m telling you about this one straightaway. If you want to run a spelling check, Review, click on Spelling Check. By default, Outlook is normally setup to do this checking as you type anyway. So if you see some of these red squiggly underlines, you’ve probably made a mistake. So let me just correct those. That should now be okay. And I believe my message now says what I want it to say and it’s good to send. So all I need to do is to hit the Send button and away it goes. Now you may notice that very briefly there it said one next to Outbox. You probably missed it. Don’t worry if you did miss it because we’ll be coming back to that later on. What happens when you click Send is not necessarily that the email is sent. What happens is it gets queued up ready to be send and depending on the settings you have in your copy of Outlook, and again we’ll come back to this later, it may or may not get sent immediately. Years ago before people had generally good, always on internet connections, people may have had Outlook setup to just send their email, say, once an hour or something like that; to make an internet connection, send the email, and then close the internet connection down again. Some people still do have their internet connections on only temporarily and some people don’t always send email the moment that they click the Send button; but as I say, more of that later. The way that mine’s setup is that as soon as I click the Send button, the message is queued and virtually immediately it’s sent. So that emails gone and probably Steve’s able to read it by now. And once I’ve sent that email, it is stored in my Sent Items folder. So if I click on the Sent Items folder now, I can see my first sent email. You see the name of the recipient, the subject, and the beginning of the text. So I can see which email that was. Now I’m going to give myself a little bit more space here by closing down the To-do bar on the right and what you can see is a list of emails, there’s only one in it at the moment, and then the preview of that email on the right here. So I can see the full email as it was sent to Steve. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Now let’s take a look at the View tab again and in the View tab in the Layout Group, we’ve seen the Folder Pane, we’ve seen the To-do bar. What about the Reading Pane? Now the Reading Pane here is the one that gives us access to reading the selected email message. So select an email message there, in this case in the Sent Items folder, and the message is there on the right. If you click on Reading Pane, right is the current selection. If I click bottom, then the Reading Pane will appear at the bottom of the main window. So the list of messages in the currently selected folder up here, Reading Pane at the bottom. I can, in fact, turn the Reading Pane off altogether. It’s all a matter of personal preference. If I turn it off and double click on the message instead, then the message will open in its own window. So I’m going to put the Reading Pane back on for now. I’m going to have it on the right. So I’ve sent a message. I’ve reviewed it in the Sent Items folder. Now, I’m going to look at some receive message. So I’m going to look at the Inbox, so click on Inbox, and whichever message is selected in the Inbox, you can see highlighted there and its contents are shown in the Reading Pane; in this case, on the right. Now this is a message from Microsoft about changes to Microsoft services.

That’s quite important.

What about that one?

Work and play with

Windows. I don’t want that one. If there’s a message that I don’t want any longer, I can click the Delete button on the right there, gets rid of that message. Oh look, there’s a reply from Steve.

So I’ve already got a reply from Steve to my message about when he needs the

presentation by. It says Monday would be great. So I know that I need to have that presentation ready by Monday. When I’ve got messages in my Inbox like this, if it’s a message that I’m going to keep, then I probably want to have some sort of filing system. I’ll talk about that later but for the moment I’m just going to leave that message in the Inbox. There may be other messages, for instance, that one at the bottom there that I can just delete. So let me get rid of that one as well. So I’ve sent a message. I’ve received a message and read it. One other thing to do now before we move on; let’s give Steve a quick reply. So if you look at the Reading Pane at the top there, there’s a set of buttons: Reply, Reply All, and Forward. Let’s just do a Reply at the moment. Click on Reply and what we get is a very simple version of the message window here on the right in the Reading Pane. It’s actually built straight into it and I can just type in a reply.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now the way this is setup, I get a copy of the original message. So when I reply to Steve, he will get the message I’m replying to so he’ll know what I’m referring to when I say, Thanks Steve. Note it’s already filled in his email address and the subject is RE, that this was referenced to and then the subject of the original message. So we’ve got a conversation going now between us. I could change this to a pop out version of the message window but all I’m going to do is click on Send. And that’s it. I’ve thanked Steve and that’s pretty much it. So that’s the very basics of sending and receiving mail. In the next section, we’re going to look at the basics of the Outlook 2013 calendar. So please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Creating Appointments and Scheduling Meetings Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take our first look at the Outlook 2013 calendar, and to get into the calendar all we need to do is to click on Calendar there, just above the Status Bar. Now the first thing to notice here is that if you look at the bottom of the folders pane here, you can see that it says My Calendars, Calendars with an S. It’s actually showing two calendars. One of them is associated with this installation of Outlook as I’ll explain later on and one of them is associated with the email account that I’ve just setup. Now it’s perfectly feasible to have more than one calendar in force and if you’ve setup your new email account in the way that I’ve done so far on this course, you’ll probably finish up with two calendars as well. Now you may want to keep two calendars. You may want one for work. You may want one for home. You may want to merge them together. You may want to keep them separate. But for the moment to do the basics of calendars, I’m really just going to only use one calendar. So I’m going to uncheck the calendar that is associated with that email account, [email protected], just for the moment. So I’m going to uncheck that and revert back to having just the one calendar. Now as you’ll have realized by now everything that we can see on the Ribbon is totally different when you’re looking at a calendar than when you’re looking at email. Let’s start with the Home tab. We did look at this very briefly earlier on, but the most basic arrangement really is whether you want to see a day in the calendar, a work week which in my case is Monday through Friday, a week which is the whole week with a week starting on Sunday, or a month. Now on the left in the Folder Pane which, of course, holds completely different things to the Folder Pane in email, we have a Date Navigator and the date navigator lets us step through the calendar in a few ways. Now currently at the top I’ve got March 2013. I can see the next month below it. If I use these little arrows to the right here, I can go through a month at a time. I can choose a particular day; so, say, the 17th of July 2013. That then appears and I see in the main window there what’s happening on July the 17th. Now at any time, I can get back to today by clicking on the Today button here. That takes me back to today. I’m recording this on March the 1st 2013. Now before we start to create appointments, let’s just have a look at the View tab in Calendar View and we have the usual selection here under Layout. We can choose to show or not show © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 the Folder Pane. So let’s switch the Folder Pane off; it disappears. Switch it back on again, it’s there in normal view. I think you’ll get the hang of the Folder Pane by now. It’s different in these different modes of operation when we’re looking at mail, calendar, people, tasks, but I won’t keep mentioning that. I think you should have the hang of that by now. Similarly, the Todo bar works in much the same way as well. So, on the To-do bar I could choose to show people. I can choose to show calendar. I can choose to just close the whole thing, one step at a time. And, of course, the Reading Pane when we’re dealing with Calendar View will give us information not about emails but about appointments and I’ll come back to that in a little while. So let’s go back to Home again and let’s create our first appointment. Now in Outlook 2013, there is a definite distinction between an appointment and a meeting. An appointment is basically something that just involves you. If you don’t need to check anybody else is available, you don’t have to discuss the time with other people, or expect people to confirm that they can or can’t attend. All you’re doing is putting an appointment in your calendar. Now I’m going to put myself down for a dentist appointment next Friday. Bad news I know, but let’s suppose I’m going to the dentist next Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. So I click on New Appointment and now I see this window where I’m going to fill in details of the appointment. Now as you’re probably expecting by now there are an awful lot of things that I can specify about an appointment and most of them we’re going to cover later. For the moment, all I’m going to do is to put in a subject which is going to be Dentist. Fortunately, it’s just my regular check-up. So maybe I’ll get away without needing anything to be done. The location. Well, my dentist is in the town of Darlington in County Durham. And it’s next Friday so I can use the date picker here under start time and next Friday is March the 8th and the start time is 2 p.m., so the time picker 2 p.m. And finish date gets changed to the same as the start date automatically. So that’s already on March the 8th and I can say well hopefully 30 minutes will be long enough for a check-up. It’s certainly not an all day event which is what I would check here if it were an all day event. Now while I’m there, I can perhaps just make a little note to myself to say, Ask him about the new insurance scheme. He’s running a new insurance scheme whereby you can pay a fixed amount each month to cover all of your dental treatment for the year. I think that sounds like a good idea but that’s just a reminder to myself to check that with him. And when I’ve put in all the details that I’m going to put in, I just click on Save and Close.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now this may be very slightly difficult for you to see but if you look in the Folder Pane on the left, you’ll just see now that Friday the 8th has a slightly bolder number in it and that indicates that I have at least one appointment on that day. If I wanted to check what that appointment was, I could just click on the day and I can see down here Dentist check-up Darlington. If I hover over the appointment, you’ll see that the main information appears in that little balloon on the left there, Dentist check-up. And if I select that and then switch on the Reading Pane, put it on the right, you’ll see that the details of that appointment appear in the Reading Pane. Similar sort of idea behind reading an email, of course, but this time I’m looking at the details of an appointment. I’m not going to leave the Reading Pane there. I’m going to put it off for the moment. And one of the things that I’ve just realized I’ve done wrongly with this. Let me just hover over it again. It says Dentist check-up. There’s the date and time. Location Darlington; reminder 15 minutes. Now hang on a minute. That’s no good, 15 minutes, because it takes me 30 minutes to get there. Reminding myself 15 minutes before it that that appointment is there is not a very good idea. So what I think I’m going to do is to warn myself the day before. Now if you want to modify an appointment; easy to do, just double click and we’re back in that appointment window. We look at the details of the appointment and in the options section on the Appointment tab, one of the options is it’s got a little bell next to it and it’s the reminder. Choose when to be reminded of this item. Now currently I’m saying reminding me 15 minutes before the appointment occurs. Something that’s half an hour away, that’s not going to be particularly helpful. If I click on the drop down, I have a number of options there, a whole range. I’m going to ask to be reminded about it one day beforehand. Now that means that Outlook, provided I’ve got it open, of course, will remind me a day before the start time of that appointment which is 2 p.m. on Friday. So 2 p.m. Thursday, I’ll get a reminder to say you’ve got to go to the dentist tomorrow. When that happens what I would normally would do is to reset the reminder to say an hour before to make sure I have time to get myself ready and still give myself plenty of time to drive to Darlington to my dentist, and so it’s as simple as that. When I finish making my changes, I click on Save and Close and the updated appointment is stored in my calendar.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now I mentioned earlier on in the course about context sensitive tabs and with this appointment selected, Dentist check-up Darlington, I have the Calendar Tools Appointment tab. You’ll only see this when you’re working in the calendar and if I click on that Appointment tab, I have access to many of the settings for that appointment that mean I don’t have to actually open the appointment up in a separate window in order to reset things like the reminder. I can do that right here on this tab. I can also setup recurrence which I’ll look at later and I can categorize the appointment. I can give it a high priority, make it private, etc. We’ll look at all these things later on in the course. So the next thing I’m going to do is to schedule a meeting and this time, I’m going to schedule it in my other calendar mainly to show that I certainly can. So if I switch on my toby.a calendar and off my Outlook data file calendar, more of both of those later. I’m now going to schedule a meeting, so I click on New Meeting on the Home tab. Now for this meeting, the first thing I’m going to do is to invite somebody else to it and the person I’m going to invite to it is Steve. There he is. Note that because Outlook is aware that I’ve typed an email address in before starting with an S, [email protected], there it is.

Now I’m going to send Steve the

presentation on Monday and I really want to review the presentation with him. So I’ll type as the subject, Review presentation, and the location we’ll make My office and let’s say Wednesday. I’m going to send it on Monday, so let’s say Wednesday. Let’s say Wednesday morning at 10. There’s a reasonable amount to cover then so let’s allow a couple of hours, say until 12 p.m. Now as with the appointment, there are many other things that I could specify here; other options available, reminders, etc. but I’m just going to say in here. So there we are and that’s just a little note to Steve to tell him what the meeting is for and I’m happy with that. All I need to do is to click on Send. Now if you look at March the 6th in the calendar, there you can probably just about see it’s a bolder number six than the surrounding numbers. It might be quite difficult to see there but you should be able to make that out. Click on the six and there, of course, is my proposed meeting with Steve. Now Outlook 2013 knows that I have multiple calendars and it color codes them. This calendar, the toby.a calendar, the one that’s selected at the moment, I’m thinking of this as my work calendar whereas the other one I’m thinking of as my home calendar. My work calendar is color © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 coded green. If I hover over that proposed meeting, the main details of the meeting are shown: Review presentation, I’ve got a start and time, organizer, that’s me, location, reminder. If I click on that meeting, I get calendar tools for a meeting which some of them are the same as for an appointment such as the reminders. Some of them are those more relevant to a meeting like add or remove attendees, contact attendees, and tracking which basically keeps track of who said they can attend and who said they can’t. And to get some more information about the status of attendees, if I click on the View tab and then on the Reading Pane, I’ll put it on the right. Not only do you get a little summary of the meeting on the right, but in this case you get a summary at the top in terms of the responses to these invitations to the meeting. So no responses have been received for this meeting. So I know that I’ve invited Steve but I haven’t heard anything back from him yet. And until I do, I won’t really know whether the meetings on or not. So let’s see what Steve says. So I’m going to do a few other things while I’m just waiting for that. Let me just go back into my email, see if there’s anything new there. Let’s go to the Inbox. Ah that’s good, Steve has accepted this meeting. That’s great. Let’s go back and have a look at the meeting again. Let’s go back into the calendar and I’m going to go to that particular meeting again, click on it. Oh, there we are. Attendee responses, one accepted, zero tentatively accepted, and zero declined. And in fact on the Meeting tab, if I click on Tracking, I’ll see there that Steve, a required attendee, has accepted. So that’s good news. Steve’s okay for that meeting. So that’s a pretty straightforward meeting that we’ve arranged there with just one other person. But you get some idea of the power of arranging meetings using Outlook and you can actually do a lot more than that when you’re arranging meetings. You can look for available time slots and all sorts of other things, but we’ll come back to those topics later on in the course. For now that’s enough on the calendar for the moment. We’re going to move on in the next section to look at people or if you like, contacts. I’ll see you then.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Adding Contacts Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at some of the basic features of dealing with people. Now if you’re used to an earlier version of Outlook, you’ll be used to the term Contacts and I think Microsoft are in the situation now that they’re halfway through changing from saying Contacts to saying People. Because I’ve been using Outlook for a while, I quite often still say Contacts. Take the terms as being interchangeable; Contacts and People. But People is the one I think I should be using at the moment and People is the one that appears down at the bottom there just above the Status Bar. Let’s click on People and we can see a people’s display. At the moment, it’s extremely empty. I haven’t setup any people at all in this installation of Outlook 2013 yet. Now if you look at the left hand end of the Ribbon, at the moment there is a button; New Contact. I suppose that probably should say New Person. And we are going to use that in a little while to setup a new contact. But generally speaking, in the New Group on the Home tab of the Ribbon, whatever you’re looking at, there’s also a New Items button and if you click on New Items or rather the arrow at the bottom of New Items, you can actually create an email message, an appointment, a meeting, a contact, or a task. We’ll look at tasks in the next section. You can create any of them from whichever mode you’re in. So if you’re looking at people or contacts, you can create an email message or an appointment and vice versa. So you can mix and match those as much as you like. But for the first contact that I’m going to add, the first person, what I’m actually going to do is go back to mail and I’m going to choose one of the emails from Steve. Now when you’ve got things in the Inbox, you can pretty much tell what they are by looking at the little icons that you see. I can tell this is an incoming email from Steve because it’s got a little envelope there and a little arrow pointing to the left meaning that’s an email coming in. Let me open that email up. And it’s from Steve. If I right click on Steve’s email address, one of the options I have is Add to Outlook contacts and I can, using this, approach add Steve to the Outlook contacts. Now one of the advantages of doing that is that I get a panel where I can start to add the information, but part of the information is filled in. And obviously, the part that’s filled in is the email address. So © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 the email address is there. I’m actually going to put Steve’s proper name in here. His name is Steve Brown and I can add any other details that I want to. Now I’m not going to put in a lot of details about Steve at the moment. I’ll come back to that later, but I’ll put his phone number in. He’s Mister Steve Brown. That’s okay. His phone number in there. Let’s put his work phone number in. It’s 555-2314. That’ll do for now. Click on Save. And when I’ve entered all the information, I’m going to enter close Steve down, close again here, and let’s go back into people. Now one of the interesting things when we’re back in people; we can see Mr. Steve Brown there. I can, of course, put a picture of Steve in. I’ll talk about putting pictures on to our contacts later on. But with Steve selected here, and he’s my only contact so far, in the pane on the right, I can see Steve’s details. Now, of course, some of them like the work phone number, I can see the email I can see. But note also that there are some links. So if I wanted now to schedule a meeting with Steve, all I would need to do would be to click there on Schedule a meeting and it brings up a window where I can schedule a meeting. My meeting with Mr. Steve Brown, I can enter all the details. I can even look at availability on calendars and so on, subject to a couple of things that we’ll talk about later on. So I’m not going to do that at the moment. That was just to demonstrate that it can be done. If I close this window now, the question is what do you want to do with this meeting request? Don’t save the changes. I’m not really going to schedule a meeting here. So I just click on OK and there we are Steve Brown’s details. Now you should be able to work out by now, that if I click on the View tab, what these various things are. If I switch off the Folder Pane, I lose what was on the left. And what would happen if I switch off the Reading Pane? You’ve got it. Steve’s details. So I don’t think I need to mention that again. Now the other thing to note here is that as with calendars, I can have more than one list of contacts. I’ve got a list associated with my Outlook data file and I’ve got another list associated with that Microsoft Live account. Now Steve is in the Outlook data file contacts. I’ve actually setup a contact in the other one as well. There’s only one. It’s a company called WebFusion who’s an ISP in the U.K. Now if you’ve got a contact in one of these lists, you can actually very


Learn Outlook 2013 easily move them into another list. So I could actually drag Steve into the Toby list. The Toby list has now got both of those contacts in and I can see the details for both. And it’s also worth noting that with most of these types of object in Outlook that you can do all the normal Windows and Office things. So let’s suppose that I wanted to have both Steve and WebFusion in both of my contact lists. If I were to select Steve by clicking once and then hold the Shift key down and select WebFusion as well, so I’ve got both contacts selected. If I right click, on the contextual menu, I have copy. Now let me go to the Outlook data file contacts list and do a paste. I can paste with the keyboard shortcut of Control-V. And I have both contacts in that list as well. So what I’m going to do now is to manually add a new contact. So toby.a, that’s the contact list that’s selected. On the Home tab click on New Contact and you get a pretty impressive window comes up with an awful lot of potential information about one of my contacts. Now normally what I’ll do now is to put in the full name of the contact. So the full name it’s going to be Ms., the first name is Sally, last name is White, and a company is TA Inc. And her email address is [email protected]. And I can fill in as many more of these details as I want to. I’m not going to fill in too many at the moment. I’ll put a few more in later on. I just want to get the general idea over. And that’s how to manually setup a contact. So click on Save and Close and there’s my next contact. Now there’s a lot more to show you on contacts later on in the course, but just for now one other thing. Let’s go back to that New Items button that I mentioned before, click on New Items. I’m going to send an email message. Now when I want to specify the potential recipient of an email message, if I click on the To button now, watch what happens. It comes up with a list of those three people and if I wanted to send an email just to Sally or to Sally and Steve, I can access them, get their email addresses from here. I’m going to come back to that in just a moment but I want to show you something else as well. Watch what happens if I click on Address Book. Same thing. And watch what happens if I just start typing. So let me just type an S here. I’m offered [email protected] or with the name Sally White, [email protected]. Now when I first entered Steve I entered the name like that


Learn Outlook 2013 so that’s the way that Outlook is recognizing Steve. Whereas Sally I setup as a contact first and then put the email address in so she comes up as Sally White like that. Now all of those methods are perfectly feasible ways of adding addressees to an email message. But I’m going to go right back to the first one and let’s suppose that I wanted to send it to Sally and Steve. Sally’s selected at the moment. Double click. I’m going to send it to Steve as well. Double click. Note that the To now has a semicolon between those two names. Click on OK and I see both names in the To list but with a semicolon between them. I can, of course, manually type email addresses in. There’s never a problem with typing email addresses in manually. But once you’ve got those contacts setup with their email addresses, you’re going to save yourself a huge amount of time by using one of those methods of getting the addressee names into your emails. So that’s it on contacts or people and the end of this section. In the next section, we’re going to look at tasks so please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Adding Tasks Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to have an introductory look at tasks in Outlook. And perhaps the simplest way to think of a task, if you’re not familiar with using Outlook or another personal information manager, is that a task is an item in your To-do list. So it’s not an appointment in that it’s not something happening on a particular day at a particular time. It’s more something that you know you’ve got to do. You may well have a deadline with it. You may, for instance, need to have it done by Monday. Today is Monday and this is the day by which I need to have that presentation prepared. Or it may be something that is very low priority where you don’t really have a deadline or maybe the deadline is a long way off in the future. And the task may just be a reminder or it could actually contain a lot of information about what you need to do. In addition, you can assign tasks to other people to do. So you can give somebody else a task to do and they can be required to update you on progress on that task. So let’s suppose that I’m going to put a task into my To-do list to send that presentation to Steve. Now as we know, we can pretty much create things from anywhere. I’m currently looking at email. If I click on New Items, one of the options there is Task so I’ll just click on task. Now you won’t be surprised to see a window appear, Untitled Task. It has its own Ribbon with some tabs. It shares some of the tabs and the contents of the tabs with other types of element in Outlook. But some of them are unique to task. So things like this one, Assign Task in the middle here, that’s a command that is unique to tasks. So as my subject I would say, for instance, Send. So that’s my subject. If I needed to put a longer explanation in here of exactly what the presentation is about, for example, I could enter it in this area down here which is basically where I can put in any additional information. And I might well use this not only for a task for myself but if I was sending a task to somebody else I might put the detail in here. As we’ll see later, I can also do things like attach a document to this task which might itself contain more information about what’s required, but for the moment let’s just create the task. So the start date for this task, Friday the 1st of March, and by default when I put in the start date, the due date becomes the same date. So it already says Overdue by three days. Now, in fact, of


Learn Outlook 2013 course it’s actually got to be done by today, Monday, so I’m just going to put that in for today. It’s not longer overdue but I do get a message that says Due today. Different people approach the next thing in different ways. I have set this task up with a start date of Friday and a due date of Monday. I may or may not use the status value over here. It currently says Not started. If I want to use these values and some people do and some people don’t, I could also set the status of this task and I could say it’s In progress. Now the range of status values that’s available goes: Not started, In progress, Completed, Waiting on someone else, or Deferred. And when you’ve built up your To Do list and you’ve got an awful lot of tasks in it, you may find that having the status values does actually help. I tend not to use them but I know many people that do use these values. For the purposes of this course, I’m mostly going to use these values. So we’re going to say that this task is in progress. Now we give it a priority. Now it’s very important that I get this presentation done, but it is an internal document and it’s not as important as some of the other things that I have to do, so I’m going to give it normal priority. I have a choice between low, normal, and high on priorities. And, of course, it’s very subjective what you call low, what you call normal, what you call high. So when you add a task, you need to be clear about whether it’s low, normal, or high. I tend to think of high things as things that are really going to cause me a big problem if they’re late. Whereas normal things could probably be put off a little bit without causing me a big problem. Well, getting this presentation to Steve it could be delayed by a day. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. But if I didn’t get it done today I might then change the priority to high to make sure that I get it done say by tomorrow. The next value here is also one that some people do and some people don’t. If you’re working on a task for somebody else, you may be required to keep this value up to date, but it’s the percent complete. And with this presentation I’m working on for Steve, at the moment, first thing Monday morning, I’m roughly halfway through it. So I can set that as 50%. You can actually click in there and type a probably much more unrealistic value of how complete it is. Normally, I just work in the 25, 50, 75, etc. Now we come to something else which is very important which is the use of reminders. Now I mentioned reminders earlier on. We looked at reminders in relation to a dentist appointment. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 You can have a reminder for a task. And by clicking the checkbox here, Reminder, you can say on what day and at what time you would like a reminder. Now I’m going to say that my reminder is today and I’m going to set the reminder for, I’m going to set it for 8 a.m., leave it at the default value there. So at 8 a.m. today I’ll get a reminder from Outlook that that task is due. So that’s all of the information that I’m going to enter at the moment for this task. I’m now going to click on Save and Close. My task is now saved. And because the time is just past 8 a.m., you can also see the reminder popping up. Now when you get a reminder, you have a choice. If you’ve used a reminder and maybe you’ve completed the task or you think, oh yeah that’s fine. I don’t need anything else. I don’t need to be reminded again. You can click on Dismiss which will basically dismiss the reminder. It doesn’t delete the task. You’ve still got the task there but you won’t be receiving any further reminders about that task. If however you think, oh yeah I’ve still got to do that actually, you can reset the reminder by using the snooze facility. Now the snooze facility here, Click snooze to be reminded in, let’s you choose a different time. So I could for instance say oh remind me again in, say, an hour and then click on Snooze. And then in another hour, I’ll get another reminder. So adding a task to your To Do list in Outlook is that straightforward. Now let’s actually look at tasks. So back down to the bottom, let’s click on Tasks, and there we have on the left To Do list, recognizing the Outlook data file and the toby.a email account. So we’ve got two lots. In toby.a, we have nothing. In the Outlook data file, we have that one task. Note the task is there. If I double click it, it opens up and I can see the detail and, of course, change the detail. And also on the right I’ve got a little flag. Now I’m going to talk to you about those flags a bit later on in the course, but they’re going to be a very useful feature throughout Outlook 2013 when it comes to being reminded about things and being able to prioritize things. So there’s my list of tasks. Now in fact there’s another way of looking at your list of tasks and I’d like to finish this section by taking a quick look at that. Now amongst the things you have to cope with when you’re using a pretty sophisticated personal information manager like Outlook is that you have a lot of different types of information to keep track of. And as we saw earlier on in the course, there are various ways that you can see different types of thing in view at once. So you can use the Sneak a Peek feature, you can use © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 the To-do bar on the right, and you’ll develop your own preferences for doing that. But with tasks there’s a particular view which I find very useful and that is if you go the Calendar View, so here’s Calendar View. At the moment, I have a day in view. I’m going to change to having a week in view at the moment in the calendar. One of the options with the Calendar View is that if you click on the View tab, in the Layout Group there is a Daily task list button. If you click on that, one of the options there is to show that in normal view. Now watch what happens if I click Daily task list normal, and what you see at the bottom of the display is a list of tasks that are due today. So it says Show tasks on due date. So due today, Monday, 4th, you can see a list of tasks. Now unfortunately the display here is so narrow that you can’t see any words. But if you hover over that task, you’ll see that it says Send presentation to Steve. Started on March 1st, due to finish March 4th, and the reminder time was today at 8 a.m. Now clearly, I’ve only got one task setup here but once I’ve got a few more setup, then for each day of this week I can get a little summary of what tasks are due to be completed on that day. Note also that I still can see here my appointments in the calendar, the ones that are going to happen at a certain time on a certain day. But I can also see a list of the tasks that I need to either be completing or working on, on that day. Now in addition to that and supplementary to that, of course, you’ve always got the To-do bar. So if I click on the To-do bar and select tasks, watch what I see on the right. On the right, I see again a list of those tasks and I can double click, open up a particular task, and see the details. Note also that with the To-do bar, I can actually type in a new task. I could use the To-do bar to add a task there if I wanted to. So let me now go back to the View tab again and change the view now to a single day. Now you can see the calendar but note that the view is wide enough to see the description here, Send presentation to Steve in the task at the bottom. If I open up that task, I get the same window with task information in it. When I complete a task, I’ve basically got two main options. One of them is to actually delete the task. There’s a button there to delete. You have a similar button for things like deleting a calendar appointment. But very often, people don’t want to delete things that they’ve completed. They’d rather leave evidence that they happened in Outlook. So if you delete this task, it will go. It’ll be gone. You’ll have no sign of it. But if you just want to mark it as complete, you would click on the Mark Complete button here. That would leave the task in © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Outlook and visible but it would be shown as complete. Another way of doing that is to change the percent complete here from 50% to 100% but more about those things later. For now, that’s enough to get you started on tasks. And in the next section, we’re going to have a look at notes so please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Creating Notes Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at notes. Now we’ve used the link at the bottom here, mail, calendar, people, task already a couple of times and to the right of those, you probably noticed those three dots. Let me click on those three dots and I’m going to click on Notes, and that brings us into a display of the saved notes. Now so far I haven’t created any notes. I’m going to create a note now by clicking on New Notes. And basically while I’m doing this presentation work for Steve, I’ve just remembered that Sally’s got a book that I could give her a quick call about because I think that would help me. So I’m just going to write myself a little reminder. So just Call Sally about book. The note is just like a yellow sticky Post-it note. Obviously there’s no actual glue involved in this case but I have a little area that I can just type myself a note about anything. It can actually be much longer than the size of that note would imply. But as you can see from the little yellow Post-it itself, it records the date and the time that I recorded that note. And it also gives me a Close button in the top right. If I click on Close, it closes that note and that note is just there as a reminder. I could, of course, have created a task for that. I could’ve given myself a task of calling Sally today about the book which would’ve been absolutely fine. But really notes are more just about little almost random thoughts and also some people use them for things like keeping user names and maybe reminders of passwords and that sort of thing. They’re just little odd pieces of information that it’s useful to have. Some people create notes and then when they’ve used whatever they’re for, they delete them again. Some people keep notes and have information in them that they keep forever. The good thing about notes is that there are really no rules. You can write what you like. You can delete them. You can create new ones. You can amend them and so on. And they’re very conveniently accessible from this Notes View here. Now I’m going to tell you a couple of other things about notes in just a moment but I just want to point something else out to you. You saw just now how we got to notes by clicking on the three dots. Let me click on the three dots again and I’m going to click on Navigation Options because this is quite important for your own customization of your installation of Outlook 2013. Click on Navigation Options and it says Maximum number of visible items four. And I’m going to


Learn Outlook 2013 increase that to five and it will show the first five of these items. So let me just click on OK and watch what happens. If you use notes a lot, you might prefer to do that. Similarly, let’s go back into Navigation Options again. Suppose that you don’t use tasks at all; that’s probably not very likely, but let’s suppose that you don’t. If you selected tasks and clicked on Move down and change five back to four, it will show mail, calendar, people, and notes. Click on OK. So you can adjust, customize what’s shown here. I’m actually going to go back to having all five shown because I use all five of those and I quite like the default order that’s there. So click on five, click on OK, and I’ll be done. If at any stage, you just experiment with that and you decide you want to go back to how it was, there’s a Reset button there. Click on OK and there we are. Now because of the way this course has to be recorded, this may look a little bit strange but it’s actually fine. If I’ve got this note here, Call Sally about book, and let me open it up again. The key idea here is not only that I’ve got that note in Outlook but that I can actually put it on my desktop to remind myself later on in the day. So if I take this note by its title and just drag it outside Outlook, it will just sit on my desktop like that and just wait for me. Later on I’ll see that yellow Post-it note on my desktop. Maybe I’ll have a pile of two or three Post-it notes on my desktop and they’ll just act as reminders for me to make a call. You don’t have to restrict those notes to sitting inside Outlook while it’s open. Having said that, when you close Outlook, you will close those notes as well. They won’t be deleted. They’ll still be there. They’ll still be available to you next time you open Outlook but they will no longer be sitting on your desktop. So let’s just quickly at one or two other basic features about notes. If I open this particular note up, note I can drag around by the title bar. The title bar doesn’t actually contain a title by the way but it’s a little bar you can use to drag it around. And if you click within the body of the note, you can pretty much type freely. You are not restricted in size to the amount of space there. If you carried on typing, you’d more than fill the space. It would just carry on running down. You can also resize a note. If you look at the bottom right hand corner here, there’s a resizing handle there. I can resize it to pretty much any size that I like. And as we’ll see later on in the course, we can categorize notes. We can sort them. We have different views available to enable us to find particularly important notes in particular situations. But in terms of just creating them, moving them around and, of course, when you’ve got a note


Learn Outlook 2013 selected like this, there’s a delete button up there on the Home tab as well. That’s enough to be going on with for now for notes in Outlook 2013. So that’s the end of the basics of the main elements within Outlook and I’m going to come back to each of these in turn later on in the course and fill in the missing detail and I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 9 – RSS Feeds Video: Managing RSS Feeds Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at RSS Feeds in Outlook. Now there’s always been a bit of controversy over what RSS actually means. Nowadays the name is generally accepted to stand for Really Simple Syndication, although there are various opinions of what the initials originally stood for. And basically we use RSS as a common way of publishing news feeds, listings, blogs, and so on. And what I’m going to cover in this section is how to get an RSS Feed of a news channel. And once you’ve seen one of these setup, you should be able to setup as many of your own as you want to. I’m going to actually get something from the White House I think on this occasion. Now the way I’m going to set about getting this RSS Feed may surprise you a little bit because I’m going to go to YouTube and, in fact, as with many of the social media that you may want to use they provide updates or at least notification of updates of content using RSS. Now I’m going to search YouTube for White House and I see listed a number of videos that feature White House. Now one thing noticeable about some of them is that they say like this one By White House. And at the very top, I see The White House is the official channel of the White House and the videos are public domain. Now to subscribe to this feed, there are a number of options. One option is to click on Subscribe, sign in to your YouTube account and subscribe that way but I’m going to do it a different way on this occasion because I want to do it pretty much independently of a specific YouTube account. So, if I click on Channel that will take me to the White House channel. I’m then going to enable the Internet Explorer command bar, and with the command bar enabled, there’s a button over here on the left which is basically the RSS Feeds button. If you click on the drop down, click on RSS, and it brings me through to this page which includes Subscribe to this feed. Now it says, Uploads by White House. Subscribe to this feed. Click on that and it brings up this little dialog, Subscribe to this feed. When you subscribe to a feed, it’s automatically added to the favorites center and kept up to date. So having done that I click on Subscribe and I’m now subscribed to the feed via Internet Explorer.


Learn Outlook 2013 One consequence of subscribing in this way is that this particular feed comes through via something called the common feed list and I need to make sure that this shows up in Outlook. So, to do that I go into Backstage View, I click on Options, and then into Advanced and really this is where we’re starting to look at specific options to achieve specific things in Outlook. So go down to the section RSS Feeds and the second option there says Synchronize RSS Feeds to the common feed list in Windows. So check that which makes sure that the common feed list coming through to Windows is synchronized with the RSS Feeds in Outlook, click on OK. Now it may take a minute or two for this to show up or you may even need to close down Outlook and restart it. But you will eventually see next to RSS Feeds a little wedge here, click that, and that gives you access to your first RSS Feed, Uploads by White House. Now in this case, the 25 unread items are actually 25 unwatched videos. And if I select one video in the list here, I get the details in the pane on the right. As usual, I’ve got access to Reading Pane which I can switch on or off. I’m going to put it back on to On on the right. There’s a detail of each video; information such as the number of views and the ratings that other viewers have given it and basically you can go through and choose a video. Choose a video, say that one, and then if I click that video I’ll be able to watch it. And there we are. There is a White House Press briefing playing in Internet Explorer via YouTube. Now apart from the fact that obviously our RSS Feed to the White House video sources is setup and working okay and it will continue to work on a day by day basis. So you can expect that list to be updated on a regular basis which amongst other things means you either want to setup a mechanism to clear it out from time to time or you want to make sure that you go through and delete the videos that you’re no longer interested in. If we go back into Backstage View again now and look at Account Settings, we looked at email accounts before, now if we look at RSS Feeds, we’ll find that we’ve got our first RSS Feed setup. The feed name is Uploads by White House. It was last updated today. That’s when I actually set the feed up. And if we double click on that or select it and then click on Change, you get a dialog, the RSS Feed Options dialog where you can go through and change or customize the settings for this particular feed. Subscribing to a YouTube channel in Outlook is very popular. Also people like to subscribe to their favorite blogs as well using RSS Feeds. That’s pretty straightforward. Most of the major online magazines provide RSS Feeds. This is Rolling Stone. If you go down to the bottom of © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 the front page here, there will be a set of links down here, various options. One of the options for Follow us is to follow us using RSS. So if I click on RSS, I’m presented with a list of the available blogs. Now the list is, first of all, we have all the news, then we have particular individuals, and then towards the bottom we get things like movie reviews, album reviews, and so on. Now with each of these, there are a number of options and given that you can access these via Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN-plus, etc. you may be a bit baffled by which of those to use. Basically, what you want to use is the first one, the XML one which is the basic RSS Feed. So if I click on the XML button here for all blogs, I come through to rollingstone.com all blogs and then it starts to look pretty much the same as the YouTube one did because I go into Subscribe to this feed, click on that, dialog comes up, and it says rollingstone.com all blogs. And then all I need to do is to click on Subscribe. It says you’ve successfully subscribed to this feed. And once again it can take a few minutes for the RSS Feed to be picked up by Outlook. You can always just shut Outlook down and fire it up again. That’s usually an effective way of making a feed start to work. If I go into RSS Feeds again now, I’ve got a second one, rollingstone.com all blogs, click on that. That gives me a list there of what are effectively articles this time and if I click on a particular one, say that second one, I get a few lines of synopsis and then a link through that says View article which gives me access straight through to the relevant Rolling Stone article. So let’s just click on View article and there I can see it as it appeared in the online edition of Rolling Stone. So, we’ve seen how to setup access to a YouTube channel or to a blog via an RSS Feed and you can do pretty much exactly the same thing to setup access to your favorite podcasts. In any of these cases, there are some situations where either a suitable Add button isn’t provided or perhaps the add feature doesn’t seem to be working in which case you can setup the RSS Feed manually. And I want to demonstrate that in the next part of this section and I’m going to do it by showing you how to manually setup access to a podcast. I’ve identified a podcast using Podcast Alley which is a very well known portal for accessing a very large number, a very wide range of podcasts internationally. And the particular podcast I’m going to setup is the one called the Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, and this contains a lot of old radio detective programs which you can download many, many episodes of if you really like © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 listening to that kind of thing. Now there’ll usually be a Subscribe button. There’s a Subscribe button here and in there there’s instructions for how to setup the podcast and how to setup the associated feed or feeds into a range of different pieces of software. Now almost always, you will see somewhere amongst all of this information, information like that that you can see here. If you want to see the RSS or XML file click here. So what it comes up with then is a number of subscribe now links, various buttons that will basically connect via things like My Yahoo, Google, Pageflakes, and so on. But it will also give you the feed XML that you need in order to access an RSS Feed manually. Right down at the bottom here, you can see that little orange and white symbol which is the RSS Feed symbol. It says View feed XML and if you right click on that and click on Copy shortcut, it actually copies the code for that RSS Feed to the Clipboard. Now let’s go into Outlook and manually setup that feed. So I go into Backstage View, into Account Settings, and then into RSS Feeds and one of the options in RSS Feeds is New. Enter the location of the RSS Feed you want to add to Outlook. Now all I have to do is to paste in the feed I just copied. So that’s Control-V, click on Add. So using the URL I provided, it’s located that particular feed. It’s identified the correct feed name, The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, got in all the other information that it needs. I’ve got the RSS Feed Options dialog available if I need to change anything. So all I do now is click on OK. That feed is now setup. Note the status is pending but if I wait a little while that one will appear as well. And I’ve setup a blog RSS Feed, Rolling Stone, a podcast RSS Feed, The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio, and a YouTube channel RSS Feed; two of those automatically and one of them using the manual method. So on this occasion, I didn’t actually exit Outlook and restart it. It’s managed to download in fact 200 of these episodes. So I’ve got The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio here and you can see that I have 200 items there already for me to go into and look at the synopsis of the episodes, listen to the episodes, and so on. So there we are. So I’ll choose one of the detective story episodes and click on View article in the Reading Pane. It goes into Internet Explorer and it comes up with the details of that particular episode. So there’s a little synopsis. Original air date August 6, 1944 and then further down there’s an © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 embedded player on the page where I can actually play that particular detective story. So let’s try a little bit of that story. (Music) Welcome to The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio from Boise, Idaho. This is your host Adam Grant. If you have a comment, email us. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 10 – Printing Video: Printing Emails and Contacts; Print Properties Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I want to take a look at printing from Outlook 2013. There are some general principles involved when you want to print from Outlook, but there also some specific requirements depending on what sort of objects you’re printing. So for instance, there are specific considerations when you’re printing appointments, email messages, tasks, contact details, and so on. So let’s start with printing an email message. I’m going to go to the toby.a Inbox, choose one of the messages. That’s one from Steve. And to print that message, all I need to do is to go into Backstage View and click on the Print option. Now when I click print in Backstage View, I basically get a preview of how the print will look on the right and you can see with such a short message there’s not an awful lot in that preview. But I want to turn my attention first to the buttons on the left because there’s one big button at the top where you click Print to print. But below that you have a Printer button which gives you a choice of the available printers. Now, in my case, I’ve basically got four options available here. I’ve got print to fax, print to HP psc 2500 Series. That’s a physical printer that is attached to this PC via the USB port. I can print it as a Microsoft XPS document or I can send it to OneNote. Now to be fair I don’t very often print physical documents. Most of the work that I do gets emailed or sent by some other means electronically to other people. It’s actually quite rare for me to use a printer so my default is set to OneNote. And when you come to do a print, you can see which of your printer options is selected as your default because it’ll have that tick in it. Now which of those printers is your default is important for reasons we’ll come back to in just a moment. Now normally once your copy of Outlook 2013 is installed and setup, the list of printers available to you here will be correct. But there are a couple of situations in which you may be missing a printer. One of them is if your PC’s connected to a network, Outlook 2013 may well not be able to see automatically all of the printers on the network. In that case, you would need to click on Add printer at the bottom here and follow the sort of Wizard steps through, specify that you’re looking for a printer on the network, and let Outlook help you to find that printer. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 The other situation that sometimes occurs is that if you plug perhaps a new printer into your PC, Outlook doesn’t detect the printer straightaway. And in that situation, you can click on Add printer and follow the Wizard through again and say that the printer you’re looking for is actually physically connected to the PC but the PC can’t see it. And usually if you follow that Wizard procedure through, you’ll be able to set up that other printer. Now I’m going to print now to the physical printer so that’s the one I’m going to select. So having selected my printer, I now click on Print Options. Now I get here a Print dialog. Some of the settings here are duplicated elsewhere on the print page as we’ll see in a moment. But depending on the choice of printer, if I click on Properties up here in the top right of the Print dialog, I’ll get a set of properties to choose from that are very much dependent on the choice of printer. If you’re using a physical printer, a color printer with color ink and so on, perhaps a high resolution printer, then you’ll have a similar set of options to these. Having said that these are very much the ones associated with the manufacturer HP and this printer is actually quite an old printer. So with a different make of printer or a more modern HP printer, you may see some similarities but also some differences as well. But typically the sort of thing that you’ll see will be settings for obviously paper size. My paper size defaults to the U.K. and Europe standard size of A4. You may have yours set to A4. You may have it set, for example, to Letter size. But clearly you need to choose something that is printable on the printer that you’re using. You will also probably have settings such as a print quality setting. I usually have mine set to the normal setting, but there are occasions when I may want the best quality or the maximum DPI setting. If I’m printing something that is good quality as I can, I may choose one of those. But if I want to just print something quickly and maybe save a little bit of ink as well, I may use the fast draft options which will give me a relatively poor quality print but will be quick and use less ink. I do usually use normal but it’s worth being aware of those options as well. The other types of options that you’ll often see are things like borderless printing where you don’t actually want a border round the edge. You want to print as close to the edge of the paper as possible. And then if I look at one or two of the other settings, if I click on the color options here, you may have some advanced color settings that let you choose different color schemes. This has got a choice between Color Smart’s RGB and Adobe RGB. I also have an option here to print in grayscale or to save my print settings and save them as a quick set. So for instance, if © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 I set these options for fast draft printing, I could save that as a named set or indeed if I setup some options for the best quality, I could achieve I could save those as a named set as well and call them up in future by their name. Now as I say exactly what you’ll see here will depend on the printer that you’re using but they’re the sort of choices that you’ll be able to make. So let me cancel out of the properties for my physical printer, back to the Print dialog. Within the Print dialog, we have a number of options. We can specify whether we want table style or memo style. I’ll demonstrate that to you in just a moment. The range of pages, now in this case there is only one page. If you look at the bottom of the Backstage View window, you’ll see 1 of 1. It’s only a one page email but you can choose a range of page numbers if you want to print selected pages. You can also choose down the bottom here to print attached files. We haven’t dealt with attachments so far but when we do that’s how you would set about printing them along with the email they’re attached to. And then on the right, you can say how many copies you want and if you’re dealing with a multipage email or other multipage document, whether you’d like the pages collated so you get sets page 1, 2, 3, page 1, 2, 3, page 1, 2, 3, or whether you get all the page 1s, all the page 2s, all the page 3s, and so on. So having made my selections, I would normally just hit the Print button and print whatever I’d selected. On this occasion though, I’ve got one other thing to explain and that is the difference between table style and memo style which is particularly important. The only one of these in which you print that email message is memo style. That’s how you print an individual message. If you look at table style, let’s just preview table style. What you actually see is a list of the contents of the folder that the selected message or messages are in. So basically table style prints a list of email messages. It doesn’t print an individual message including all its details. It prints a list of messages. So if I just want to print one email message, I’ll do it in memo style. When I’ve done it, I can either go into the Print Options dialog, make any changes to the settings or if I know that the settings are correct, I can just hit the Print button. And in this case with the default settings, when I hit the Print button, you get a message to tell you what’s happening which won’t be on the screen very long because this is a single page and I’m actually now printing it into OneNote and then the print will be completed. So click away and that’s it. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Now if you do tend to do quite a bit of printing, don’t forget one of the options on the Quick Access Toolbar is Print. Mine isn’t currently enabled but if I enable Print you can see the little printer picture there on the icon. So now if I were looking at an email and I wanted to print a copy, I could click on Print and it takes me straight into the print in Backstage View with the default settings, and then I can go through and make all the selections that I’ve talked about so far in this section. So that’s printing emails. Let’s take a look at a couple of the other types of object that we might want to print in Outlook 2013. I’m looking at my calendar now and right in the middle of this week, I have this meeting scheduled with Steve and it’s a meeting to review a presentation in my office. If I select that and click on the Print button on the Quick Access Toolbar, it takes me into Backstage View but I don’t see the details of the meeting. As with email where you have a memo style for an individual email and table style which prints a list, when you’re dealing with your calendar, there is again a memo style which will print the details of an individual appointment or meeting. But then there are several table styles and each of them corresponds to a different view of your calendar. So if you wanted to say print a calendar out for the week in agenda style all on one page, you get a nice page, the dates on it, one rectangle for each working day of the week and a couple of smaller rectangles for the weekend, Saturday, Sunday, and within each of the rectangles a list of appointments. There are different styles. There’s a daily style version. There’s a weekly calendar style version. So these are all basically listings of what’s in my calendar. If I want to see the individual meeting, the one I selected, that’s what I choose memo style for. And there I get as with the email a detailed listing of all the information I have about that meeting, which is not very much. If I hover over the preview, you see a magnifier and if I click with the magnifier I can see a blown up version of what’s in that meeting and it makes it a lot easier to read the detail of what’s in that meeting. And, of course, if I want to I can make my selections and print the details out as well. So let’s try printing out some contact information. I’ve got Mr. Steve Brown selected. Let’s click on Print and you can see as you probably expect by now a list of the people who are in our © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 contacts list, our people list. Steve Brown, WebFusion, Sally White, and there are different listing styles but, of course, there’s a memo style as well which is just the individual details of Steve. There is also a phone directory style and as we’ll see later on there are some other types of ways of representing people information that can form the basis of a very useful print, but we’ll come back to that later. That’s all we need to cover on printing for the moment. I’ll leave you to make sure that your printers are setup correctly and to perhaps do a little bit of an experiment with printing tasks and printing notes. And what we’ve covered so far should very adequately cover what you need on the basics of those. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 11 – Outlook Data Files Video: Favorites; PST and OST Files; Folder Size Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. We’re going to look next at Outlook data files and, unfortunately, this is a little bit of a technical area. And if you’re not particularly comfortable with technical things, then you may not be particularly comfortable with this section. But I am going to keep it in relatively straightforward terms and even if you don’t fully understand all of the content of this section, I think it’s very important that you try to follow the main points here because having a good idea of what’s going on with data files in Outlook even if it isn’t at the most technical level is really very important, for example in setting up your various email accounts. Even if you’ve only got one email account you really could do with understanding the main points of this section. The first thing I’d like to look at is the Folder Pane on the left. We’ve been using it for a while now and I’d really just like to talk, first of all, about the Favorites section at the top. As the number of data files and folders overall in the Folder Pane increases, you’ll find eventually that the list you get down here gets longer and longer and you have to scroll up and down to find the particular folder you want. Bear in mind also that some of the folders like the RSS Feeds folder when you expand can have an increasing number of RSS Feeds to have a look at. So the whole thing starts to get much more difficult to use and manage. The idea of the Favorite section up here is to give you a list of the folders that you use most often and to enable you to quickly find those. Now for instance here, I’ve got Inbox included in this Favorites section and the Inbox you can see here is not a separate Inbox. It’s not actually an email inbox at all. It’s a pointer to this Inbox. So whatever I see in my Outlook data file inbox that’s exactly what’s there. Similarly, I’ve got deleted items down here under Outlook data file, deleted items. If I select that folder, I can see the one note that I deleted, Call Sally about book. If I select the folder under Favorites, it’s exactly the same folder. They’re not copies of the same thing; they are the same thing. If I wasn’t particularly bothered about being able to get to my deleted items folder quickly or easily, if I right click on that deleted items folder under Favorites and click on Remove from Favorites, it’s no longer shown under Favorites. And if I wanted to put it back again, I would find it in the main folder list here, right click, click on Show in Favorites, and it’s back again. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So the Favorite section really is just a quick and easy way of getting to the folders that you use most often. If I have a particular folder in the Favorites section like Inbox, if I select it, I can actually drag it up and down within Favorites if I want to change the order. So if I wanted to put inbox at the beginning, click and drag, pull it up there, and drop it in the position that I’d like. So you can arrange the Favorites folders in whatever sequence suits you best. So that’s Favorites. I’m going to close that up for the moment. So just collapse that. And what we’re left with are the two main sections that are currently in the Folder Pane. Now it may well be that ultimately you only have one section. You could have one, two, three, four, any number of these for reasons that I’m going to explain in this section. But, first of all, let me explain about the two sections that we have already. The first section is called Outlook Data File and that is the file where pretty much all of your data is kept in Outlook 2013. So that will contain your calendar. It will contain copies of emails. It will contain information about RSS Feeds, all kinds of things, and most of those things you can already see in here. It is physically a file on your computer, and it’s what’s called a PST file. That means it has an extension of PST. And I’m going to show you that file in a moment and I’m going to talk a little bit about what PST files are and how you deal with them. The lower section, the one that begins [email protected], that corresponds to what’s called an OST file, and an OST file is primarily there so that you can synchronize your email, calendar, contacts, etc. with data that is stored somewhere else. So loosely speaking, to begin with what’s in the Outlook data file, the PST file is what you’re keeping on your computer long term, that’s the main body of information that you use with Outlook. The lower one here, the OST file, is the one that you use to synchronize with email that is stored on an email server somewhere else. So in the case of this particular one, it’s an email server that Microsoft looks after. Now the OST file itself is kept on my computer and everything that’s in here I have a copy of or a copy of part of on my computer. But the main storage is on Microsoft’s servers. Because I’ve only got effectively a copy, or in some cases a set of pointers here, I have no need to backup that OST file. It is a file on my computer but I don’t need to back it up. It’s just a file that’s used as a convenience to synchronize what I can see in Outlook here with what’s stored on Microsoft’s servers. If I were dealing with a Gmail account, which I will later on in the course, then it would be on Google servers. So, the PST file, the Outlook data file is on my computer. That’s the important one that I need to look after carefully. The OST file that’s used for this type of email account is basically one that’s used for synchronization. I’m © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 not saying it’s not important but I’m saying that it doesn’t normally contain any information that isn’t available on the mail server where this particular account is actually hosted, which is one of Microsoft’s mail servers. So let me just close up toby.a for a moment and let’s concentrate on this Outlook data file. If I right click on that and click on data file properties, I get a dialog that gives me a lot of information about this particular PST file. Now, first of all, I’m going to look at the Advanced button here, click on Advanced and it brings up detailed information about this Outlook data file. Its name is Outlook data file. I could actually rename that if I wanted to. I could give it my own name like Toby’s data file or something like that if I found it more helpful. The default name is Outlook data file, and then below that there is an actual file name. So that actually tells me where that PST file is on my computer. Now you may decide that you want to move that PST file and keep it somewhere else and I’ll come back to that a little bit later on. There isn’t actually any reason that you shouldn’t move it. If you want to put it in a location where it’s easier for you to back it up, for example, then it’s a pretty straightforward job to move it. I would recommend you don’t move it around a lot because it’s easy to come unstuck, make mistakes, but if you want to put it in a better location early on, probably a good idea. The format defaults to the default Outlook data file format and then there are two very particular things here which you need to be aware of:

change password and compact now.

Now

particularly, if you’re using a shared computer, you may not want other people to be able to open what I’ll call your copy of Outlook. What I really mean is you don’t want people to open Outlook and then open your PST file. Think of your PST file as really being everything that you own in Outlook. Now you can go a long way to securing the contents of your PST file by putting a password on it and then that password would need to be entered each time the Outlook data file is accessed, and it’s pretty straightforward. All you do is click on Change password. You are asked for the old password. Currently there is no password on this particular PST file so I would leave that blank. I put in a new password twice, the second one, the verify one, is to make sure that I typed it correctly the first time. And then there’s a little checkbox here, Save this password in your password list. If in fact you have to log in to the PC you’re using, using for instance a domain user name and password, if you check this box it won’t separately ask you for the password for our PST file. So, somebody who knows how to log into your domain © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 account, i.e. hopefully only you, won’t have to separately enter the password for the PST file as well. But if you’re on a PC where anybody can log in and potentially other people could access your PST file, you want to not check this box so that anybody trying to open your PST file will be required to enter the password. So I’m not going to put a password on at the moment, but if you want to, that’s how you do it. The second of these options says Compact now. And particularly if you’ve used Outlook before, you’ll be aware of the fact that PST files grow at a rather alarming rate. They’re certainly not as bad in terms of growing very quickly as they used to be, but fundamentally when you’re dealing with a PST file, you’re dealing with content that changes over a period of time quite rapidly. Email comes in, email gets deleted, items get moved around, you get junk mail, you delete junk mail. There’s a lot of activity typically in a PST file and over time the content gets fragmented and frankly in a bit of a mess. What then happens is you finish up with a bigger and bigger PST file. Not only does that use space on your PC but it will take longer and longer to back that PST file up to an external device. All you need to do really as part of a regular maintenance routine is to come in here and click on Compact now and Outlook 2013 will do its stuff. It will compact the PST file down into the smallest size that it can do without losing any of your information. I should point out also that there are occasions when you may get problems in Outlook and the instructions you get, the information you get from Microsoft or elsewhere may be to compact your PST file and that’s basically how you do that. And on the subject of size, if I just cancel that, go back to the Outlook Today dialog and click on folder size, you can actually see how much space is currently being used in the Outlook data file. The size without subfolders is zero kilobytes. The total size including subfolders is almost 5,000 kilobytes. So that’s almost 5 megabytes of data. And it also shows you how much space is used up by each of the folders within the Outlook data file. You can see the one that’s using the most. Not surprisingly is one of the RSS Feeds, the one that has the information about The Great Detective Radio programs of which I think we’ve got about 200 listed in that particular RSS Feed. So if you want to identify where the space is being used, that’s a useful facility as well and I’ll come back to that again a little bit later on. So that’s the Outlook data file. Let’s cancel that. Now I’m going to just collapse that down and turn our attention to the [email protected] account. Expand that, right click, data file properties, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 and in this case, we’re not dealing with a PST file. We are dealing with an OST file. As I said before, the purpose of an OST file is to synchronize the contents of these folders with the equivalent folders on a Microsoft server that’s basically hosting this particular Microsoft Live account. Now the intention is that you would only use these folders or something very close to these folders purely from the point of view of sending and receiving email, and once you’d received email if you wanted to store it, as I’ll show you later on in the course, you would almost certainly copy or move it from here into your Outlook data file. But more of that later on. Having said that, you could perfectly, reasonably and I know a lot of people that do this and it’s absolutely fine; you could, of course, leave all of this email on the Microsoft server. You could setup folders. You could have a calendar, whatever you like on that server and synchronize with that information. Now one main advantage of doing things that way, keeping a large part of your work say on a Microsoft server, is that it makes it very transportable. If you finished up somewhere else in the world without whichever device you’re using to run Outlook, you could still log in to your Microsoft Live account, look at the emails you’d stored there, look at your calendar, and so on. So there are a lot of advantages in keeping information on the Microsoft server, actually in the account, and synchronizing from Outlook. But the fundamental thing here is that the way to do it is the way that suits you best. There isn’t one way that’s right for everybody and one way that’s wrong for everybody. It’s whatever suits you best. The important thing is to understand the differences between PST files and what they’re used for, and OST files and what they’re used for. So there we are. Looking at this particular account if I click on Advanced I can see the name and location of the OST file. It gives me the full folder location on my PC and then it says [email protected], so it’s an OST file. I have a facility here to compact that OST file and also I can look at folder size and I can check how much space is being used by each of the folders in that particular OST file. So having looked at the basics of PST files and OST files in subsequent sections, we’re going to look at managing the items, the folders and so on within those files and things like archiving and backing up. So that’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 12 – Account Management Video: Setting Up Gmail and POP accounts Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a more detailed look at account management. We’ve already setup one email account. It’s a Microsoft Live account. And in the last section we talked about OST files, PST files, folders, and related topics. In this section we’re going to setup two more email accounts. We’re going to setup a Google mail account and also I’m going to setup a business, a domain type email account manually to show you how to do that if Outlook 2013 isn’t able to find all of the right settings for you. Having done that we’re then going to take a look at the PST file and the OST files that are setup and how we use the files and the folders that they contain. So let’s get started. First of all, I’m going to setup a Google mail account, a Gmail account. So go into Backstage View, add account, and then we pretty much just follow the procedure we did before. Email account, I’m going to call this Toby Google as opposed to Toby Microsoft. The email address goes in next and then I type in the password. Click on Next. It doesn’t take Outlook long to find the relevant settings. The last thing that Outlook does is to log on to the server and send a test email message to make sure everything’s okay. And when everything’s okay, I can see that I get a congratulations successful message. Click on Finish and now I have my Gmail account setup. As you can see, it has its own folder structure. The folder structure is actually different from the Microsoft Live folder structure. Many of the folders, standard folders like Outbox and Inbox are common but there are some other differences. I’m not too concerned at this stage about exactly which folders are in each of these accounts. I’m more interested in how the data in the accounts is stored. Now what I want to do having setup that Gmail account is to go back into Backstage View and click on Account settings, account settings again, and look at the Account Settings dialog and in particular note that email accounts we now have two. We have [email protected]. It’s got a tick next to it which indicates that it is the default email account. And then we have the Gmail account that we’ve just setup. Now what I want to do now is to click on the Data Files tab within the Account Settings dialog. There are now three data files. There’s the Outlook data file which © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 is the default file, the PST file. And on this Data Files tab, you can see exactly where that file is and you also now have two OST files. And these are the files that are used to synchronize with those special types of email accounts, the ones where the email messages, etc. are actually stored on the mail server, Microsoft mail server or a Google mail server or whichever other service that I’m using. Now note the location of those OST files. They go into a specific location. It is actually possible to change that location but it’s actually a fairly technical thing to do. You can’t do it from within Outlook itself. And as I mentioned earlier, I would advise you against doing that. Don’t forget the OST files you don’t really need to backup. The only file you really need to be worried about is Outlook.pst and I’ll come back to that in a little bit later on. The two email accounts that we’ve setup so far are of different types. In fact, the last one we did, the Gmail account, is on IMAP type and the Microsoft Live or Hotmail type account is an Exchange ActiveSync type account. Now the main type of account traditionally which people have used with Outlook is actually another account type altogether and that’s a POP account and we’re now going to setup a POP account. The important thing about a POP account from the point of view of what we’re going to do here is that with this account we’re going to be storing everything on the local PC. We’re not talking about synchronizing with a Microsoft server somewhere or a Google server somewhere. We’re talking about storing everything actually in the PST file. So what I’m going to do is to manually setup an account which will store everything in the PST file. And until quite recently, that was the most common way that people would setup email accounts in Microsoft Outlook. Nowadays, of course, more and more people have more than one email account and more and more people want the kind of mobile accounts, the Microsoft Live, the Google mail, and other accounts that enable you to move around, to pick up your email wherever you are and in fact to pick up your email on many different devices including tablets, mobile phones, and so on. So this type of account, the POP type account that I’m going to setup although it’s still very heavily used and particularly used in relation to business. It is now to some extent being joined or maybe even superseded by this large number of more mobile and flexible email accounts.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now as I mentioned right near the beginning, I could actually set this POP account up automatically but I want to do it manually partly just to show you what sort of settings it involved and partly so that if you know if you do finish up in this situation that you have to set one up manually you’ve got a reasonable idea of what’s involved. So into Backstage View, click on Add Account. This time, I’m going to choose Manual setup at the bottom there, click on Next. Now I get a choice. Am I talking about a Microsoft Exchange Server or compatible service? So if I were running on a work network here, I might specify my local Microsoft Exchange server. Am I looking at an outlook.com or Exchange ActiveSync compatible service? That’s a service similar to the type that’s used for Microsoft Live accounts. Or do I want to connect to a POP or IMAP account. Now, in this case, I want a POP account. Click on Next. Now I have to type in quite a lot of information about the account. So I’m going to go through this a step at a time, but bear in mind that you’ll need to put in the account information that is relevant to whilst you’re doing this. Now the first thing I’m going to do is to put in my name in here and that is going to be the name that’s used for this account. So I’m going to call it Toby Work and I specify an email address and that’s going to be [email protected]. Now I specify the incoming and outgoing mail servers. These you would get from your ISP. If this is a work account that you’re picking up, then the IT people at work would be able to tell you what your incoming and outgoing mail servers are. Mine is mail-dot. And then thirdly what I do is to specify the user name and password that I would normally use to access this account. Also on this occasion, I’ve checked the box that says remember password. If I didn’t check that, then every time Outlook tried to fetch this email, I’d have to reenter the password to go with this log on information. Obviously that would be a bit tedious; but depending on your security situation, you may need to do that. If this is some sort of shared access device that I’m using, I may need to make sure that I have to enter that password each time Outlook tries to get my email. But on this occasion, I’m safe to leave that checked because only I can access this anyway. And what I’m going to do next is to test the account settings that I’ve just entered. But before I do I’d like to just talk to about the setting below this, Deliver new messages to. Now with this POP account, we’re going to save everything within the PST file that I’ve specified. Therefore I need to tell Outlook that’s where the messages go. Now I get a choice here, deliver the new © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 messages to a new Outlook data file. If I actually wanted the messages that are coming into this email address to be stored in a separate PST file, I could specify that here. But if I want to use one of the existing PST files, bear in mind that I only have one PST file at the moment, but if I want to use that one if I select Existing here, click on Browse, choose that PST file, the outlook.pst, click on OK, then for this email account when I fetch its messages and whatever else I do, they’ll be stored in the existing PST file. So let’s go ahead now test the account settings. I get two ticks and everything seems to be okay. Congratulations. All tests completed successfully. Click Close to continue and my account is pretty well setup. Now there are some situations where there are a couple of other settings that you may need to adjust and for these if you’re not of the more technically minded disposition, you may need to check with your IT people, perhaps at work or from your ISP if you do need to sort of dabble in these settings. But if you click on More Settings, it brings up another little dialog, Internet Email Settings, three tabs. The General tab is a useful one. You can use it to specify the name by which you want to refer to this account. So if I actually want to refer to it by the name Toby Work, which I do, I’m going to put that in here. And you can also specify here the reply email. So if you’re emailing people from this account, you can specify a reply email. Now mine is going to be the same one again, but I always like to make a specific point of specifying that here. And you could put your organization name here. There is no such organization as Toby Arnott Inc. but let’s put that in there. Outgoing server. Very often when you’re sending messages, you use an outgoing server called an SMTP server. You don’t need to worry about that. But if it needs authentication, so that means if you need to log in to that server to use it, this is associated with people sending out junk email and using your server to send out thousands or millions of emails. If the server you’re using is protected by the person that owns it by requiring you to log in, you may need to check that box there. So if you’re having trouble sending emails that may be something you need to check. And the option there, Use same settings as my incoming mail server. With the ISP that I use the authentication information, that’s the user name and password for the incoming and outgoing servers are the same. And then finally on the Advanced tab, there are some default what are called Port numbers there. You normally won’t need to change these but I have been in situations where the ISP has specified a different number there or a different © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 number there. And the very, very last setting is actually quite an important by the way and what this says is when I’ve downloaded my email do I want to leave a copy of the email on the server? Now you could uncheck that and say no because once I’ve successfully download it as far as I’m concerned the servers finished with it. But you could say leave a copy there. That might cover a situation when things go wrong. And you can also then specify do I want it removed from the server after a period of say 14 days which is the default; i.e. I want you to leave a copy on the server but a couple of weeks later delete it. Or you can check this box which says remove it from the server when it’s deleted from my deleted items folder. So I’m going to download my mail on to my PC. I’m going to use it, read it, etc. on the PC, but when I eventually delete it from the PC, delete it from the server as well. Now if you choose that last option which is in some ways the safest option, you could finish up with an awful lot of email stored on your server. It can tend to slow things down a bit. But this is again a case of personal preferences, what you have these settings set at. I’m going to leave the defaults there, click on OK, click on Next. It does the test again of both sending and receiving email and when it’s finished click on Close, click on Finish, and I have my new account setup. Now one thing to note here is that the couple of test messages that I sent are shown and also that if I now go into Backstage View, click on Account Settings. I now have three email accounts. I have my Exchange ActiveSync account for Microsoft Live, a Google mail account, and my POP account which is called Toby Work. So I’ve manually setup a POP account in Outlook 2013. That’s it in this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 13 – Managing Folders Video: Adding New Folder, Moving and Deleting Items, and Emptying Folders Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’m going to look at managing folders in Outlook 2013 and the first thing we’re going to do is to look at the folder structure in the Toby Arnott Live email account. So we’re not looking at Outlook at the moment. We’re looking at Windows Live. Basically the folder structure that you see in this Windows Live account overlaps and largely corresponds to the folder structure that we can see in Outlook. But there are some important differences. One of the differences is that there is a Drafts folder in each case and the Drafts folder holds the drafts for emails that are being created in that particular situation. So if I were working in Windows Live and creating an email, it would go into the Drafts folder here on Windows Live. Whereas if I were creating an email in Outlook, the draft of that email, until I was ready to send it, would go in the Drafts folder in Outlook. However, some of the folders exactly correspond. So for instance, at the moment you can see by the selection that’s made on the left that I’m looking at the Inbox. You can also see that there are actually seven messages in it and that the middle message, the fourth message in the list there, the one where the name is in bolder type is the unread message. So where it says on the left here Inbox 1, the 1 refers to the number of unread messages. So there’s one unread message in the Inbox. So now I’m back in Outlook. Let’s look at toby.a in Outlook. You can see the folder list there. The Inbox has got a one next to it indicating there’s one unread message. Click on the Inbox and there we have seven messages and the fourth one is the unread message. So the synchronization is basically keeping these in step. As I mentioned just now, there are one or two differences. So for instance in Outlook, you have Search folders. That I’ll talk about a little bit more later on. And you know that in Outlook, it says Drafts this computer only. Now what I want to talk about next is the use of folders and the storage of messages and other items in general.


Learn Outlook 2013 Let’s suppose that I’m working on a number of projects and I have a number of Outlook items, emails perhaps, notes and tasks, calendar items, all sorts of things that I may want to store in relation to those projects. Many of those items could be stored within this [email protected] structure and then synchronized with my toby.a Microsoft Live email account. But an alternative and this is the alternative that I generally use, is to keep the material all within my Outlook data file. Now, of course, this is quite an important decision to make because it means that in order to work on those things and to have them all available I need my Outlook data file available which then means I need my copy of Outlook. But then virtually without exception I have that available to me anyway. So my general approach unless I have a specific reason to do otherwise is to keep all of my project information within my Outlook data file. Now in some cases, I go one step farther than that although I’m not going to do that on this course, and that is that I will create an additional Outlook data file; an additional PST file. I may create a PST file just for a project and everything to do with that project goes in a separate PST file. One of the advantages of doing that is that when I finish with that project, I can actually finish with that PST file I can archive it with everything else that goes along with that project. There is a loss of flexibility in how to do this in Outlook 2013. It’s not my intention on this course to go through and demonstrate all of those possibilities, but just bear that last one in mind. You’re not restricted to one PST file. You can have more than one. You can put some types of content in one PST file, some types of content in another, and you always have the option of keeping some at least of your Outlook items in something like a Microsoft Live account or a Google mail account or whatever. What I’m going to do now though is to demonstrate how I setup project folders within a single Outlook data file. So one way of doing that all I need to do is to right click on Outlook data file and select the option on the contextual menu, New Folder. Click on New Folder and I’m invited to enter a name for the new folder. Now I’m going to call this folder Projects. Hit the Enter key and I’ve now got a projects folder. Now I’m going to right click on the projects folder and I’m going to click on New Folder again and this time I’m going to type in for the name of a subfolder, Marketing Initiative. That’s one of our projects. Now I’m going to right click on the projects folder again and click on New Folder again and this time I’m going to type in Production © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Review. And they’re the two projects that I’m working on at the moment and each of them now has its own folder in my Outlook data file and those two projects are within the projects folder overall within my Outlook data file. So I can build up a tree structure of folders for the storage of my project information. Now the meeting that I’ve been discussing with Steve and the emails backwards and forwards between us that you saw earlier on in the course are all part of the Marketing Initiative Project. So what I’m going to do now is to file those in the project folder but I’m going to do those using touch. So I’ll just quickly switch into touch mode. Not only do all the commands on the Ribbon get spread out more but the folders do as well. Now let me use my fingers to go down to the toby.a account. I’m going to start with the Sent Items folder, select that, a list of sent items. There’s a couple of things that were sent to Steve there and I’m going to put one or two of those into the Marketing Initiative Project folder. So let me just go up a little bit with the scroll bar here and all I have to do is to just drag it with my finger; would be exactly the same if I were doing this with a mouse. I could just drag that message, select it, drag across, and drop it into the Marketing Initiative folder. Similarly, with the next one, select, drag across, put it into that folder. The other way that I can do that if I don’t want to use drag, if I tap on a message and just hold with my finger, it brings up the little menu there and one of the options on the menu down there is move. If I tap on move, it brings up a list of other folders, places I could move it to, and if I click on Marketing Initiative, it’ll actually move that message that way. So in that way, I can take messages from the Sent Items folder or any other folder for that matter and drop them into the Marketing Initiative folder. So if I tap on Marketing Initiative now, you can see that I’m starting to build up content in that folder. Now there’s one other thing to show you about managing items in folders and that is the ability to delete items. Again, I’m going to do this with touch. Pretty straightforward. Select an item, let’s say the first two emails there I don’t want to keep a record of. I’m not quite sure why I don’t want to keep a record of them but I don’t. So I’m going to tap and hold the first one. One of the options that pops up is delete. It’s right down at the bottom. You maybe just about see it. It’s gone. Do the same with the second one. That’s gone as well. And if I go a little bit further up within my Outlook data file, I’ll see a deleted items folder and anything I delete goes into that © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 deleted items folder. And that’s effectively my recycle bin. If I delete something by accident, then I can get it out of there again. Let’s just look at the deleted items folder and you can see that the items I’ve previously deleted in the course are stored in that deleted items folder. I’m somebody who tends to keep items in the deleted items folder. My deleted items folder sometimes gets pretty full actually and it doesn’t only contain deleted emails. It will contain things like deleted tasks. But there may come a point in time where you want to clear out the deleted items folder. If you again just tap on the folder and hold with your finger, the equivalent if you’re using mouse and keyboard will just be to right click on the folder name. One of the options down there as you can see is Empty folder, and if you just want to empty the deleted items folder, you can do that there. And yet another option, let’s just go into Backstage View. Again, I’m still using touch, go into Backstage View, go into Options, and tap on the Advanced tab. The second section there, Outlook Start and Exit; two interesting things there. One of them is you can choose what you see when you start Outlook up. My Outlook currently starts showing the Inbox folder. But just below that, there is a checkbox; Empty the deleted items folder when exiting Outlook. If you check that box, then every time you exit Outlook, everything in the deleted items folder of your Outlook data file will be emptied. So it’s a way of automatically clearing out your deleted items folder. I don’t actually use that myself but if you’re not particularly worried about keeping deleted items or you’re running short of space and you want to make sure they get deleted as soon as you exit Outlook, then you can check that box to make that happen. And one other very important option when you’re looking at the deleted items folder; let me again tap on one of these items and hold. You have the option when you’re looking at an item in the deleted items folder of moving it. So you can tap on Move and move it to a folder; so that’s effectively un-deleting the item as well. So there we are. That’s pretty much all of the basics of managing folders in Outlook 2013. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 14 – Backup and Restore Video: Backup and Restore a PST file Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this short section, we’re going to look at how to backup and restore a PST file in Outlook 2013. I’m going to assume the most basic use of Windows to do this. I’m not assuming that you have a specific or dedicated backup program. But if you do have such a program, then you can adapt what I cover in this section to incorporate the use of your backup program. Now the very first thing to point out about backup and restore with Outlook is that you do not do it from within Outlook. In fact, in order for backup and restore to work, you need Outlook to be closed because really all you do is copy the PST file, or if you’ve got more than one PST file, your files to another device. And the copies on the other device are basically then your backup copies. Now it’s very important that you don’t use the same device that you’re running Outlook on to store these backup copies. The main reason being, of course, that if it’s the device that fails, particularly if it’s for example the hard drive on the device that fails and the hard drive contains both your Live PST file or files and your backup copies, then you may well have lost everything. It’s very important that you keep the backup PST file or PST files somewhere else. The typical sort of location where you can keep them would be to a memory stick or perhaps you could write them to a rewritable DVD. Or if you’re on a network, you could copy them over the network say to another PC on the network or to an attached storage device. So there are many options for where to put your backup copies. You may also want to keep more than one backup copy. I actually keep additional backup copies of my work in the boot of my car, in the trunk of my car so that if anything happened in the house, the house burnt down, assuming the car didn’t go with it, then I’ve always got a backup copy in the trunk or the boot of the car as well. So the first thing to do is to make sure that you’re aware of what needs to be backed up. If you go into Backstage View on the Info tab, and then go into Account Settings. And Account Settings, from there you probably recall the Data Files tab, the second tab along there, and that lists the data files. Now as you know, you don’t need to backup the OST files. It’s only any PST files that need to be backed up. There is that particular PST file. If I click on Open file location, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 you’ll actually see this file in its current location on my PC, and there that PST file is. It’s currently about 8 megabytes in size. So considering there’s not very much in this copy of Outlook at the moment, it’s already quite a big file. In reality, once you’ve been using Outlook for a while you’ll probably find that file gets very big indeed. Now one thing I must emphasize again, you need to do this backup when Outlook is closed because all the time that Outlook is running, it effectively locks that file. And if you try to copy that file, even if your backup program will allow you to copy that file when it’s in use, you may well get some rather inconsistent, possibly even broken content. What you need to do is to close down Outlook, and then wait for a few minutes while Outlook properly closes down. One thing about Outlook is as you close it, it does a certain amount of housekeeping as it exits. So you need to give it just a little bit of time to make sure that it’s finished. Then what your backup consists of is literally just copying that file. I don’t really need to say anymore about it than that. I copied mine over my network to a storage device on the network and then on a regular basis, certainly every working day I take an additional copy from the storage device and as I say keep it elsewhere. As long as you keep at least one copy, how often you do this depends on how much you use Outlook for. I use Outlook a lot and I make a copy of this every day. At the end of the working day, I copy my Outlook PST files because I actually have a few of them on the copy of Outlook that I use for my own work and for my personal use as well. I actually have two separate Outlooks; one for work and one for home. So basically you close Outlook, you know where your PST file is, you can check it here using the method I’ve just shown you, and literally you take a copy of that file. You don’t move it. You don’t delete it. You just copy it and make sure you remember where you put the copy. And that brings us neatly to the question of restore. If you need to restore the Outlook data file, for example suppose that the existing one is damaged. There are mechanisms within Outlook 2013 to repair an Outlook data file. But if those mechanisms fail and your Outlook PST file proves to be non-recoverable, then what you would need to do is to copy the backup copy from the device where it’s stored, to basically overwrite the one that is used by Outlook in a live situation. Now, you’ll need to do that with Outlook closed as well, of course. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 And that is basically how to do backup and restore. Please make a point of backing up your PST file or files on a regular basis and I hope that you never need to restore from a backup. It has happened to me in the past though and when it did happen, it saved me a lot of work being able to restore from that backup. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 15 – Archiving Video: AutoArchive and Manual Archive Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. We’re now going to take a look at archiving in Outlook. And the general principle behind archiving is that over time your Outlook data file or files will start to get filled up with old items. And it’s a good idea every now and then to clear those old items and to archive them much in the way that in an old paper based system you might take some of the folders, ones you don’t use anymore perhaps or ones that were more than say two years old and put them in the basement or in a cupboard and lock the cupboard up. Well the archiving in Outlook follows pretty much the same principle and there are two main approaches to archiving in Outlook. One of them is to AutoArchive and the other one is to manually archive and you may choose to either or both of them. So let’s start with AutoArchiving. Go into Backstage View, go into the Options, click on Advanced, and three sections down we have AutoArchive. Reduce mailbox size by deleting or move old items to an archive data file. So now click on AutoArchive Settings and that brings up this AutoArchive dialog. Now the first thing you can do is to control whether AutoArchive actually runs or not. If this box is unchecked, mine is currently unchecked, then AutoArchiving is effectively switched off and we won’t be able to look at or change any of the other options. But let me just switch it back on for the moment. I don’t actually generally use AutoArchive but you may choose to. But to look at these options properly, we need to switch it on. So the first option is to choose how often we want AutoArchiving to run. Generally speaking if you’re very short of space, you may want to run that quite often. Also, if you have an awful lot of email going through your system and a lot of things that age, get old beyond your archiving time limit, then you may want to run it fairly frequently to make sure that stuff gets archived very regularly. But if the turnover in your system is low, you probably don’t need to run AutoArchive very often at all. The next option is prompt before AutoArchive runs. Do you want Outlook to tell you before it starts an AutoArchive rung? If you don’t check that box what happens is that it just starts AutoArchiving possibly when you’re partway through doing something else. On the occasions © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 that I have used AutoArchive and had it setup to run regularly that can be a little bit of a surprise and almost invariably AutoArchive runs at a particularly unfortunate time. But it’s your choice. If you don’t particularly want it to prompt, you can uncheck that and it will just run when it needs to run. The rest of these settings relate to the AutoArchive process itself and I’m going to quickly go through one or two of them now. Delete expired items, email folders only. If you leave for instance incoming emails in an inbox email folder, then after a period of time it will be considered to have aged and will expire and will be deleted if this flag is set. Generally speaking, with all of my email I don’t leave it either in an inbox or in a sent items folder. I generally move things to more permanent storage using the sort of folder structure I showed you earlier on in the course. But if you do leave these in your basic default email folders, for instance, then those items will expire and they will be deleted if you have this box checked. So let’s now look at these main options for archiving or deleting old items. First of all, what’s our age limit? Well, our age limit at the moment defaults to six months. So we’re only going to clean out items older than six months. I could change that to another number and either months, weeks, or days. And then I have a choice. I can either move the old items to an archive file or I can permanently delete them. Now let’s suppose I want to move them to an archive file. If I click on Browse here by default, what Outlook 2013 is going to do is to move them into an archive.pst file, in the same folder as my outlook.pst file. I can, of course, choose a different PST file name. I could choose a different folder but that’s the default. So I’m going to stick with the default for my archive file. That will then mean that I’ve got two PST files and I’ll need to backup two PST files; my Live Outlook PST file and my archive PST file that’s got my old content in it. Having set those, what I really need to do then is to say Apply these settings to all folders now, click on that, and all of those folders now have those archive settings set. The archive will run every 14 days. Click on OK and I can sit back and just let that happen. So that’s automatic archiving. Let’s now take a look at manual archiving. The settings for this are largely shared with the ones that we’ve just used for AutoArchive. The difference here is that, basically, you manually invoke an archive when you need to and you can change settings, specific settings if you want to as a sort of one off exercise. Now in order to demonstrate this, what I’ve done is in the Outlook © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 data file in Projects, the production review project, I’ve put a couple of old emails in it. They’re nothing to do with the production review project, but they’re both just over a month old. So what we do for this, we go into Backstage View, go into Mailbox Cleanup, and the cleanup tools, click there. One of the options is Archive, and this brings up an Archive dialog. The settings here are very important.

The top option, Archive all folders according to their

AutoArchive settings. So that’s the one that says basically run a full AutoArchive but instead of waiting for 14 days or whatever the period is run it now. Alternatively, archive this folder and all of its subfolders. Now I’m only going to archive a single folder here, just the folder for the project I pointed out just now. But note you can do things like archive the calendar. You can archive notes. You can archive tasks. But I’m just going to go to Projects. I’m going to choose that production review project and the default date here is set as December 5th. I’m going to change that to March 6th and just check the archive file. That’s still set to archive.pst. That’s fine. Click on OK. Now let me go back into Outlook itself and notice that that folder is now empty. If I go down to archives, however; a new folder structure that’s appeared within archives within projects there is a production review folder and within that I’ve got those two emails. So what it’s done is it’s now created my archive.pst file and it’s archived those two emails into it. When I next run the full AutoArchive, then anything that qualifies according to the criteria I’ve set under AutoArchive Settings will be moved into my archives folder and that’s archiving. This particular folder structure, the archives PST, I can’t emphasize enough also needs to be backed up. The fact that you’re archiving it is really sort of de-cluttering Outlook itself. Under normal circumstances, I’m sure that you want to keep what’s in your archives so it’s important that you backup the archive PST file as well. Okay, that’s archiving in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 16 – Import and Export Video: Import and Export Wizard Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at importing and exporting items. If you’ve just started using Outlook and you’re starting to build up a list of contacts, you’re starting to send and receive emails and setup your calendar, get some appointments and meetings going and so on, then you’ll start to see Outlook really begin to fill up with content. If you’ve used a previous version of Outlook, you may also have transferred a lot of content over or you may have got content from other sources. Now Outlook is pretty good on importing content from elsewhere and it’s also pretty good at exporting content for other people to use. Now I’m not going to spend a lot of time here on import and export, but I’m basically going to demonstrate one import of some contact details from a PST file that I’ve got from elsewhere and I hope that from that you’ll get a pretty good idea of what Outlook 2013’s capabilities are in this area. So there are a couple of ways of doing this but the way I’m going to do it is to use the import facility. I go to Backstage View, go to Open and export. There are a number of options here. A couple of them we’re not going to look at. You have an open calendar option that lets you open a calendar in one of the standard ICS or VCS formats and access content of such a calendar. You can also open an Outlook data file. So for instance, if you’d got a safe PST file from somebody else, you could open that and maybe transfer some content from there into your PST file or files. And in fact in the current situation where somebody else has provided me with a PST file with a lot of contact information in it, I could open that data file, transfer the contacts from that data file into my Outlook data file and do things that way. But on this occasion, I’m going to use the import/export option which is the next one. So click on Import/Export. So here I have the Import and Export Wizard and it includes a number of standard import and export procedures. I’m not going to go through all of these now. I’ll mention one or two of them again later on. But just to give an example, we earlier on setup RSS Feeds and there is a file standard called the OPML file standard that enables you to transfer RSS Feeds between RSS © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Feed aggregators. Now RSS Feed aggregators are software products that can handle RSS Feeds. Outlook is an RSS aggregator but there are many other products as well. And if you setup, for example, your RSS Feeds in Outlook and you wanted to provide them to a different software product, you could use this first option, Export RSS Feeds to an OPML file. It would take your RSS Feeds, either all of them or selected ones, create an OPML file. You could then use that OPML file in the other software product and you would find that the RSS Feeds will be setup correctly in that software product as well. So that’s one of the standards but the one we’re going to use here is the one that says Import from another program or file. So note the description there, Import data from other files such as Outlook data files PST and text files. Click on Next. Now which type of file are we going to import from? A text value, comma separated values, or an Outlook data file. We’re going to import from an Outlook data file. Now we’re going to import. Let’s browse to that file. There’s the file, click on Open. Then I get choices. Do I want to replace any duplicates with the items imported? Do I want to allow duplicates to be created or do I want to not import duplicates? I can assure there will be no duplicates, but I’ll say do not import duplicates so that if I’ve made a mistake and any are duplicated they won’t be imported. Click on Next. Now this particular Outlook data file is protected with a password so I’m going to need to type in that password. And now I can see that with that particular PST file that is the name of the file itself so that’s the Outlook data file. If I expand that what I really want is the contents of the contacts folder. So it’s the contacts folder that I want and I’m going to import those items into the same folder, so that’s the contacts folder in my Outlook data file. So they’re going to become new contacts in my Outlook data file. So I just click on Finish and the import will take place. So let’s see the results of the import. I go to People and within the contacts in my Outlook data file where I imported those contacts to I’ve got about seven or eight new contacts and one of them even has a photo, Mr. Don Anderton. The original Steve Brown, Sally White still there but I’ve got seven or eight additional people that have been imported from that other PST file. That’s it on import and export. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 17 – Calendar Management Video: Calendar Options Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at calendar options. So we need to go into Backstage View, into Options and select Calendar. The first set of options are labeled Work time and here you say that your work hours are, specify start time, in my case 8 a.m., end time 5 p.m. That’s the default. And then you specify which days of the week are your standard work days. Monday to Friday are my standard working days. And then you can choose which day of the week is the first day of your week. So on my calendar, you may have noticed that the first day of the week is Sunday which is a nonworking day and then the last of the week is Saturday. And you can also specify which of the weeks of the year is the first week of the year. And in my case, basically week number one in the year is the one that contains January 1st. The second set of options is labeled Calendar Options. And the first of these, if it’s checked, means that you get default reminders when you create an appointment and the time period for the reminder is set here. By default, it’s set to 15 minutes but you can set it to any of those values there. I’m going to leave it set at 15 minutes. And it also gives you a checkbox where you can allow attendees to propose new times for meetings. If you propose a new meeting time, then the response type that you send will be tentative. Now I’m going to explain a little bit about those response types a little bit later on. But the next option is Add holidays to the calendar so that you don’t have to add all of the public holidays in yourself for each year that you’re using your calendar. You can click on this button and specify whose public holidays you would like copied into your Outlook calendar. Now for mine it’s defaulting to United States but I actually want the United Kingdom holidays in mine so I’m going to click on OK for the U.K. holidays. The holidays are now added to the calendar. I’ll take a look at those in just a moment. Now a couple of these options are outside the scope of this course. The change the permissions for viewing free and busy information, free/busy options, options there to publish your calendar


Learn Outlook 2013 to a location where other people can see it. That’s outside the scope of what we’re doing. You can enable an alternate calendar. Again, outside the scope of what we’re doing. I’m going to move on now to these later sections one of which is display options. You can choose a default calendar color. These tend to be fairly pale sort of pastel colors. If you want to change the color of your calendar, you certainly can there. And you can also choose whether or not to show week numbers in the month view and in the date navigator view. Now I’ve actually got week numbers switched on at the moment and I’ll show you what those week numbers are in just a moment. And then you have a couple of switching options here. Automatically switch from vertical layout to schedule view when the number of displayed calendars is greater than or equal to five. You’ve already seen what happens when we have a number of calendars shown. Well, if you go above a certain number you can rearrange them from being in a vertical layout to what’s called schedule view. I’ll leave you to experiment with that. It’d take a little while to demonstrate that. And also you should setup here your time zone. Mine is on UTC which is the U.K. island Portugal time. Now I’ve got another couple of options down here that you may find useful. One of them we’ve already seen screen tips. Well, if you want to show calendar details in screen tips, there’s a checkbox there for that. And you can also setup Outlook to automatically accept or decline meeting requests; certain conditions under which you can do that. Again, outside the scope of this course but if you want to find out more about automatic scheduling and so on, that’s another one of the options you’d need to look at. And finally I mentioned one of the new features of Outlook 2013 is the Weather Bar on the calendar. And you can certainly choose whether or not to show the weather bar on the calendar. There I’ve got it ticked so that the weather bar is shown. And you can choose whether to show the temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit. So we’ve been through the calendar options. I want to just now quickly show you what a few of those have achieved. So first of all, let’s look at week numbers. If you look at the little date navigators on the left here, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday through Saturday, the tiny little numbers to the left of the days of the month there, they are the week numbers in the year. So it’s currently March © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 6th, the Wednesday. That’s week 10 in the current year and that’s what the week numbers that are shown mean. So now let’s look at the weather bar. You can see the weather bar there. There’s the forecast for today; cloudy, 42 degrees. Hover over it to get a little bit more detail. If you can’t see the location, sometimes you need to just minimize the Navigation Pane there, and you’ll see the location. Now it defaults to being New York. I definitely do not live in New York. So I’m going to find my location. Nearest location for me would be the city of York in the United Kingdom. So if I search on that there’s York, Great Britain, and that’s today’s and tomorrow’s forecast for my location; quite handy seeing it there just above my calendar. Now a little while ago, you will have seen me select the United Kingdom public holidays to go into my calendar. But just to demonstrate something you need to be careful about here, the calendar I’m looking at, at the moment is my toby.a calendar. That’s the one associated with my Microsoft Live account. When you make a setting like the one we just did in Options for public holidays, that’s in the Outlook data file calendar. So I need to switch that on so I can see that and you’ll see that in that one, the one that’s blue here, you can see one of the public holidays. The public holiday there is Good Friday. There isn’t an equivalent in my toby.a calendar. It’s not shown in there automatically by this option in Outlook because it’s a calendar associated with a Microsoft Live account. If I go through to April 2013, you’ll see there the next public holiday in the U.K. is Easter Monday, but again no equivalent there in the toby.a account. So that’s something to be careful about. Now there’s just one other thing to show you in this section. If I go to mail, you’ll see that I’ve actually received an email from my colleague Larry inviting me to a meeting. Now so far, I’ve sent out a meeting request. I sent one to Steve that you may remember which he accepted. But so far, you haven’t seen the receipt of a meeting request. It comes in the form of an email. You can tell it’s a meeting request because of that little icon there with the two little people on it and the calendar behind it. And on the meeting request apart from the simple title of Discuss production review, and I can see briefly what the proposed date and time is. It’s Monday, March the 11th 3 until 4:30 in Larry’s office. And I also then get the options and these are the terms that I was referring to earlier in this section. I can accept the meeting request. I can edit the response before sending. So if I were to accept this request, I would say Accept and an email would be © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 created accepting it ready to go back to Larry, and I could edit the response before I sent the message. I could just send the response now or I could accept it but not send a response. I then have an option for a tentative acceptance. I have an option to decline the meeting and I have an option to propose a new time, and they’re all the things that we talked about earlier on in this section. I also have an option here to click into my calendar, and if I click into calendar, what happens is that Outlook 2013 takes me to my calendar, to that particular day and time. It’s 3 o’clock on Monday afternoon. I can see the status in the little bubble on the left round the bottom. The meeting has not been accepted. And if I click within that meeting request, I open up the meeting calendar tools. Look at the tab at the top of the screen, and there I have the same range of options. I can accept, tentative, decline, propose new time, etc. And in fact, even if I just right click here, the right click menu gives me those options: Accept, Tentative, Decline, and so on. So these are the available options and commands for me to deal with an incoming meeting request. Now Larry’s requested that meeting. I can’t see any reason why I shouldn’t attend. I’m quite happy to talk about that subject with him so I’m going to accept the meeting request. I’m a little bit busy to type in a message just to thank him or just to put a greeting in there so I’m just going to say send the response now and he will just get an accept response. Now once I’ve done that, if I now hover over the meeting again it’s no longer a not accepted meeting; it’s actually in my schedule and you’ll see that there is a 15 minute reminder on it as well. So we’ve looked at calendar options in this section and we’ve looked at some of the most significant consequences of those calendar options. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Video: Calendar Amendments and Rescheduling Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at creating appointments, at amending appointments, and at rescheduling them. So let’s start with an appointment that we had scheduled for today which unfortunately had to be rescheduled. Now in my toby.a calendar, I had a meeting scheduled with Steve and it didn’t happen. It got delayed this morning by a bit of an emergency that came up so I’m going to reschedule it. Now when it comes to rescheduling a meeting, there’s a number of ways that you can do it. You can actually do it by moving it on the calendar. So if I grab that meeting, I could literally reschedule it by moving over to the right say to the same time on Friday. Now if I do that, I get a message; Microsoft Outlook. The time of the meeting has changed. Choose one of the following. Save changes and send update or don’t save changes. Now that’s probably the simplest way there is of rescheduling a meeting just by dragging it to a different place. You can do that with the mouse or you can do it with touch. I’m going to cancel that at the moment though, leave it how it was because really what I want to do is to open the meeting up and reschedule it using some of the available commands and controls. So let’s double click on the meeting. Now one of the changes I want to make is to invite Sally to the meeting as well. So I go into the To area and already Steve is a required attendee. If I click on Sally, in fact Sally’s already selected, and then click on Optional. Sally becomes an optional attendee at the meeting. So that’s my first change. And the next change I want to make is to change the date. So I had March 6th. I’m going to change it to March 8th and I’m going to make the meeting a little bit longer, just say two-and-a-half hours. Now if I wanted to make some changes to the words in here, I could make those changes and format the text accordingly. So for instance, if I wanted to emphasize the word Review, I could select the word Review, go to the Format Text tab, click on the Bold button, and the word Review in that short description of the meeting is now changed. So there are all the things that I want to change. All I do now is to send an update. Now as far as my schedule’s concerned, the meeting is already rescheduled for Friday but obviously, I’ve got to now wait and see what the responses are that I get to the meeting. Note © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 that when I have an appointment or a meeting selected in my schedule, I get the Calendar Tools Meeting tab on the Ribbon and from there as we saw earlier, I can make several changes to this meeting. I’m going to change the reminder for a start to a one hour reminder, not 15 minutes to make sure I allow myself enough time to get ready for it. The other kinds of things that I can change here are to add or remove attendees, to contact the attendees. I could send each of them an email maybe to update them about the meeting, and I can also work on my meeting notes in Microsoft OneNote. Recurrence we’re going to look at later, and in a moment we’ll look at Show as. We’re also going to later on look at Categorization, but that’s one for later in the course. So there we’ve seen a selection of the basic amendments and rescheduling we can do to an appointment in Outlook 2013. (Computer chimes.) And there you can see and hear that Steve has accepted the revised meeting. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Video: Calendar Recurrence Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at how to make a meeting a recurring meeting. And the example I’m going to use is that after we’ve reviewed the presentation in relation to the marketing initiative in our meeting that’s scheduled for Friday, I’m going to setup a regular Monday morning team meeting to follow up this marketing initiative project. It’s going to be for myself and Steve and Sally and we may invite somebody else from one of our clients later on. For that moment, it’ll be the three of us though. And I’m going to aim to do it every Monday morning from 10 till 12. Now we’ve already seen how to create a meeting; there are in fact a number of ways of creating meetings in Outlook 2013. Let me go to next Monday. That’s Monday 11th, that’s 10 o’clock on Monday. Rather than saying new meeting and then fitting in the details, I can actually drag over the time for the meeting, so I can cover that two hour period, then say New meeting, and automatically the new meeting comes up with that start date and time entered. Now I need to invite both Sally and Steve. On this occasion, they’re both required so I’m going to select both names and click on Required, click on OK. Now the subject; I’ll keep the location as my office. And what I’m going to do on this occasion is to make this a recurring meeting. Making it recurring is very straightforward. In the Options Group on the Meeting tab there is a Recurrence button. Click on Recurrence and it brings up an Appointment Recurrence dialog. This dialogue is a pretty straightforward one. The first section is the appointment time. We’ve already got the correct start and end time for our two hour meeting; obviously we can change these settings if we need to. The middle section deals with the recurrence pattern and you can choose daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly recurrence and you can choose multiples of those. So if for example I wanted the meeting every two weeks, I would select weekly. But then I would say that I want the meeting every two weeks and not every one week. Well, for the moment, I’m going to make it every one week and maybe when the project gets going I may change that frequency to perhaps to two weeks when it needs a little bit less close attention or when the day to day management is doing more of the work that’s needed. And then I can also say which day of the week or which days of the week I want it to recur on, because I could have this meeting say on Mondays and Thursdays for example. So I’d have two meetings a week but every week


Learn Outlook 2013 or I could have two meetings a week but fortnight. So you can build up a suitable recurrence pattern using the recurrence pattern section in the middle. The lower section basically says how long does this go on for? The first option, No end date means it goes on forever. You can say ends after a certain number of occurrences or you can say that it’s going to end by a certain date, perhaps the project end date. Well, I always like my projects to have an end date. This particular project is going to run till the end of the year. So if I select End by, go into the date picker, maybe I’ll choose a Monday a little bit before Christmas and I’ll make that my end date. That’s my Appointment Recurrence dialog completed, click on OK. Now all of the recurrence information I’ve included there will be included when I send this invitation to Sally and to Steve. I’ve included all of the information I need except for one thing and that is in the Tag section on the Ribbon on the right there, there is a High importance button and I’m going to set this weekly meeting to be a high importance meetings. It’s very important for this marketing initiative that this weekly meeting not only takes place but that everybody is there. So I’m going to click on High importance and when they receive that invitation, they’ll see that it is a high importance meeting request. Notice the recurrence is described down here. It goes every Monday effective March 11th until December 16th from 10 till 12. So click on Send. Now for me, of course, the meeting is in my calendar already and if I step through the weeks of the year from now on, I’ll see that recurring meeting and if you look at the meeting in the calendar, you’ll see that little recurrence symbol in the bottom right hand corner that tells you that it is a recurring meeting. So that’s how to setup a recurring meeting. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Video: Calendar Attachments Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at inserting items into an appointment or a meeting, and in particular I’m going to insert a couple of items into the recurring weekly project meeting that we setup a little while ago. So, first of all, I’m going to open up that meeting, double click on the meeting in my calendar, and note that when I double click on it, it says Open recurring item and I have a choice. Do I want to open the first occurrence, the one that I’ve double clicked; the one, the first Monday, the one on March 11th? Or do I want to open the entire series? Now on this occasion what I’m going to do is to open just the first one but I could do this to the entire series which would in effect mean that everything I’m doing would be done to every meeting in the series, but let’s just do it to the first one. When the meetings open, one of the tabs that’s available to me is the Insert tab. Now the first thing I’m going to include in this meeting is an Outlook item. It is going to be a note that I’ve written giving people directions to my office. People know where the building is but they may not be able to find my office within the building. So I go to Outlook item, I browse to the notes, click on Notes, and one of the notes that I’ve written is directions to Toby’s office. Now one of the things you have to be a bit careful about when you’re doing this is that you don’t send Outlook items to people that don’t use Outlook. And sometimes you just need to err on the side of being a little bit cautious. Now the directions to Toby’s office, this particular note is a pretty short note that I wrote about how to find my office once you get to reception in the main building. Rather than include it as an attachment which is the default here I could say text only and what will happen is the directions to my office will be included as text only in this meeting information. So on this occasion, I’m going to choose text only, click on OK, and the contents of that note, the directions to my office are now included as text in the meeting text. So directions to Toby’s office, sign in at reception, etc. Now the use of a note like that is a pretty good technique for including standard information when you send emails, meeting requests, etc. to other people. The other thing that I want to send is a draft agenda for the meeting. I’ve prepared one using Word. This therefore doesn’t count as an Outlook item. I attach it as a file to the meeting. The © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 attach file option is in the Include Group on the Insert tab. Click on Attach file, I go to the folder that I’ve put that draft meeting agenda in, double click on that, and that is now included as an attachment to the meeting. Now if you want to see what the marketing initiative project draft meeting agenda looks like, I can double click on that which is what other people will do when they see it and provided they’ve got Microsoft Word this will be fine. So let me double click on that now. There is the draft agenda. It’s open in Read Mode in Microsoft Word and obviously we’ll discuss the draft agenda at the first meeting, maybe modify it for later meetings, and that’s what other people will see when they open that attachment when they get the updated meeting request for the first meeting. So I’ve completed the insertion and attachment to this meeting request. I’m ready to send an update so I click on Send update and now if you look at that meeting in my calendar, not only can you see the little recurrence symbol, but you can also see a little paper clip symbol which indicates that there is an attachment. If I go to the second one of those, it only has the recurrence symbol not the attachment. So the attachment’s only on the first one. That’s how to do attachments and to insert Outlook type items into meetings, appointments, etc. in Outlook 2013. I’d just like to finish with a word of warning about all of this. Not all email accounts, not all email servers will support all of these types of attachments. In some cases, if you try to send an attachment to a meeting request, then the server will reject that attachment. It’ll certainly send the meeting request okay but not the attachment. What you would normally have to do in that situation is to attach the attachment to an email instead and almost all servers nowadays will accept attachments to emails. But it does very much depend on the servers that you’re dealing with. And the other thing to be careful of, particularly when you’re dealing with a large number of meeting attendees or addressees to emails in general is that you are, to some extent, at the mercy of the accounts that other people have got. So even if you can send something to somebody, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can receive it and it doesn’t necessarily mean that if they do receive it, it looks the way that you expect it to or that it does what you expect it to. So when you’re dealing with new people, people you haven’t communicated with before, you’ll often get © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 little problems you have to overcome. They may not be able to receive things as attachments to meeting requests. You may have to send them to them separately by email. But we’ll deal with one or two of those issues later on in the course. So that’s it on this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Video: Calendar Events Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this last short section on the calendar we’re going to look at creating an event in Outlook 2013. An event is really a special type of appointment that lasts for at least one whole day. I’m going to demonstrate the creation of an event in my toby.a calendar by putting in some details of a client visit I’m going to make to one of my clients, Acme Inc. in a couple of weeks from now. So the first thing I do is go to the relevant date. It’s actually on the 21st of month, so March 21st. And I’m actually going to be at this customer site for two days.

So I’m going to click

somewhere in the Thursday and then click on New items and it’s going to be all day event. Now note what happens when I specify all day event. I get a meeting window coming up with me able to enter the details. But the box that I’ve so far ignored there, All day event, is checked and you don’t actually specify times for an event. Although it says here start time and end time what it actually means is start date and end date. And in my case, this is a two event so it’s going to start on the 21st of the month and end on the 22nd of the month. The subject is client visit and the location is Portsmouth, and basically that’s all I need. Now I could put some other information here in the body of the event information. I might, for instance, put in here details of my contact there. And somebody who has access to my calendar, my P.A. or another member of my team if they can get into my calendar would be able to open that up and check the contact details. Similarly as we saw just now if I can actually send Outlook items to other people who use Outlook, then I could actually send them this event as an attachment to an email for example and the details will be included in that. But for the moment, I’m just creating the event to show it in my calendar. But I want to do one other particular thing with this event. One of the options that I’ve so far not spoken about is this one in the Options Group there on the Event tab in this case and that is there is a Free/Busy options box. Now with an event, this will have a particular appearance that you’ll see in just a moment. But generally speaking for any meeting, appointment, event, you can choose how that is color coded in your calendar. So for example given the options of free, working elsewhere, tentative, busy, out of office, I might choose on this occasion that it’s working elsewhere or out of office. And somebody looking at © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 my calendar would see that I have something scheduled but I’m actually going to be elsewhere or at least out of office. Now working elsewhere is the option I’m going to choose in this case. So that’s it. That’s all the information I’m going to add to this event for now, so I click on Save and Close. Note that with an event like a regular appointment, I’m not inviting other people to it so it’s not a case of Send; it’s just Save and Close to show it in my own calendar. Now you can see this client event, Acme Inc. in Portsmouth, doesn’t appear as such as a very heavy block in my calendar. But you can see from the shading that I am working elsewhere and you can also see from the shading that that’s basically something that’s lasting for two whole working days. One of the very significant things about the Free/Busy shading that I’ve just demonstrated, it’s really outside the scope of this course but I think it’s worth mentioning it here, is that if you are working with other people where you can share calendars or detail in calendars which normally means that you will have access to Microsoft Exchange, then you can setup the visibility of your calendar so that people can’t actually see your appointments but they can see the Free/Busy markers. So they can actually see, for instance, that I’m working away on those two days. They wouldn’t necessarily know where I was. If I was on some sort of secret sales mission maybe I wouldn’t want people to know where I was, but they could certainly see that I was working away from the office. So there are really two ways in which this Free/Busy shading can help you. It’s very good from your own point of view at a glance to see when you’re in the office, have a good idea of what mix of things you’ve got to do in a particular week, but it’s also very useful for other people when you’re restricting the amount of detail they can see in your calendar. So I have just one more thing to do in this section and that is I’m looking at my contacts now, so this is my Outlook data file contacts. Steve Brown who I work with quite a bit; you’ve seen Steve mentioned. I’ve just found out that his birthday is in a couple of week’s time. So I’m going to quickly go into his contact details. I’ll show you more about this a little bit later on. But I’ll go into his contact details now and let me just put a record of when his birthday is. It’s actually on Tuesday, March 19th this year. That’s fine. Save that. Let me just go back into my calendar and on this occasion I’m going to look at my regular Outlook data file calendar alongside the other one. Let me go to two weeks time and in the work calendar, the one on the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 right, the green one, client visit Acme Inc. that I just added. But on the left you can see another very important date. This is recorded as an all day event and it’s Steve Brown’s birthday. So if you know people’s birthdays they are shown as events in your calendar because, of course, a birthday is an all day event. If we had some sort of party during the day or we all went to a pub or a bar or something for a couple of hours, I may show that as an appointment or even a meeting during the day. But Steve’s birthday is an event. It’s setup recurring. It’s got a 15 minute reminder. I would probably want a longer reminder than that to give me time to go and get him a gift or a card. So if I double click on that, open the entire series, not just this one. I might say give me a warning say one week beforehand to give me time to get that card or gift, save and close, and I’ve basically now got an all day event for Steve for his birthday and each year I’ll be reminded to get Steve a gift and a card and to say Happy Birthday on the day, of course. So that’s it on events in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 18 – Reminders and To-do Management Video: Managing Reminders Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at managing reminders. We’ve already setup some reminders for appointments, events, meetings, tasks, but the management of them we haven’t looked at in any kind of detail. So let’s deal with a couple of the reminders we’ve already got and look at some of the options for dealing with reminders in general. Now when Outlook sends you a reminder, a Reminders window pops up and lists that and any other reminders that need attention. If you want to see what reminders are outstanding at any time, if you go to the View tab generally speaking whatever you’re doing at the time, whether it’s calendar, people, tasks, on the View tab, let’s say go to Tasks. On the View Tab one of the options is Reminders window, and that opens the reminders window. And at the moment you can see the Reminders window is actually flashing; there are two outstanding reminders. I’ve got a reminder about my dentist check-up and I’ve got a reminder about the rescheduled meeting with Steve to review the presentation.

Now notice that these both relate to calendar

appointments and they’re in different calendars. So one is from my Outlook data file calendar, one of them is from my work calendar on the toby.a account. So I’ll see all of those together. Now reminders in Outlook are a great idea and very, very useful but, of course, they drive many of us mad because they always come at a bad time. You never know quite what to do with them. But with a little bit of thought and organization, you can actually use them to your advantage. With these two reminders that I have here, note one of them is selected, one thing I can always do is just snooze for a while. And while I’m talking about these I’m going to snooze for the review presentation reminder and then we’ll see what happens. So I’m going to say for that five minutes, and then I’ll make sure that the five minute time elapses. Having selected five minutes, I click on Snooze, and that particular reminder is no longer in the reminders window. It’s going to give me five minutes and then it’s going to remind me again. Now note the default here, five minutes before start. That’s completely different to snoozing for five minutes. So that means just remind me five minutes before it starts. Well, as I mentioned © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 before, reminding me about my dentist check-up five minutes before it starts is going to be no good at all because it’s about a 30 minute drive to get to the dentist anyway; so that one is not going to happen. However, I have been reminded and in the case of the dentist check-up, I may say well what I’m going to do is to ask you to remind me again say in a couple of hours or perhaps tomorrow. But before I do that, let’s just look at the other options. So if I have a reminder like this one, I basically have two options. I can dismiss it by selecting it and clicking on dismiss. What that does is to stop me getting anymore reminders about that particular item. Now it doesn’t delete the item in any way, it just means I won’t get any more reminders. And if I’ve got a whole list of reminders there in the Reminders window and I click on Dismiss all, then all of those reminders will be dismissed. Sometimes I’m afraid when I get a bit annoyed I might click on Dismiss all because I’m annoyed about the number reminders I’m getting. If you do get annoyed about the reminders window and it comes up and it shows you a whole list of reminders, you can always just close it again and then perhaps when you’re not quite so busy, you can reopen it by clicking on Reminders window to bring the whole window up again. The other thing that I can do, of course, as we just did with the presentation review meeting reminder is with that reminder selected, I can say snooze. If I click on the control next to the Snooze button, I can see a list of the available snooze times. The top couple are snooze times to before the start. Now as I said, five minutes before the start for the dentist appointment which is half an hour’s drive away isn’t really going to help. Oh and by the way, my review presentation reminder has just reappeared in the reminders window. But I might realistically say with the dentist check-up, what I really need to be reminded of is in, say, half a day or maybe, yeah maybe one day that’ll be tomorrow morning round about this time early tomorrow morning that would be a good time to get a reminder. So I’m going to say one day for that one, click on Snooze, and that’ll give me a reminder tomorrow morning. Now notice the review presentation reminders are appearing up there on the screen and now I can decide what to do about this particular reminder. I’m not going to be able to work on that just at the moment so what I’m going to do is say remind me again in a couple of hours, click on Snooze, and my reminders are all dealt with. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 And there’s just one other thing to point out. In the Options for Outlook 2013 in the Advanced section, there’s a little section there about reminders. First of all, you can switch off reminders if you want to. So if you don’t want to show reminders, uncheck there. And you can decide whether you want to play a sound or not. If you don’t want a sound, just uncheck the box. If you’re happy with a sound but you want a different sound, a different WAV file, then you can browse to a different WAV file. There are a number of system WAV files that are available with your version of Windows. You can browse to the WAV files and choose a different WAV file to play or indeed get a WAV file of your own; a snippet of your favorite piece of music perhaps and you can use that as your reminder sound. So that’s it on reminders. I’ll see you in the next section.


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Chapter 19 – Search Video: Basics of Search; Searching Contacts Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take an introductory look at the search facilities in Outlook. The search facilities are very flexible, they’re very powerful and they are context sensitive. So depending on what we’re trying to search the facilities vary accordingly. I’m going to start by doing a search in the contacts in my Outlook data file. I’m going to search my contacts for Sally White. Now you can see Sally White there. I know it’s not difficult to find her information, but let’s assume I’ve got hundreds or thousands of contacts in Outlook. In order to do that, I type Sally White or Sally into this box. Note the prompt in the box, Search contacts and keyboard shortcut Control and E. And when I’ve typed in the name in theory, at least I click on that magnifier, the Search button, and Outlook 2013 will search through all my contacts for the term I’ve entered, whether it’s Sally or Sally White, and then it will list those here; a sort of subset. It’s effectively a filter of who’s available in my list of contacts, whose contact information includes the term that I’ve entered. However, Outlook 2013 is a little bit cleverer than that because as soon as I start typing in that box, it will start to filter the contacts that are shown based on what I’ve typed. Now let’s suppose I really am going to look for everybody who’s got Sally in their contact information which probably means everybody whose name is Sally something. If I click in that box and just type the letter S to begin with, I see a list of all of my contacts who’ve got an S in their contact information. Now Don Anderton obviously hasn’t got an S in his name, but he is a senior analyst at SureFire Software. So now I type in S-A and having typed in just S-A, the only one of my contacts that’s got S-A in the name is Sally White. Now note if I’d got a very, very large number of contacts, I may have had to type in her full name to uniquely identify Sally. I may even have more than one Sally White in my list of contacts and I may now need to look at the ones that it’s found and decide which is the one that I actually want to use the details of. But if you type slowly and if you haven’t got a particularly large list of contacts, you will almost


Learn Outlook 2013 always find that you don’t need to type in the full name in order to find the person that you’re searching for. Now when you finished with your search, if you want to go back to the full list of contacts, the cross symbol there says Close search and it basically ends the search. So if I click on that X, I have my full list of contacts back again. So in its basic form a search is as straightforward as that. And you can do the equivalent on calendar, mail items, tasks. We’ll look at one or two of those later in the course. But there is a more sophisticated version of the search as well and I want to briefly introduce you to now. And you may have noticed that when I clicked in that Search box before, I got a contextual tab on the Ribbon. It’s the Search Tools Search Tab and depending on the context, so in this case I’m looking at contacts or people, I get a number of additional functions that I can perform. One of the main advantages of using this tab is that you can specify search criteria which are specific rather than just looking for the letter S or the letters S-A somewhere in the contact information, you can look for specific contact information and there are a couple of forms in which you can do this. So for instance, I could do a search here by using the “Has phone number” button in the Refine Group; I could say which of my contacts has a mobile phone. So click there or rather which of them has a mobile phone number that I am aware of. There’s only one and that’s Don Anderton. Now you’ve got to be a little bit careful here because if I now entered another criterion, it would be added to the one I’ve already put in. These criteria are cumulative. It’s intentional that they’re cumulative so that you can build up complex search criteria. But if having looked for people with mobile phone numbers and found only one, I said okay that’s fine. Now I want to look for something else. You need to make sure that you close the search and that you start a fresh search. Now let’s try this More button. And with the More button, I could for instance say let me find the contacts that work for a particular company. So let’s suppose I want to search contacts for somebody where the company name has got T-A in it. Now the only person whose company name has got T-A in it is Sally White, and there are the details of Sally White. So you can see that you can use the various controls on the Search tab there to build up some complex searches. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So the general principles carry over into the other areas of Outlook 2013. So if I go to mail, for example, I’ll see there that I have the equivalent box for searching there. Let’s go to one of my inboxes there. That’s a pretty good one. And if I click within that Search, I can see that I have a Search Tools Search Tab and although some of the commands and groups are the same as they were on the Search tab that I saw for contacts, others are not. So for instance, I could search for any of my items which have got attachments. I can look for email messages by received date. So I could look for the messages received this week, today, yesterday, etc. So I have a whole range of search criteria which are the most popular ones related to email in this case. And then I’ve got the equivalent for calendar, tasks, and even for notes. So that’s the basics of search. In the next section, we’re going to have a quick look at search folders. So please join me for that.


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Video: Search Folders Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to take a quick look at search folders. We looked at search just now. Search folders are a sort of permanent search in a way and if you regularly want to be able to see say all the messages that satisfy certain criteria, you can setup a search folder to do that. Now I’m going to demonstrate this with a fairly straightforward example and then I hope you’ll feel inclined to go ahead and experiment with it yourself. Now I’m going to work in my toby.a account and if I select Search folders, I get a little button there, New search folder, click on that, and that brings up the New Search Folder dialog. Now when it comes to creating a search folder, there are some standard ones that I can choose from: reading mail, mail from people and lists, etc. And then right at the bottom there’s an entry, Create a custom search folder, and I can use that option to create a custom search folder where basically I will show email that meets criteria that I specify. Now I’m not going to look at custom search folders in this course but I am going to use one of the standard search folders. I’m going to use the one that says Mail from and to specific people. So if I select that now what I need to do is to choose the person or people that I want to show mail sent to and received from. So I click on the Choose button and let’s suppose I want everything to and from Steve. Double click Steve, click on OK. So now what my search folder will do is to show me mail to and from Steve. It’s going to search mail in; you can choose the folder, archives, Outlook data file, toby.a. I’m going to look for it in toby.a and then click on OK. And there is my search folder. Its name is the name of Steve, in this case, just to remind me that this is a search folder that shows emails to and from Steve. It does not create additional copies of these emails and put them in another folder. This is basically a view of the existing messages. So you’re seeing the originals but they’re all gathered together and, of course, this is kept up to date. As I continue to communicate with Steve, as messages get deleted, and new messages appear and so on, this folders contents will be updated. So if I want to see a history of all my correspondence with Steve through this account, I would just go to this search folder and then I could scroll through and see all of those messages in a nice convenient order, and as we’ll see later on, I could even change the order if I wanted to. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 20 – Categories Video: Color Categories Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at categories which are used by different people in many different ways but are generally a very powerful and flexible tool. Now in order to show all the different ways of using categories, it would take a very long time so I’m just going to look at one or two options in this section and then leave you to use categories in the way that’s best suited to what you do and the way that you use Outlook. Now you’ve already seen that I have two calendars setup here that I’m generally using. I’ve got my Outlook data file calendar and my toby.a calendar and generally speaking, I’m using one for my personal activities and one for my work activities. Now supposing I just wanted to have one calendar with everything in it, there’s no reason I shouldn’t do that. And one very useful thing would be if within that calendar I could in some way color code or categorize the appointments, meetings, and events. So for instance, I might have my personal events yellow and my work events blue. So that’s an example of how I can categorize my Outlook items. Another way that I might use Outlook categories would be for example if within my work calendar, the one associated with toby.a, I categorized according to projects. So the marketing initiative project might be purple and the production review project might be, say, red. Now provided I didn’t have too many different colors needed, then I could categorize according to project. And in fact it’s that second option, categorizing according to project that I’m going to demonstrate in this section. So let’s start by just looking at my toby.a calendar for the moment. This review presentation meeting here is related to the marketing initiative and if I want to categorize with that presentation selected, if I look at the Meeting Tab, Calendar Tools, Categorize is one of the options in the Tags Group. Click on Categorize and I can see what are effectively the default categories which I get when I install Outlook 2013. The defaults are color coded: yellow, blue, green, orange, purple, red. If I click into All categories, I get a dialog which enables me to rename categories and also to introduce new categories. Now the ones I said I was going to use, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 I’m going to use the purple category for Marketing Initiative. So if I select that and click on Rename, I can put in there. And if I want to assign that to this particular item, I would check it and click on OK. And that is now a meeting associating it with my Marketing Initiative Project. Let’s go to the next week, and in the next week I’ve got the recurring weekly meeting. If I open that up the entire series, click on OK, say categorize. Now in my list what was the purple category is now at the top it’s called Marketing Initiative, click on Marketing Initiative and it’s categorized. You see the purple strip there just to remind me. Now this sort of change to a meeting is not going to require sending an update. But if I click on Send update, bear in mind that this color change, this categorization is just local to my installation of Outlook. If I click on Send update it says No changes have been made to the meeting request. You don’t need to send an update. That’s fine. Then I can just close that and now I see that I’ve got purple; again, Marketing Initiative Weekly Project Meeting. Now let’s suppose that next Tuesday morning I’m planning to spend a lot of time really putting together some ideas for the production review. I could select a batch of time on Tuesday morning, click on New appointment, say, I’m going to mark the time as busy but I’m going to categorize this as what will be the red category. I’m going to set that up now as production review, assign that to this particular appointment, click on OK. This is an appointment rather than a meeting so there’s nobody else involved, click on Save and Close, and now you can see that project appointment related to the production review project in red in my calendar. Now as I said at the beginning of this section, you can use categorization for all sorts of things and if I was going to use it to differentiate between my projects, I might also have categories for things like sales or administration or training, those kinds of activity.

But in this very

straightforward example with a couple of projects, you can see how to add another project and you can also apply these categories once you’ve set them up to many of the other types of item in Outlook. So for example, let’s suppose I go to my contacts, my people, and let’s suppose I’ve got a particular contact associated with the production review project. And if I go to the Toby list of contacts, supposing it’s this contact here, now I can categorize that contact. Once that contact is selected, I can categorize and say that contact is associated with the production review project, click there, and that particular contact is now categorized. So if for instance I was going to do a search on contacts, when I click in the Search box one of the options in the Refine Group is to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 look for contacts in this case with a particular category. So supposing I wanted to find contacts associated with production review, click there, and that is that contact associated with production review. And I’m not restricted to associating a contact or another Outlook item with just one category. I’ve just associated Sally White, categorized her as being involved in the marketing initiative project. If I go into Steve’s records, Steve Brown, go into categorize, click on All categories, I can actually mark Steve as being associated with the Marketing Initiative and the Production Review. So I can check both, click on OK. Now if I wanted to do a search on, say, Marketing Initiative, I’d get Steve and Sally. If I close that, search again, production review I get Steve and WebFusion. And if I wanted to find somebody who was associated with the Production Review and the Marketing Initiative, I’d leave that search there with the category set, go back in, and include Marketing Initiative. And there’s only one person that’s in both and that’s Mr. Steve Brown. And as I mentioned before, you can also apply categories for example to mail. So if I go into mail and say go for that particular message there, Review presentation. This was one of the updates associated with that meeting. I can categorize that as well. So click on Categorize. It was associated with the Marketing Initiative so that gets categorized as well. Note how in that case the bar appears in the email message and the color coding there helps me to identify that this message is associated with the marketing initiative. And, of course, if I did a search in this particular folder and I based it on category and I just look for marketing initiative, bear in mind I’ve only applied that category to one message. I would just find that individual message using the search on the category. Now one last thing about categories before we move on; if I go back to a particular item again, let’s choose that one. Go into Categorize, All categories. I mentioned that you can create new categories. It’s pretty straightforward. Click on New. You can assign a color, put a name in. You can even use shortcut keys. So if you want a nice quick way of assigning a category, you can setup your own shortcut key to do that. And you can, of course, delete categories if you no longer want that category, Marketing Initiative, you can select it and delete it.


Learn Outlook 2013 So that’s an introduction to the use of categories in Outlook 2013. What you use them for and how you use them is up to you, but they’re a powerful and flexible facility. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Chapter 21 – Task Management Video: Managing Tasks Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at managing tasks. First of all, let’s look at Backstage View and in the Options, there is a section on tasks. Quite a small number of options there but they are important. The very first option in Task Options is whether you want to set reminders on tasks with due dates. Now we’ve only really created one task so far. When you create a task, you can set a due date, and if you do set a due date, this is where you specify whether you automatically want to set a reminder or not. If you have a lot of tasks and you get through a lot of tasks in a typical working day and they’re all going to be in Outlook, you could finish up with an awful lot of reminders coming through. Now because I tend to have a lot of tasks within my normal working environment, what I tend to do is to not set reminders. But for the purposes of this section of the course, I’m going to switch the reminders on. And closely associated with whether you have reminders set or not is the time that you receive those reminders. Tasks aren’t associated with a particular time of day, unlike say appointments and meetings. So if you’re going to have a reminder that something is due or maybe that it’s overdue, it will tend to happen at a particular time of day. Mine is set here at my working day start time, 8 a.m. So any reminders that are due on my tasks will be default arrive at 8 a.m. The next two options relate to assignment of tasks. You can assign tasks to other people and other people can assign tasks to you. That’s outside the scope of this course. It’s pretty straightforward when you’re working in a team but if you do assign tasks to other people, if you check this first box here, Keep my task list updated with copies of tasks I assign to other people. If you do assign tasks to other people, you can still see them in your task list and it enables you to keep up to date with what’s happening. Similarly if you’ve got tasks assigned to you, if you check this box it means that you will send status reports to the person who’s assigned the task to you when each task is completed. That’s outside the scope but you will see references to the assignments at later points in this course and that’s what these refer to.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now you can choose what color an overdue task appears in your task list. You can choose what color a completed task appears in your task list. I’m going with the defaults. You can also set a Quick click flag. Now I’ll explain this a little bit more later on but basically when you’re reviewing items, when you’re reviewing emails for instance as well as tasks, you can use a single click, quick click on a flag to indicate that something needs some attention. Now I’ll explain a little bit more about that to you later on in the course. At the moment, we’re going to accept the Quick click setting of today. And then finally the lower section on the tasks page of Outlook Options, you can say how many task working hours are there per day; eight in my case. How many task working hours per week? 40. So there we are. The only one of these options that I’m changing is that one to set reminders on tasks with due dates as I mentioned before. Click on OK and let’s take a look at the one task we’ve created so far. Now the first thing to note about this task is that when I created it right near the beginning of the course, I in effect put it into the wrong task list because I put it in the Outlook data file task list and since then I’ve been using toby.a, my work Microsoft Live account, to deal with everything to do with the marketing initiative project. Now I can easily resolve that because all I’ve got to do is to grab that task and I can pull it into the toby.a account. Click there, now click on toby.a, and the task is part of that account. So it’s in the task list for toby.a. If I go back to the Outlook data file task list, I’ll see there are no longer any tasks in that one at all. So as with all of the other basic types of Outlook item, you can move them between these accounts very easily. Now let’s open the task up by double clicking on it and even though it’s marked as overdue and I just need to update it as complete. Let’s look at one or two of the other things we can do here. One of the things we can do, if I click on the Tags there, tags for tasks, one of the options is Categorize. And if I click on Categorize, I can actually indicate it as part of the marketing initiative project. So click on marketing initiative, click on Save and Close, and it’s now categorized as being part of the Marketing Initiative Project. However it is a completed task so let me just go back into it again and I’m going to actually mark it as complete. So I’m just going to say there, click on Mark complete, and you’ll see that


Learn Outlook 2013 although the task is still in the list here the text is all struck through and there’s a tick at the end indicating that it’s a completed task. It’s important to recognize the difference between a completed task and a deleted task. If I were to just delete this task, there would be no record of the fact that I had completed it and that might be quite important in the context of say a project where I might want to be able to trace through all of the tasks that were assigned and the status of each of those tasks. If on the other hand I created a task and then decided it didn’t need to be done, then it would probably be more appropriate to delete that task. Now let me go back into the calendar and take a look at some of the activities associated with the marketing initiative project and in particular, let’s look at the week beginning March 11th when we’re going to start having those weekly project meetings. Now one of the things that’s going to need doing with those weekly project meetings is going to be to write up the minutes each week. And although I’m going to assign that to my P.A., initially I’m going to create it as a recurring task for me. So let’s start with a new task. I’m going to assign it to the category marketing initiative. The subject is going to be Weekly meeting minutes. It’s going to start on Monday the 11th. I’m going to try and get those minutes out the same day. Reminders? Yes. I’m going to stick with an 8 a.m. No, I think I’m going to change the time of that reminder because although by default my reminders come out at 8 a.m., we won’t have had the meeting then. So maybe I’m going to set that for early the afternoon following the meeting. And then in addition, I’m going to set it as recurring. So I’m going to switch on recurrence. It’s going to be weekly on a Monday, every Monday, and I said before when I setup the actual meetings themselves that it would be until the end of the current calendar year. So let’s stick with that. We’ll go for 16 th. I think that was when the last one was. Click on OK and I’ve now created a recurring task for myself every Monday until the end of the year with a reminder at 2 p.m. on the day, and according to this I’m expecting to get those minutes done every day. Of course, it might be more appropriate to set myself an appointment for the afternoon and actually allocate some time. But the minutes won’t be very extensive. They won’t take very long each week. At least, I hope they won’t. So if I just make sure I’ve set myself a task for the day, I’ll make sure I finished it before the end of the day. Now click on Save and Close.


Learn Outlook 2013 And I have one item to warn you about here. When you’ve actually saved that recurring task, you’ll see it appear in the Calendar View if you’ve got the task list viewed in the Calendar View. That’s the first one that’s on March 11th, the first Monday. If you go to the second week, you won’t see the task there yet. The second task won’t appear until the first one is completed. So when the first one’s completed the second one will appear against the appropriate date in the calendar. And on the subject of that first occurrence of the recurring task, if I right click on the task as you can see from the contextual menu that comes out, I have options such as mark complete, assign task, rename task, flag for follow up. I’ll be talking about flags later on. And then I also have the option to delete the task as well as mark it complete. And I explained earlier why you might delete the task rather than mark it complete. Now I need to schedule another task for myself in relation to the production review project. But the nature of this task is that it is confidential. Although I’m going to put it in my list of tasks, my list of things to do, if my Outlook schedule is shared with anybody else, I don’t want them to be able to see what this particular task is. The task is basically a personnel issue in a way. I’ve got to decide whether I can get Sally White involved in the production review project so I’m going to have to sit down and do a bit of planning and then present the proposal to other members of the team. So I’m going to click on New task. The new task is Plan Sally White involvement in project. I need to start working on that today and I need it done by tomorrow. It’s in relation to the Production Review Project so click on Tags, Categorize, there’s the Production Review Project, and I’m going to mark this task as Private. Now as you can see from the screen tip, Mark this item as private so that other people cannot see the details of it. Not only is it important that people don’t realize I’m working on this but if I put any notes in here, I don’t want anybody else to be able to see those notes. The task is also of high importance so I’m going to flag it as having high importance as well. So click on Save and Close. Now, of course, I can see the details of this task but nobody else will be able to. Now as we’ve seen already we can go in and modify a task pretty easily. So for instance, if I wanted to put some notes that I’d got from somebody else in the task I’ve just created, I double © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 click to open up and I can do pretty much with this the kind of things that we saw earlier on. So for instance, when you’re dealing with a task, there is an Insert tab and you can attach a file, insert an Outlook item, and so on. If I put some text into the body of the task, here I can format the text. I can run a spell check on it. And back on the task itself as I mentioned before, there are other options that I’m not covering in this course such as assign task whereby I could assign this task to somebody else. Now the last thing I’d like to look at in terms of managing tasks here is the view. I’ve only got three tasks here. I’ve got a completed task. I’ve got one that’s basically in progress. I’m starting it today and I need to have it done by tomorrow. And I’ve got another one which is a recurring task and the first occurrence of it will on the coming Monday. If you look at the Home tab here when we’re looking at tasks, there is a Change View button and if I click on Change View, I get a whole gallery of available views. And apart from that gallery of views, I can actually go in manage views. I can customize views and save the current view as a new view with a name. But if I wanted to look at a specific category of tasks, for instance supposing I just wanted to see my completed task. Let’s look at completed tasks. That’s the only completed task. So let’s change the view again now and let’s go for tasks within the next seven days. So click on Next seven days and I can see that I’ve got Plan Sally White involvement in project. Note the exclamation mark there which denotes this as a high priority task. Also note the color coding for the categorization. Let’s try one more view. Let’s look at one which is overdue. Have we got any overdue tasks? No we’ve got no overdue tasks. Now as the number of tasks you have in Outlook increases that ability to effectively filter the task view can be extremely useful. And once you’ve filtered the view, you can also sort it. So for instance if I put All back on again, so I’m just going to say Detailed, I could sort it by due date. If I click on the Due Date header, it will sort it by due date. And in fact, they’re in due date order anyway. But that reverses it. So you put the latest at the beginning, click it again, and it will put the earliest at the beginning. You can also sort it say by priority. So I could put all of the high priority tasks at the beginning and the lower priority task further down. You can sort by category, etc. If you sort by category, you effectively group the task by category. So that’s another very useful facility when you’re looking at your list of tasks. So that’s it on managing tasks in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 22 – Contacts Video: Contacts Options Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look at contacts in more detail and the first thing I want to do is to review the options for contacts in Outlook Options. So go to Backstage View as usual, call up the Options, and click on People. Now there are only a couple of these that I particularly want to look at and I want to start with Full Name and File As. If you have a contact called John Doe, then there are some situations in Outlook where Outlook needs to make a full name out of that like John Doe. And when it does that, it will choose a full name order and you can specify what the default full name order is. Now for me, the full name order is first name, middle name if there is one, then last name. So that would be John Doe. But if you wanted a different order, for instance Doe, John, or if your language or culture involved having two last names which sometimes happens for example in certain Spanish speaking countries, then you might have first, last one, last two. The file as order is the order typically that’s used in an index. So in the case of John Doe, if you were putting John Doe in a telephone directory, the telephone directory would almost certainly sort on last name and then on first name. So he would go in as Doe, comma, John. Doe, comma, John is my default.

You could use a different file as here.

And if you’re dealing with

companies, you could maybe just put the company as the file as or if you look at the last option there, company and then in brackets last, comma, first. So you need to set both of those to the values that suit you. For the majority of people, the defaults will be fine. The next option here is Check for duplicates when saving new contacts.

That’s a pretty

important one. I always check for duplicates. I very rarely have a duplicate contact based on name. But if you’re working within a large organization, you may have many people with the same name and you may need to be very careful that you don’t either let contacts in or stop people who are different people but with the same name getting rejected.


Learn Outlook 2013 The only other option to look at here quite quickly in the bottom section in the middle there’s a checkbox there that determines whether you show user photographs when available. Mine is checked so if I have user photographs they will be shown when available. So they’re the only options that are important for what we’re doing here. In the next section, we’re going to move on to look at contact information.


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Video: Contact Information Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a more detailed look at contact information, at the ways of adding it to Outlook, and at the ways of modifying it and viewing it. Now I’m currently looking at the contacts in my toby.a account and the first contact there is Don Anderton. I have a picture of Don and then what I can see here in the Reading Pane on the right is what’s called the People Card, and the people card is a new feature in Outlook 2013. It basically gives a summary of the information about Don. So it has things like phone numbers, email address, and so on. It also has some links to various activities associated with Don. So for instance, if I wanted to schedule a meeting with Don, there’s simple link there, Schedule a meeting. Click on that, and out comes a window where I can fill in the details of a proposed meeting and send it off to Don. Another one of the links here is a link to send an email to Don. So if I click on that link, there’s the email message window and I can type in what I need, send it off to Don. So I get useful summary information on the people card and some useful links. But if I want to see some more detail about Don, bear in mind when we looked at contacts earlier on there’s an awful lot more information you can put in about a contact then just email address and a few summary pieces of information about their company, then you need to click on View source to open the main contact window. Now in Don’s case, he’s in a rather unusual situation in that he is in two places. I’ve got him as a source from my contacts in toby.a but I’ve also got a source, my contacts in my Outlook data file. Now the sort of situation in which this might happen would be if I had a person who was both a personal contact and a work contact or I could simply just have the contact details duplicated. So let me look at the information about Don that’s in toby.a. So I’m going to click on the first source here and now you can see a lot more information about Don. Let’s have a look at some of the things that you can see in this contact window. First of all, I have his name, company, job title, and file as. With the full name if you click on that button there, you can go in and put in a specific title; so for instance Prof. or Doctor or Miss,


Learn Outlook 2013 etc. And you can also specify a middle name and even a suffix. So, if somebody’s got letters after their name for instance, you could put those in there as well. As far as emails concerned, if I click on the drop down there, I can specify more than one email address if necessary. And when it comes to phone numbers, I have a long list of options. There are three shown here but I can choose from business, home, fax, pagers, etc. Now on the right, we have an area for just putting in general notes but we also have a business card for Don. Now if I right click on the business card, I see two options. One of them is Edit business card and one of them is Copy image. So you can just make a copy of the image and paste it somewhere else in another document. But edit business card is also particularly useful. If you click in Edit business card it brings up the Edit Business Card dialog. You have options here to change the card design. So you can decide for instance where you want the image to appear, how large you want the image area to be, and then you have options for deciding which fields you want to include in the business card and then you can format the text and so on. So you can pretty much change the layout of that business card at will using this dialog. If you make a mess of it partway through, you’ve also got a Reset Card button. I’m going to leave the business card for Don as it is. And one of the other important options here is the Delete option, of course. If I want to delete this contact information, there’s a Delete button up here towards the left hand corner. I already mentioned the commands on the people card to arrange a meeting and to send an email. Well, there are some more communication options here roughly in the middle of the Contact tab on the Ribbon and these include facilities such as a call facility. If you have the appropriate communications mechanism setup, you can call either the business or the mobile numbers. You can go straight to Don’s webpage, if you’ve got it specified. You can assign a task to Don and you can also look at mapping. We’re going to look at mapping in a couple of minute’s time. Now I’m going to turn my attention to one or two of the other contacts because I want to show you how to add a little bit of contact information to a couple of other people. Here’s another one of my contacts and with this contact what I’m going to do is to add a picture. So if I open up the contact window, then I have an option there to insert a picture. So click on


Learn Outlook 2013 there to add a contact picture, there’s the picture that I want to add, click on OK, and that picture is inserted for that particular contact. It really is as straightforward as that. Note that it’s also possible with contacts to insert Outlook items and add attachments. If I look at Sally White; for instance, if I wanted to attach a copy of Sally’s CV that’s pretty straightforward. Some of the basic things that I might want to update related to a contact can be done on the people card itself. There’s an Edit button there and that lets me edit the contents of the people card. That’s not everything that’s available but it’s quite a few things. And also from here I’ve got a Notes tab and I’ve got a What’s New tab. I’ll come back to one or two things related to those later. But if I want to get to the most complete picture of the information about Sally, I need to look on that source and now all I’m going to do is to insert a copy of Sally’s CV. So click on Insert. I’m going to say Attach file. The one I want is Sally White CV.docx. Click on that and there is now a copy of Sally’s CV in the notes. Anytime I want to take a look at Sally’s CV, I just need to locate her notes, double click on that, and the CV will open for me. Now there’s just one or two other things to point out about contacts before we move on. One of them is that if you need to give the contact details to somebody else, you can actually forward contact details on to somebody else by email. If you look at the contact window here in the Actions Group, there is a Forward action. Click on Forward and there are three options. You can forward somebody’s details as a business card, so that’s similar to the business card that we were looking at just now; as an internet format vCard, that’s basically an internet standard for contact details, the vCard format; or you can forward the details as an Outlook contact. This clearly would be to somebody who has a compatible version of Outlook. So if somebody else you know uses Outlook, you can forward contact details on to them. Now down at the bottom of the contact window, there is a pane called the People Pane and a little bit later on we’re going to look at the People Pane in quite a bit of detail. But for the moment I just want to collapse it by clicking on that little arrow. You’ll see you got a little bit more space, a little bit more information down here about a contact. Let me save Sally’s details. Now I’m going to go into the details for Tina Androtti, and the option here that I want to look at is Map It. View a map of this contacts address. We can actually see where somebody lives. So let’s try mapping Tina. So that uses Bing mapping, the zip code, the details of the address to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 pinpoint somebody’s location on a map. When you’ve got the location on the map, you can zoom out, you can zoom in, and so on. So that’s it on contact information. Don’t forget this contact window is the one that you use when you insert contact information by hand as we saw right near the beginning of the course. If you insert a new contact, you get this window to complete. But as you’ve seen, even if you only put in very basic information early on, you can add and modify the information easily later on. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Video: Outlook Social Connector Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at the use of the Outlook Social Connector and this is the tool we use so that we can integrate the facilities of social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn into our use of Outlook 2013. Now there are a couple of aspects of this to explain early on. The first thing I’m going to explain is that I’m primarily going to use Facebook in relation to this and in particular one of my contacts, Steve Brown, who I know has a Facebook account. So I’m going to look at Steve Brown’s contact details first. So here we have Steve’s basic details. Let’s now go to the contact window for Steve and down at the bottom we can see the People Pane. Now in the People Pane, in the case of Steve, we’ve actually got some items included. We have mail, for instance. There’s one email we’ve got a record of. It’s the email that he sent in relation to the presentation or the request for a meeting about a presentation. Just acknowledgements, acceptances, that sort of thing won’t show up here but any emails that he’s actually sent are shown. There’s one. I can open up and take a look at that if I want to. I can check to see if I’ve got any attachments. There are none. So that’s the People Pane contents for Steve at the moment. I’ve got some other basic information about him as well. What I want to now do is to enable the Facebook social network. There are basically two ways of doing this. At the bottom of the Folder Pane there is a link there, Connect to a social network. But also on the People Pane command on the arrow at the bottom, there in the People Pane Group on the View Tab, click on Account Settings and now you have a way of enabling various social network accounts. Now I’m only going to do Facebook. If you want to try LinkedIn or a SharePoint social networking site, I’ll leave that to you to try. You will, of course, need a LinkedIn account or you will need to have access to a SharePoint account. So I’m going to log into my Facebook account. I’m going to elect to see photos and information from this network when available and I’m going to click on Connect. That’s ticked. It’s connected okay and I click on Finish. So my copy of Outlook, in fact it says my copy of Office, is now connected to the Facebook social network.

Click on Close and now you can see that I’ve got some

information from Steve Brown’s Facebook account. He’s one of my friends on Facebook. So © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 picture of him here on his skies in the mountains is included and any other information that he makes available to me via Facebook is available to me as well. So now when I look at Steve Brown’s people card in Outlook 2013 under View Source, I have two sources. I have Outlook as before but I also have Facebook. If I click on Facebook from here, it’ll actually take me to Steve Brown’s Facebook account and the information that’s available to me in his Facebook account. Okay there’s not a lot there at the moment but that’s Steve’s Facebook account. So that’s one option to me. Let me go back into Outlook 2013. Now I’m going to go to the toby.a source again so click on that. It opens up the contact window again. And if I go down to the little picture there, hover over that, I can see Steve Brown and one of the options there is a button that will enable me to just send him an email message. But I also have a drop down here that says Open contact card. And if I open the contact card for Steve Brown, what I will see is again some basic details and the View Source Facebook, and again I can link through to his profile on Facebook. So you can see how straightforward it is to link information from social networking sites, in this case Facebook, through to the Outlook 2013 contact information about a person and in fact you can get lots of different sources for the same person. If Steve’s got a LinkedIn account, I can get information from there and so on. So there we are. That’s the basic use of the Outlook Social Connector in Outlook 2013. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


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Video: Contact Views Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. As the number of contacts in Outlook increases, it can start to become difficult to keep track of everybody and to find the person or people that you need in a particular situation. We looked at the Search facility earlier on in the course, but in this section I’d like to spend a little bit of time looking at some of the options for setting up and customizing views of your contacts in Outlook. One approach to managing contacts which can be very useful is to create specific folders for contacts. Now you’d need to do this in your Outlook data file or one of your Outlook data files rather than on a synchronized account. But let’s suppose that one of my customers, the customer I mentioned before, a company called WebFusion. A couple of the people that I deal with, regular contacts work for WebFusion, I might choose to put all of their contacts in one folder. Now while I’m looking at contacts or people in Outlook 2013, if you click on the Folder tab one option there is New Folder and if I click that I get a Create New Folder dialog and notice that the folder contains contact items. Note it defaults to containing contact items because I’m working on people or contacts at the moment. Now let’s suppose that I’m going to call that folder WebFusion, click on OK. So now I’ve got a new contacts folder for WebFusion. Now let me just look at my contacts here and let’s suppose that I’m going to drag the contact into there. And let’s suppose that Mick Parsons works for WebFusion and let’s suppose that Ahmed Chalama works for WebFusion as well. So if I now click on WebFusion, I can see those three contacts and the WebFusion folder basically contains the contacts that work for WebFusion and contact details for the company itself. Now one of the issues that sometimes strikes people about this is that if you start dividing your contacts up into folders, doesn’t it become more difficult to find a contact if you’re not sure of anything other than perhaps a name? So wouldn’t you have to know what company they work for what folder they’re in? Well, generally speaking, if you look at the Search facility here, I’ve got the WebFusion folder selected, so the search up there says Search WebFusion. And when you do a search in this way, you’re searching the currently selected folder. But if I wanted to find say Ahmed Chalama and I wasn’t sure who he worked for, which folder he was in. If you click in that Search box, you get the Search Tools Search Tab. If you then click on All Contact © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 items you get a search that operates in all contact items, in all contact folders. So now if I start typing the name Chalama, then it will find Ahmed Chalama in whichever folder he’s in. The use of folders can really work. So now let’s look at the options for viewing contacts. What I’m going to do for the moment is to just close down the Reading Pane, so I’m going to switch the Reading Pane off and we just look at the list of contacts. On the View tab, Change View, People is the view we have at the moment. We could also go for Business Card View. There we get a list of the business cards presented in the style that is currently in force. Click on a business card; get more details on the right. Change View again, go for Card View. This gives a different style of card and these cards are then arranged in columns to get as many on the screen as possible. Phone View which gives us a view effectively with the information about the contacts in columns. We can adjust the widths of these columns and if I pull them over a little more, you can see that we can bring all sorts of phones into view. And then finally we have List View. Now the interesting things about List View is that we can adjust the arrangement of List View. I currently got List View by category and I’ve already put my contacts into the categories that I work in on my two projects. So I’ve got a number of people in the Marketing Initiative Project and I’ve got a number of people in the Production Review Project. Note that Steve Brown is in both. Now there are alternative arrangements available when I have this particular view. If I click on the drop down there, I can arrange by location instead or by company instead. And if I click on View Settings, the Advanced View Settings dialog for list lets me decide which columns to show, how to group them, they’re currently grouped by categories ascending but I could group them by something else, how to sort them, whether to apply any filters, and then various other settings and formatting options. And then when I’ve been changing those over a period of time, I’ve got a Reset button as well. So List View can be a very useful one for categorizing your contacts. If you want to take a different view of them in a particular situation, so for example if you have a number of contacts that work on different projects, you might well use the categories for the projects. But if those people themselves work for different companies and maybe Ashley Hambleton who works on my Production Review Project works for the same company as Sergio


Learn Outlook 2013 Ramos, then in another situation I may want to view my contacts by company and I’ll see those two together within the company that they both work for. Now if you customize a view, if you make a few changes to columns, sort orders, etc., if you click on the Change View button again, there’s an option there to save the current view as a new view. And what you can do there is to save it with a name and then call it up any other time that you want to. I’m not going to go into that on this course but it’s a good thing there for you to experiment with. So that’s it on contact views for the moment. We’ve got one other section coming up on contacts and that’s contact groups. So please join me for that next.


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Video: Contact Groups Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at contact groups in Outlook. So far whenever we’ve sent emails, we’ve used individual email addresses, maybe one or two people. But sometimes instead of having to enter a long list of email addresses, you may well have a situation where you want to send an email to a group of people; maybe all the people that work on a particular project, all the people in your department, all the people with a particular job grade or description, and that’s one of the things that you can use contact groups for. So let’s take a straightforward example to begin with. Let’s suppose I want to create a new contact group. So on the Home tab click on New Contact Group and a window comes up for contact group. Now I’m going to create a contact group called WebFusion and this is basically going to include all the people that work for WebFusion as a contact group. So if I ever want to send an email to all of them, I haven’t got to enter all their individual names or indeed remember who they all are. I just need to make sure that this group is kept up to date. So I’ve selected a name and now I click on Add members. Now I’ve got a choice. I can add the member from a new email contact. So if I just received a new email, I could start the group off from that point. I could look at my Outlook address book or I can look at my Outlook contacts and it’s the Outlook contacts that I’m going to use. Now I have within my address book a number of different contact lists and the one I’m going to look at is the WebFusion one because that’s the one that’s got all the people in it that I need. And I’m going to include just the first two because the third one is a generic sales address. I only want this group to include the specific people that work there. So to add Ahmed double click; to add Mick double click, click on OK and I now have my contact group called WebFusion. Click on Save and Close and there we are. Now notice that in my people list at the moment that now appears as an entry but the fact that it’s got like a little group of three heads and bodies in it tells me that it’s a contact group. So if I now select WebFusion, I see a sort of people card on the right except it’s the equivalent of that for a contact group. I see the list of the people there. Obviously, it’s quite a short list at the moment. And you can also see the purpose of this group because if I click on that button there, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Send an email message, watch what happens. Up I come with an email message and it just says WebFusion. Plus sign next to it, just about make it out there, that tells me it is a contact group and if I were to click on that plus sign, if you expand the list, Outlook will replace the list with its members. You will not be able to collapse it again. So if I click on OK, I actually get them as a list; I can’t pull them back to not being in a list in this email. But, of course, that doesn’t really matter because I’m only sending an email anyway and it’s going to go to those two people. So that’s one of the main reasons that you’d have a contact group is to be able to send an email to all the members of it. And if I click on Edit in that equivalent of the people card there, which is actually the list of who’s in the contact group, click on Edit. It takes me back into that window and I can adjust the members. So if I wanted to remove a member, say I wanted to remove Mick. Select him, click on Remove member. Add a member, Outlook contacts, go back into the WebFusion, Mick Parsons, double click, click on OK, and he’s back in the group again. Now apart from creating groups, obviously I can delete the group with the Delete button there, and as you’ve seen, I can change the list of people that are in the group. But also I can include groups within groups. So if I say wanted a contact group with all of my customers in it, I could make the WebFusion group one of the members of that all customers group. But that’s one I think I’ll leave you to experiment with. That’s contact groups in Outlook 2013 and that’s the end of this section. So I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 23 – Email Management and Advanced Features Video: Email Options Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look at email in a lot more detail and the first thing we need to consider are the email options and there are quite a few of them. So we’re going to walk through pretty much all of these settings in this first section, but with some of them I’m only going to have a very brief look because they won’t mean a lot until we get to cover that particular topic later on in the course. But let’s start right at the top of the mail page in Outlook Options and let’s look at composing messages. Now there are several aspects to composing messages. Some of them we’ve looked at so far, some we haven’t. Starting right at the top, Change the editing settings for messages. There is an Editor Options button there and that brings us into an Editor Options dialog. Now you have options here for auto correction and if you’ve used either earlier versions of Outlook or other elements of Office, you’ll know about AutoCorrect. It’s a system whereby you can get Outlook, in this case, to correct as you type. Now the corrections that it can do for you, you can choose which ones you want to apply. Now the main body of these options are really Microsoft Office wide and they’re really in this main section here. When correcting spelling in Microsoft Office programs, ignore words in upper case. So anything typed totally upper case, don’t try to do a spell check. Ignore words that contain numbers and so on. I’m not going to go through all of those now, but let’s look at the lower section, When correcting spelling in Outlook. So this is specifically with Outlook. Check the spelling as you type. Now when you’re typing a message if you want Outlook to immediately flag any suspected spelling mistakes have that box checked and it will do it. If that annoys you, if you just want to run a spell check at the end or if indeed you’re not interested in checking your spelling which I don’t think is particularly wise but anyway, then if you’re not going to check the spelling at all, just uncheck that and it won’t do it. The second box, Mark grammar errors as you type, is a little bit more debatable. The grammar checking in Office in general and Outlook in particular has improved greatly lately but I’m still somebody who doesn’t really agree with Outlook about many of the grammar errors or things that it considers to be grammar errors. So if grammar checking annoys you, you can switch it off © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 as you type. You can ask it to look for frequently confused words. So this will be things like There, T-H-E-R-E, and Their, T-H-E-I-R. In my experience it tends to get those the wrong way round anyway, but let’s not go into that now. But again, if you don’t want it to warn you about frequently confused words, you can uncheck that. And when you come to do a spelling check, even if you do it as a big spelling check at the end, this checkbox determines whether the grammar is checked as well. So this is a very important set of settings here. So that’s the Proofing tab within those options. If I go to the Advanced tab, there’s an even longer list of more options associated with editing. Now it would take us a very long time to go through all of these so let me just highlight the sort of thing that is in here; for instance, the fourth one down, Use Control and click to follow a hyperlink. You’ve probably seen that when you’ve been using Office documents before. But then also things like showing AutoComplete suggestions down here. Now you really need to go through these. Some of them you may not understand but I’m sure a lot of them you will. And go through those and just check which ones you like and which ones you don’t like. Down at the bottom; Displays. Show measurement units in inches. Maybe you’d prefer to use centimeters or points or picas. I’m going to stick with inches. So when I’ve made all of my Editor Option selections, I click on OK to save anything that I’ve changed and I’m back now at the main Outlook Options again. The second option here, Compose messages in this format. Nowadays almost everybody used HTML but there are still situations where you might need to use rich text, you may need to use plain text. You may communicate with people where you can only use plain text. Well, the default is HTML and I’m sure that for the vast majority of you that’s the right way to go but you have the option of rich text and plain text to use in specific situations. Now down to the next section and we have a very important option here, Always check spelling before sending. If you, like me, like to do a spell check and you do it manually when you finish working on an email, make sure everything’s okay, you don’t need this box checked. But if sometimes you forget to do a spell check or you want to be absolutely certain that you always spell check what you send, then you need to check that. However, if that’s checked and you do manual checks as well, you’ll find that you do a spelling check maybe on a long email, you’ll click Send, and then Outlook will do another spell check anyway. I tend to have that switched off myself because I tend not to forget to spell check. But that is entirely down to you. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 The other important thing here is that if you’re replying to an email or forwarding an email, maybe a long message from somebody else, maybe they’ve done 50 lines of text and you’ve forwarded it on with two. If you do a spell check, if you have this box checked it says Only spell check what I’ve typed. Ignore the original message text when I’m replying or forwarding an email. That’s important as well because you don’t want to spell check somebody else’s work because for one thing if you did find a spelling mistake it wouldn’t really be particularly honest to change it for them. Then this one, Spelling and AutoCorrect. Spelling and AutoCorrect basically takes us back into the same options that we talked about earlier on. The next section relates to signatures on messages. That’s one for later. And after that we have one about stationary. Again, that’s one for later as well. Customizing how items are marked as read when using the Reading Pane. I’ll come back to that one a little bit later as well. Let’s look at message arrival. When new messages arrive play a sound. Now I actually have a sound play well new messages arrive but I’ve got it switched off when I’m recording this course otherwise you’d constantly hear these beeping sounds while I’m working. You can also have Outlook show an envelope icon in the task bar, and you can have it display a desktop alert. Now the second option, the unchecked one there, Briefly change the mouse pointer. Some people like that because when they’re working maybe have the sound switched off but that change the mouse pointer just very quietly says to them you’ve just received an email. As with many of the other things under these Outlook options this really is down to personal preference. So you need to experiment with those and then decide which of the settings suits you best. The next section relates to conversations and we’re going to talk about conversations in a later section, and then following that we’ve got a section on replies and forwards and, again, that’s one for later. Now we’ve got a section which is very important and that’s the Save messages section. When you’re working on a new message after a short period, Outlook will save a draft copy of the message. Just in case things go wrong, you don’t want to lose a lot of work. And in this first option, you can say after how many minutes Outlook will automatically save an item that you


Learn Outlook 2013 haven’t yet sent. You can also specify which folder it’s saved in. By default it’s saved in the Drafts folder and I suggest you leave it at that. Then you have some other very important settings. If you’ve got a message that isn’t in the Inbox and you reply to it. So this is maybe a message that’s come in, you’ve filed it somewhere else, and you’re replying to it when it’s in that other folder. If you’ve got this box checked, it says Save the reply in the same folder. The next option is Save forwarded messages. I always save forwarded messages partly so that I know I’ve forwarded them. And also Save copies of messages in the Sent Items folder; most people have this set to yes. So whatever messages you send, they’re saved in Sent Items. If you’ve got a reason not to save messages, you can uncheck that and you won’t be using up space that you don’t need. The last setting about Use Unicode format is one I’m not going to go into now but you should leave that checked. Then we have a whole batch of Send messages options.

Some of these are pretty

straightforward. What’s the default importance level? In my case, it’s set to normal but you could say that by default it’s set to low or high and then adjust the settings for any messages that aren’t at that default level. Default sensitivity level. Again, you can default it to any of these. Mine is set to normal but if you want by default your message to be personal, private, confidential, again you can set that there. And there’s some other perhaps more detailed things like you can use commas to separate multiple message recipients. Generally speaking, it’s done with semi-colons but this says you can use commas if you want to. And then automatic name checking means that Outlook will check any names before you send the message to make sure that they are valid names. Another useful one, Delete meeting request and notifications from Inbox after responding. If you get a lot of meeting requests and notifications and you don’t really need to keep those, then what you can tell Outlook to do here is say well as soon as I’ve responded delete the request. Now the next one is very important and very useful. Use AutoComplete list to suggest names when typing in the To, copy and blind copy lines. When you’re typing in people’s addresses or contact group names or whatever into the To part of an email, so who am I sending it to, who am I copying it to, who am I blind copying it to. You can tell Outlook to use what you’ve typed so far to try to AutoComplete the addresses. Now this AutoComplete saves me a huge amount of time when I’m typing. It means that I don’t have to type full addresses. Now, of course, you can © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 very often pick addresses from lists but when it comes down to it what I’ve generally found to be the quickest way to fill in email addresses for people that I’m sending or copying emails to is to use AutoComplete. You’ll see AutoComplete in action a little bit later on in the course. If at some stage you want to empty the AutoComplete list, so maybe you had of email addresses for people that you used to deal with, you don’t deal with them anymore. If you want to start your AutoComplete list off from scratch again, there’s a button on the right here to let you do it. And then the last of the options here is also one that I find incredibly useful. It’s a relatively new option but I found it very useful already, and that is Warn me when I send a message that may be missing an attachment. The next section, the tracking section on this page is also quite an important one but I’m not going to go into it here. The tracking that’s being talked about here is the ability to track, for instance, that you have received and email message. Now this is a slightly complex area because it partly depends on getting the thing setup the way that you want it to be setup but also understanding the consequences of that. The default settings for this are pretty much how I have my settings setup. So if somebody asks me for a read receipt, I don’t have my Outlook setup to always send a read receipt because a lot of the people that ask for read receipts are people who are just trying to check that I exist. They’re going to try to sell me something or send me loads of emails that I don’t want. I also don’t have it set to Never send a read receipt because I don’t want to turn down people who might be asking a perfectly valid question. So I have this set at Ask each time. Now in recent times the number of times I’ve been asked for a read receipt has really dropped off. I think they’re to some extent going out of fashion. But this is something you really do need to setup to suit you. If you find that you’re getting lots of read receipts and they’re to do with junk mail and so on, you may want to turn it off altogether. And the other associated settings here also need a bit of careful consideration. As I say I’m not going to cover them on this course but certainly when you’ve been using Outlook for a while you may need to revisit this whole area. Now the last couple of groups of settings on this page are even more detailed than the ones we’ve looked at already. I do think it’s worth you looking through them but I’m not going to go through them now. We need to move on to email itself and in the next section we’re going to look at setting up the sending and receiving of email. So please join me for that. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Email Send and Receive Settings Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section we’re going to look at setting your installation of Outlook up to send and receive emails. Most people have it setup so that this happens automatically, although there is quite a lot of flexibility in how to achieve that. Some people actually prefer to control the sending of email manually and for some people where they perhaps don’t have an always on internet connection, it may actually be more appropriate or even only possible to do it manually. We’re going to look at the various settings in this section and we’re going to start by looking at the Advanced tab in the Outlook Options. So there’s a little section here with just a couple of things in it. One of them is this checkbox, Send immediately when connected. What that says is that if I’ve got an internet connection whenever I click on Send on an email it will be sent immediately. Now I know that some people don’t have that set, maybe somebody’s writing a whole load of emails and they want to finish them all, be happy with them all, maybe there’s some interrelationship between them before they send the whole lot. I have Outlook to send emails immediately. And over on the right there’s this Send/Receive button which is the main one we use to set the send and receive settings for incoming and outgoing items. So first of all, we can setup send and receive groups, and what we would do with send and receive groups, let’s suppose you’ve got half a dozen email accounts in Outlook and two or three of them are different from the rest. They perhaps work in a different way, you want them to be sent and received on a different basis or perhaps at a different time. You can divide them up into groups. Now for the purposes of this course, I’m going to assume that we just have one group with all of the accounts in it and the settings that we’re talking about relate to that all accounts group. Now if you wanted to create a new group, there’s a New button there. You can setup a new send and receive group and then you can modify it, put different ones of your email accounts into it and so on. But that’s really outside the scope of this course. So what we’re talking about is a single group called All accounts. Now when I’m working in Outlook, I basically have two choices. I can choose to have Outlook automatically check for email every so many minutes or I can do it manually. Now the manual option involves clicking a button or using the keyboard shortcut of F9, as we’ll see in a little © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 while, to execute a send and receive operation. And with this single send and receive group, All accounts, what we do will apply to all of them. With the automatic option basically what we do is to specify a time interval and then what Outlook does is effectively to push that button for us. Now, at the moment, for all accounts that time interval is set at 30 minutes.

So on my

installation of Outlook, every half hour a send and receive for all accounts is executed. It sends any outgoing emails, receives any incoming emails on all accounts. Now, of course, it’s very much personal preference whether 30 minutes is a good time interval. Dealing with work maybe I’d want 10 minutes. Dealing with some kind of social or personal email maybe once or twice a day would be more than enough. And that’s really why we have send and receive groups because you might setup a sort of urgent group and a non-urgent group and have different settings. But as I say that’s outside the scope of the course here. The default of 30 minutes is where I’m going to leave this. Some people also work with Outlook in offline mode. Some people have to work with Outlook in offline mode. And for them they may or may not schedule an automatic send and receive, and that automatic send and receive may need to make a connection to the internet and they may just schedule this to happen at a certain time. They may just switch on whatever their connection to the internet is and push the send and receive button. But you certainly need to make sure that the first set of settings is right for you If you’re not sending emails as soon as you click the Send button, that was the option we looked at just now, be wary of this setting. I don’t have this one checked. Perform an automatic send and receive when exiting. If you’re not sending outgoing emails immediately just beware that you may miss sending an email if you don’t have that checked. So you need to look at the whole picture really when you are establishing your send and receive settings. So if you have Outlook setup for the automatic send and receive according to a schedule you can pretty much leave Outlook to it. But if you need some kind of manual involvement, maybe totally manual involvement and that’s you only send and receive when you push the button, then you need the send and receive tab on the Ribbon. There is a send and receive all folders button there. There’s a send all button there which just sends all unsent mail. And then send and receive groups here gives you access to a much more finely defined set of send and receive


Learn Outlook 2013 options by account. So for instance, I could do things just for the toby.a account or just for the Gmail account, etc. And finally if you’d just like to see a send and receive actually happening click on send and receive all folders, get a little progress bar there, ticks it off. When it’s all finished the progress box disappears and that’s it. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Composing Email Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. During the earlier parts of the course we’ve already sent a few email messages. Well, in this section, we’re going to look at composing and sending email messages in a lot more detail. And we’re going to start by looking at the address book. So let’s start by creating a new email message. On the Home tab over on the left there’s a button, New Email, click on that and we get a window to enter the details of a new message. In the header section of the message, that’s the area here, we have To and Cc buttons. That’s To who the emails addressed to and Cc who we want to copy to. Now I could click on To and if I click on To it brings up the dialog we saw before which is the Select Names dialog. I’m going to cancel that at the moment though because I can bring that dialog up another way and that is to click on the Address Book button here. Now the address book in Outlook 2013 is a sort of virtual address book in that it includes a number of things. It will include contact list from the accounts that I have in my installation of Outlook and there’s a drop down here that lets me choose between the accounts that I’ve got available. You can also see the contact group WebFusion that I setup earlier on. And if you are, for example, using Microsoft Exchange Server you will normally see your Global Address List, your GAL in there as well. Now there are various other types of lists of contacts, other address books that may appear in this list. So your list may very well be quite different from mine. But really the Outlook 2013 address book gathers all of those lists together. So let’s suppose that I’m going to send an email to Don. If I select Don’s name in the list and then click on the To button, Don’s name is in the To list. Now as we saw earlier, we can have as many names in that list as we like. They’ll be separated by semi-colons by default. If I then wanted to copy somebody else, supposing I wanted to copy everybody in the WebFusion contact group; select WebFusion and click on Cc and all of those people will get a copy of the email to Don. But then we have Bcc. This is blind copy. Let’s say I go for the list there and let’s suppose that I want to blind copy Sally and Steve on this email. Now with blind copy, what happens is they see the message fine but nobody else, none of the other addressees, either the To’s or the Cc’s can see that I have sent a copy of the email to Sally and Steve. So other people © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 are blind to the fact that they have been copied. That’s very useful if you want to give somebody else a copy of an email but not let other people know that you’ve done that. Now for some reason when you first create an email, the Bcc list isn’t shown in the window. If I move that slightly to the right, you can see there we’ve got From, To, and Cc, no Bcc. But if I click on Sally and Steve and click on the Bcc button, so they’re blind copied here, and then click on OK, as if by magic the Bcc list now appears. One other thing to remember while we’re working on this email message is that as I pointed out earlier a copy of the message will be saved periodically in the Drafts folder so that I don’t lose my work. In fact, if you minimize this message now for a moment and open up Outlook data file, look at Drafts, you’ll see that the message is there. There’s no subject yet. I haven’t entered a subject yet. But you can see that a draft of the message is there. Let me just go down to the task bar and go back to my message again. What I’m now going to do is to put in a subject. So the subject will be Copy of presentation and let’s just suppose that I get to that point and I think, oh I’ve got to check where that presentation is. If I want to close this email message, I’m partway through writing it but I want to close it and check some details before I send it. As long as I don’t click the Send button and just close, Outlook says Do you want to save the changes? I’ll say yes and the message is now in my Drafts folder and at any stage if I want to just open it up again, I can just double click on the message and carry on working on it. Another very important point to make about this message is that when you’re working with multiple accounts the From box at the top here by default indicates you’re sending an email from your default account. In my case, that’s Toby Work. If I wanted to change the account that I was sending it from, click on the drop down and there is a list of my accounts and I can choose which of my accounts I want to send it from. On this occasion, I’m going to stick with Toby Work but it’s very straightforward to change the account there. So I’m going to send Don a copy of the presentation that I’ve prepared but I need to explain a few things about it as well so what I’m going to do now is type in my message. Now I’ve made some deliberate mistakes in my typing there. Don’t worry about those at the moment. But one of the things I’m going to include in the message is a hyperlink to a website, in this case © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 microsoft.com. All I need to do is to type in the URL in the usual kind of way. As soon as I get a space or an end of line, Outlook 2013 turns that into a hyperlink and then when Don gets the message, he’ll be able to click on that hyperlink provided he is able to read HTML formatted email and he’ll be able to go to that link that I’ve sent him. Now I sent him a link there to microsoft.com. Everybody knows that link anyway, but obviously I could include any URL that was valid in there. So there we are. I’ve typed a message. I’ve put in a hyperlink and I’ve included a couple of mistakes as well. So let’s deal with one or two of those shall we say features of this email. Now you may have noticed as I was typing there that Outlook automatically corrected one or two of my spelling mistakes. So when I typed in presentation, I actually typed it in wrongly but Outlook corrected pretty much instantaneously. But some of the other spelling mistakes where it couldn’t work out reliably what I’d actually meant to type, it’s left as underlined with a red squiggle and it didn’t know what to do when found U-T, ut, and it couldn’t work out what to do with O-F-F-C-E which is a bit of a surprise really. So what I can now do is to run a manual spell check. So if I click on the Review tab and click on Spelling and Grammar, and don’t forget the options that we looked at earlier on in the course related to spelling and grammar, you need to make sure you’ve got these set correctly for your requirements and your language and your locale. Click on Spelling and Grammar and it says what do you mean by ut? Do you mean U-T or U-S or Up or At or It or But? Now hopefully that list will include the word that we want. It actually has got that word. It’s got Out. But even if the word that I want isn’t in the list one of the things I can always do rather than just click it from the suggestions is to type it in. If I just typed in the O there, click on Change, it will accept that and move on to the next problem. Now I’d only got one suggestion here and that’s Office. So that’s fine. So that’s already selected, click on Change, and the spell check is complete. So from a spell checking point of view everything looks fine. However there is one word warning here which you should never forget and that is that just because something spell checks correctly it doesn’t mean that all the correct words are there. So if you look in the first line here, Here is a copy of that presentation. Sorry it’s so ling. Well, Ling is actually a word in the English language. Obviously, I don’t mean Ling I mean Long. So


Learn Outlook 2013 it’s always a good idea to proof read what you’ve written before you send it and I’m going to change that to Long which is what I’d intended. Now I also mentioned earlier on that you can format the text in an email message. And in fact, within Outlook 2013 there are some pretty sophisticated facilities for formatting email messages, including the use of themes and styles. Now generally speaking, the use of themes and styles in Outlook is outside the scope of this course but I’ll just show you some very basic formatting. Let’s suppose that I want to emphasize this Don’t forget. Well, if I click on Format Text, then I have a full set of formatting facilities here and I could for instance say well I’d like that to be bold. So I could select those two words and click on Bold. And similarly, I could say well let’s have it bold and italic and there we see those words pretty much emphasized. Now, of course, I can achieve the same thing using touch. And let me just demonstrate a little bit of the formatting using touch because we can also look at one or two features of touch that we haven’t seen so far. And that is that when you’re working with text in an email message using your fingers and touch, it can be very difficult to be accurate to position things, select things, and so on. And one of the best ways to overcome these problems of accuracy apart from switching to touch mode itself is to use pinch and stretch. So let’s suppose that I wanted to make Don’t forget bold and italic using touch. If you try to select those two words, you might find it quite difficult, particularly if you’ve got fairly fat fingers. Now let me just switch to touch mode, although strictly speaking that’s not necessary. It will help me to locate the commands. And then what I’m going to do is to use stretch to change the zoom within the text of the email message. So I put two fingers or a finger and thumb within the text, pull them apart, and you’ll see a display showing the zoom level. So supposing I got to about 250% roughly. Now you can see that I have a much closer view of all of the text. Let me just scroll down to the Don’t forget part. Now sweep across to just select those two words. Then I can use my fingers for bold and my fingers for italic. Let me just pinch back in again and again roughly into about 100%. You can see that I’ve achieved the same thing using my fingers and touch. And by the way, I’ve also seen there that there’s another word, Sight, where it’s got the wrong version of Site. But, of course, it passes the spell check. So there’s just one other thing to mention here and that is that apart from this formatting that I’ve just done a very small demonstration of in this section. If you go into the Options tab, on the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Options tab one of the groups there is the Themes Group, and from the Themes Group you can choose a theme for a message. So if you click on Themes, let’s try a very different theme. Let’s say the Ion theme. It changes the font. It changes the color scheme and so on. And then you can go in with either the text in general or a specific selection. You could do things like change the colors. You can go in and change the fonts. And you can go in and apply various effects. So you really have a lot of freedom here in terms of formatting email. Now as I said, this is not part of the current course. I’m going to leave you to experiment with that. So that’s all that we’re going to cover really on composing emails in the course now, except for one other topic and that’s the use of signatures that I’m going to look at briefly in the next section. So please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Email Signatures Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In the previous section, we created this email and there was just one thing left to do. Well, in fact, there are two things left to do but there’s really one new thing left to do and that is to look at putting a signature on an email. This is pretty straightforward. Obviously your signature will be particular to you and you may need more than one. If I click on Insert, one of the options on the Insert tab is that one, Insert Signature. There’s a little drop down next to it which would let me choose from my signatures when I’ve got a number setup. I haven’t got any setup at all at the moment though I’m going to set one up for Toby Work. So click on Signatures and I can create a new signature. Now on the right I can choose my default signature and I can associate a signature with a particular email account. So let’s start with New, type a name for this signature. I’m going to call this signature Toby Work and now in the main body down here, I can actually enter the details of the signature. Now typically the sort of thing I’d put in a signature would be a phone number, maybe a company name, maybe a mobile phone or cell phone number. So let me put in here. These are not, of course, real phone numbers, as you’ll realize. And then I could maybe put my company name. I may even choose to put my address in there as well. When I finish with that, that’s my signature, click on OK, and I’ve created a signature. Now at any time that I want to, I can go back into edit that signature. So if I click on the drop down again and select Signatures, Toby Work, I can edit that. See it’s selected down here. I’ve just realized that I forgot to put my email address in there so let me just type that in. Now I’m happy with that signature as it stands at the moment. Now I can associate it with one or more of my email accounts. Now for the toby.a account which is my default account at the moment, I don’t want to use that signature so I’m going to stick with none for that. But for my Toby Work account, I want to make this the default signature. Now apart from including it as the default signature with this particular account, so Toby Work will get the Toby Work signature, I can also specify that the signature should be used when I reply to or forward an email. So here under replies and forwards, I can also say that that signature should automatically be included. Now on this occasion, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to decide on the occasion whether I want to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 include a signature or not. But this setup he will ensure that for all new emails for my Toby Work account, the Toby Work signature will be used. So click on OK and now because I’d already created this particular email and it is an email from Toby Work account the signature won’t be automatically included. It would be on a new message for that account. So I need to manually insert that signature. So all I need to do is to go to the end of the email and then just click on the Signatures button in the drop down and choose Toby Work. That signature is now included as part of the email. Now just to show that this works okay, I’ve got my draft email still in progress. You can see the one in the drafts folder. I’ve just minimized it for the moment. But if I click on New Email note that if it’s from Toby Work, I get the signature automatically included. Whereas if I switch to my toby.a account and click on New Email, new email appears from toby.a but there’s no signature. I could, of course, create a signature to use with that account and then when I created a new email for that account, I’d get that signature. So just more thing to do now in relation to this email to Don; I want to attach this presentation. It’s pretty much the same as we’ve done attachments already. I could insert Outlook items if I was sending this email to people who all used Outlook or I can do Attach file. In this case, on my desktop I’ve put the presentation that I want to send, double click on that, and it’s now an attachment to this email. What happens when I click the Send button will depend on my Send and Receive settings. But with my current Send and Receive settings where Outlook 2013 will send immediately, then as soon as I click Send, the message goes from Drafts into Outbox, it is sent, and once it’s sent the message moves to Sent Items. If I don’t have send immediately set as my option, then send puts the message into the Outbox and whenever the next send does occur, which could be on a timer or it could be a manual send or a manual send as part of a send and receive, then the message will move to the Sent Items folder. So that’s it on signatures, attachments, and sending emails. In the next section, we’re going to look at receiving emails and in particular checking out what’s in the Inbox. So please join me for that.


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Video: Email Inbox Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at the email inbox. All email coming in to your installation of Outlook will go into one of your inboxes. If you have more than one email account, you’ll have an inbox for each of them. I’m currently looking at the inbox of my toby.a account and the first thing to note about each of the email inboxes is that on the status bar provided, you have the appropriate settings for this status bar you can always see at the bottom how many items are in the inbox. In my case in this account, there are 11 and it tells you how many of those email messages are currently unread. So I’ve got 11 incoming emails, one unread. And, of course, if I click on one of the other accounts such as the one associated with my Outlook data file, click on the inbox, I’ll see in that case that there are two items with one unread. But let’s go back to the toby.a account and look at that inbox. Now with 11 items and one unread, it’s going to be a pretty straightforward job for me to go through those and deal with those, and in the next section we’re going to look at the various ways I might want to deal with an email. But sometimes it’s actually quite difficult to either find a particular email or to decide what to deal with first. And so what we’re going to look at in this section is some of the tools you can use to help you find either a particular thing in your email inbox or to decide what to deal with first. So let’s look at a few aspects of the view of what’s in the inbox first. Well, first of all, it’s worth remembering that the Reading Pane currently on the right here is optional. You may or may not want the Reading Pane there. If you don’t have it, then you can either switch it on when you need it or to open a particular email and read all the contents all you have to do is to double click on the email. So if I select that email, I can see the contents on the right. This is actually just a response to an invitation anyway. But if I double click, the email is opened up and I’ve got full details of that email and I can actually take an action based on that email as we’ll see later on. So one thing I can always do is to switch off the Reading Pane and I’m going to do that now. So click on the View tab in the Layout Group, switch off the Reading Pane and straightaway I get a lot more information about every item that is in my inbox.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now one of the most important things about the inbox is that you should be able to identify the items that are currently unread because the title text and the main line of text you can see on the first item here is bold and usually differently colored to everything else; so you can immediately see that the one unread email is that one.

But also in Outlook 2013, there is a very

straightforward filter on the inbox. There is an All option where you see all messages in the inbox and there is an Unread option that only shows you the unread messages. So if you have a very large number of messages in the inbox, the use of that unread filter can be very useful. Now, of course, I can operate the inbox completely without using the Reading Pane. I can just choose a message, open it up as I showed you just now, and process it. But let’s look at some of the other ways that we might find a particular message. Let’s suppose somebody sent you a message and you’ve got dozens and dozens of messages in the inbox and it’s very difficult to find the one. You know it’s got something about a presentation in it. You can’t quite remember. Then you’ve got the search facility that we’ve already seen. So you can type in there a search term. But to the right of the Search box, there’s a little drop down that lets you choose what you want to search. So do you want to search the current folder? Do you want to search subfolders of this one, the current mailbox, all mailboxes, or all Outlook items? So if you were actually looking at the inbox but you actually wanted to find something that was somewhere in Outlook and you couldn’t even remember which folder it was in or maybe not even what sort of Outlook item it is, you could search all Outlook items for that term. So you could use the search here to look for a particular item in your inbox or indeed just about anywhere else in a very straightforward way. So let’s restrict this to the current mailbox but let’s look for presentation, and there we are. That’s all of the messages in the inbox that feature the word Presentation somewhere. And see there’s 9 out of the 11 items have got the word Presentation in them, and you can also see that Outlook highlights the term where it appears in each of those messages. When you finish with a particular search, just click on the Close Search button as we saw earlier in the course. Now the information that you can see here is arranged in columns and you can customize which columns of information are shown. If we take this particular one, click on the View tab, and click on View Settings, you can see this Advanced View Settings dialog and it lists the columns, group by, sort, filter, etc. Now let’s start with columns. The first column that’s shown is the © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 importance column and if you look closely, the very first heading there is Importance. The next one is Reminder. Icon is the third one. The icon tells you what sort of item this is. This particular one with like a calendar picture means it’s something to do with an appointment or a meeting whereas that one with the envelope is something to do with an email, probably is an email. And then next the one you have is who it’s from. Then you have the subject. So you could click on this Columns button here and change the order of or select different columns to show. Now I’m not going to go into that now but it’s a very straightforward job to change exactly which columns you see in your email inbox. You can then decide whether you want the emails grouped in some way. I’ll show you an example of grouping in a moment along with sorting. Currently they’re sorted by descending order of received. So the most recent emails are at the beginning of the list, the oldest ones are at the end. And then you have various other settings you can change, customize, etc. There is also an option right at the bottom to reset the current view to its original default settings. So you can customize the columns here and the sort order. What I want to look at here is the sort order. Now as I pointed out just now, these are currently sorted according to received date. So although it may not be immediately obvious these are sorted by received date. Supposing you wanted to sort them by From, the person they’re from. Note how with the date sorting you’ve got date today, date last week, date two weeks ago, date last month, and so on. If you click on the header From, watch what happens. Now you have them sorted by From. Now go right to the top there, from Hotmail calendar, from that, from that, from that, from Steve Brown one, from steve@tobyarnott, same person, different account, a whole of them. That sorts them From in one order.

If I click it again, it reverses the order.

It’s still sorted From but all the from

steve@tobyarnott’s are there, all the from Steve Brown’s are there, all the from Microsoft’s are there, and so on. And I can sort on any of these columns. So I could sort on Importance. I don’t actually have any high importance messages but I could also sort by whether they have attachments or not. And as I can see I’ve got one message with attachments and all the others have no attachments. So the sorting is very flexible. If you have the Reading Pane on, so let me put Reading Pane back on right. There to sort you use this little control here. It currently says By attachments, but if I click on the drop down, I can choose what I want to sort it on. So if I wanted to sort it by receive date, again I just click on Date which is the equivalent of receive date


Learn Outlook 2013 here and that puts it back into its original sort order. If I then switch the Reading Pane off again, I’m pretty much back where I started from. Now apart from the techniques I’ve just shown you, there are as usual many different ways of doing these things in Outlook.

So for instance, with the View tab selected, there is an

Arrangement Group here that can do things like reverse sort order, add columns to the display, and so on. Mostly these commands open up the controls you’ve already seen but then you’ve also seen the use of this Layout Group and so on. So there are plenty of other options to experiment with but I’ve covered the basics of the email inbox here and many of these techniques, you’ll find work in other folders as well. So you can extend a lot of this to other parts of Outlook 2013. So that’s it on looking at the email inbox. In the next section, we’re going to take a look at actions we can take based on incoming email. So please join me for that.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Email Actions Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at processing incoming and other emails; a process that many people nowadays call triage of email. And we’re going to take a few of the email messages that we saw in the previous section coming into my toby.a account and process those in a variety of different ways. Now first of all, I have a couple of messages here that are really just responses to meeting requests. So if I hover over one of these, say that one, notice that a delete icon appears on the right and the most straightforward thing I can do really is to delete an email. Now if I click on the Home Tab, note there is still a Delete button on the Home tab. So with any email that you’re dealing with, once that email is selected, you can always click delete there. But in Outlook 2013 there’s a very straightforward option, just click on the delete there and click on the delete there. Now, of course, all deleted emails will go into the deleted items folder and they can be restored from there if I need them until, of course, they are in turn deleted from the deleted items folder. So that is your backup really. That’s your way of getting back something you’ve deleted by accident or that maybe you’ve changed your mind about. Now the next thing I want to do is to take this email that Steve sent me, that one, and I’m going to forward it on to Sally so that she can see that Steve has accepted an invitation to a meeting. It’s a little bit outdated now but never mind. When I’m dealing with an item, if I can see enough information there that I don’t need to open it up then with that item selected some of the actions are available on the contextual menu. So if I right click on that item, I’ve got quite a lot of different actions available to me there. And some of the items, obviously a big overlap but some different ones as well are available on the tabs of the Ribbon. So if I wanted to forward that message apart from the option of double clicking to open it just so I could check it, read it, etc. Note that it includes the original message that I sent. And on the tab there Forward, Reply, etc. options, if I just know that I want to forward it, I don’t need to double click it to open it up. Then I could right click, click on Forward, choose a person to forward it to; that would be Sally, put her in the To. Maybe put a little FYI in there for Sally and send that message. Having forwarded the message on, I may want to file the message away. Now don’t forget earlier on in the course I created a couple of project folders here in my Outlook data file. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Supposing having forwarded that message, read, and understood the message myself I could just file it away. So let me file it in marketing initiative folder and that’s now safety filed away. Now there is a very important alternative here and that is that you can file messages as external files. So if I have a message like the one I have selected here, rather than just put it into one of my other folders for safe keeping, if I go into Backstage View and click on Save As, I can save it as an external file. Now there is a default Outlook message format for these files of MSG but there are alternatives as well. So I can, for instance, save it as a text only file or I could save it as an HTML file or a single file, HTML, an MHT file. So if you actually want to take a message out of Outlook, create it as a separate file and use it for some other reason outside Outlook that’s how to do it. Now on this occasion, I don’t need to save that outside so I’m going to cancel that. But it’s sometimes a useful thing to be able to do. I still have the same message selected. Note that we saw much earlier on in the course how to print a message. Just into Backstage View, click on Print, and then we have the preview facility on the right and we went through the options for printing email messages earlier on. Something else that often happens when you’re processing incoming mail is that you see an email message and you know you need to deal with it but you don’t really want to or you don’t have time to deal with it right now. What you really want to do is to give yourself a reminder to deal with it within a certain length of time. Now let’s take this particular email that’s highlighted here. I’m not going to delete it. I actually need to deal with this. I know what it’s about, of course, I could open it up and get the full text, but I know enough about it to know that it needs to be dealt with. Now if you look over towards the right, there is a flag. Currently the flag is grayed out but if I right click on the flag, I see a message that says Flag message. If I click on that, I flag that message for later attention and that will appear in a number of places. For instance, if I sneak a peek at my tasks, I’ll see that there is a message there which is flagged. You can see it up there, Please sign in to your account just there, the one I just flagged. So that gives me a way of keeping track of things that need attention. If I decide, okay well I now need to deal with that, click on that, it takes me to that message. And it opened it up for me and I can deal with it in whatever way I need to.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now I want to look at the most recent message, the unread message here from Steve Brown. And for this I’m going to switch the Reading Pane back on. So I’m going to put the Reading Pane on the right and I’m going to deal with the content of this message in two steps. First of all, the message includes a file. It’s actually a Microsoft Project project schedule. I don’t actually have Microsoft Project installed on this PC so I can’t open the schedule. If I did have it installed I could double click on that and that would open. So if the attachment to the message is in a format where I have a piece of software that can open it. So for instance, if it had been a Word file or a PowerPoint file, I could double click it to open it. But if you don’t have that, what you can do is right click on the message and you can click on Save As. You can save it elsewhere. Note the option just below there of Save all attachments which you can use to save all attachments in a particular place. But let’s just do the Save As for the single attachment on this occasion and I’m going to save it on to my desktop. That’s the file name, click on Save, and I’ve now put a copy of that file safely away. Some people when they do this will also remove the attachment from the incoming email so that when they file the email in Outlook they minimize the use of space for Outlook. On this occasion, I’m going to leave that Microsoft Project file attached to the email. The second step in dealing with this email is that I’m going to reply to Steve. In earlier versions of Outlook, to do that I would double click on the message, open it up, type in a reply. With Outlook 2013 there is a very straightforward set of functions; Reply, Reply All and Forward, and we’re looking at Reply in particular and this makes it very straightforward to do an inline reply. Now if I was doing a reply that would be an email message going back to Steve. That’s what I’m going to do. If Steve had copied this email to a number of other people, then if I did a Reply All, all those other people would get a copy of my reply to Steve. And we’ve already talked about Forward. So let’s click on Reply on this occasion. So within the Reading Pane, this doesn’t open a separate window. This is all done inline within the Reading Pane. I can now type in my reply to Steve. Earlier on in the course, we talked about putting a signature on replies. If I had a signature for replies for this account, then that would appear here. But I’m just going to type in here Thanks Steve and then I’m ready to send the reply straightaway. It’s really straightforward. Click on Send and my replies gone to Steve. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So that’s it on typical email actions. In the next section, we’re going to look at junk email so please join me for that.


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Video: Touch Action Bar Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to take a look at one of the new features of Outlook 2013 that really is dedicated to those of you who are going to use touch. One of the big problems for all of us nowadays is the pure amount of email that we get and the need to quickly sort through email, remove the junk, etc. and try to make sure that the things that actually need attention get attention. If you’re using a touch device then moving things around, dealing, deleting, forwarding, and so on can be significantly slower than when you’re using mouse and keyboard. But a new feature, the touch action bar that is present in Outlook 2013 can really help you to whiz through your email quickly using your thumbs primarily. Now this feature is only visible in touch mode. So I’m just going to switch into touch mode and show you how it works. So first of all, let me collapse the Folder Pane then what I’m going to do is to go into touch mode and watch what happens when I go into touch mode. I get a set of buttons up here on the right which is the action bar. And the way that most people are using this arrangement is that if you’re using a tablet or other touch device, you can step through with your left thumb, the emails, and with your right thumb, you can operate the buttons on the action bar there. Now what the buttons on the action bar do, the top one is Respond so that’s how you’re going to reply to an email. The next one is Delete. Then we’ve got Move, then we’ve got Follow Up, then we’ve got Mark as Unread. So let’s suppose I’m going to go through this selection of emails here. Let’s start with that one from Steve Brown. Just select it with my thumb. Let’s suppose I want to move it to Steve’s inbox so that’s Inbox Steve, tap with my right thumb on that move, Inbox Steve I select from the list that comes out. That one’s moved. The next one is a Facebook message, select that, right thumb, delete. Next one another Facebook message, delete. Outlook Team. Now that’s one I need to do something about so I’m going to flag that for follow up. Tap on the Follow Up, that’s now marked for follow up. Next one Facebook, delete. Now using thumbs like that it’s actually very, very simple to whiz through and process a lot of messages very quickly using a touch base device. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 Now don’t forget that when we’re using this action bar, we’re talking about a small subset of the things that you might want to do with a mail message. If you take one of the mail messages, say this Facebook message here, tap and hold then you are going to bring up the normal full list of options that are available using a contextual menu. And, of course, you’ve still access to the Ribbon to get the absolutely full list of available options. But in my experience so far even that small list of items on the action bar covers a very good proportion of the things that I generally want to do with received email messages. And just one other thing, I can still use the Folder Pane of course to take me to a different folder, say Inbox Steve. Having selected Steve’s inbox and the message that I moved just now, if I tap on that to select it and go into Respond, the top option, and reply then I’m presented with an inline reply facility and I can type into the space available there using the onscreen keyboard for example my reply to Steve, send it, and so on. So even if it comes down to doing a reply it’s very, very slick and quick using this approach. So that’s it. If you’re using a touch device I suggest you try that way of triaging your email and I think you’ll find that once you get too used to it, it can really save you a lot of time. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Junk Email Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at junk mail, sometimes referred to as spam. And there are some pretty good facilities in Outlook 2013 to help you to deal with junk mail. If you are already using or you plan to use a third party product such as one of the Symantec or Norton products, a McAfee product, a Kaspersky product. There are a number of really good products available. Then to some extent you need to mesh together the use of those and your use of Outlook 2013. Now I have no idea which of those products you’re going to be using so I’m really going to focus here on the facilities within Outlook. But you do need to be careful. Most of the good manufacturers of antivirus products will have some instructions on how to setup Outlook to work alongside their product. They may even have a piece of software that connects their product and Outlook together in some way. But there are quite a few of them and I certainly can’t go into them all here. So as I say I’m going to concentrate on the Outlook aspects of this. Now the first thing to note is that on the Home tab in the Delete Group there is a Junk button with a drop down, and from that drop down you click on Junk Email Options. And what we’re going to do, first of all, is to enable junk email options; so click on that and you come up with the Junk Email Options dialog for the selected account. I’ve got my toby.a account selected at the moment. Now this particular dialog has got a number of tabs and I’m going to explain to you what these tabs are. But, first of all, let me just look at the titles. Now one of the fundamental aspects here is some lists. And we have a first list which is a safe senders list and the safe senders list is basically a list of people who you are happy to receive email from. Basically you consider any email you get from those people to be safe, and one of the things you can do when you’re working with Outlook 2013 is to add somebody to your safe senders list. Adding them to that list will mean that any email you get from that person will be considered safe and won’t be treated as junk. Now the safe senders list can contain individual email addresses. So it might be an individual person or it could be a domain. You could say anybody from this domain is safe.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now alongside the safe senders list there is a blocked senders list and the blocked senders list is if you like the opposite. Email you get from names on this list or from email addresses from domains on this list is automatically blocked and will always be treated as junk mail. Now in addition to the safe senders, that’s the good senders, and the blocked senders, that’s the bad people, you have the safe recipients list. And you consider any email sent to addresses or domain names on the safe recipients list that will never be treated as junk mail either. So you’re always happy to send email to those people. Now the last tab is also quite an important one. It’s called International and it covers two specific but very wide ranging situations. First of all, if you want to exclude all email from a country or region with a specific top level domain code, you can. So for instance, if you wanted to stop all email from any domain code that ends dot-mx click on the blocked top level domain list, you could say go down to .mx and you’d effectively say if you tick that and clicked on OK, I don’t want to receive any email from Mexico. So any domain that ends with dot-mx, top level domain code is .mx I don’t want to receive. So that’s a very drastic way of stopping any top level domains. And similarly the second list, the blocked encoding list says I do not want to receive any email that is encoded in this way such as Arabic, Japanese. These may be particular character sets or alphabets that you can’t deal with anyway or you might just say well even if I can deal with those I wouldn’t understand what they were anyway so there’s not really any point in delivering them to me. So you can block either or both of those and choose from the available list to be specific about what you don’t want to see. So having seen those let’s go back to that first Options tab again. Now basically the settings here give you grades of protection and at the moment and by default, I’ve got the lowest level here. No automatic filtering. Mail from blocked senders is still moved to the junk email folder. So if I specify that somebody’s a blocked sender, the email will still be accepted but it’ll be put in the junk email folder. I’ll be able to look in the junk email folder later, maybe just check that what’s in there really is junk. If I were to choose the next setting which is low, then Outlook 2013 starts to use a little bit of its inbuilt intelligence and it will move the most obvious junk mail to the junk email folder. Now it © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 will be using those lists but it will also use some intelligence as well. If I move to high most, junk email is caught but some regular mail may be caught as well. Now in this setting, it still uses intelligence but it’s a little bit more Draconian in what it does. It’s if you like it’s a little bit more suspicious and there’s an increased chance that regular mail will get moved into your junk mail folder or folders. Now safe senders, you’ll still be fine. Blocked senders will still be blocked. But there is an increased chance that people who perhaps you haven’t defined in any list but are actually perfectly safe people to send to you they will get moved into junk mail. So you need to check your junk mail folder more often. Safe list only is one where only mail from people or domains on your safe senders list or safe recipients list will be delivered to your inbox. So if somebody isn’t on the safe senders list or the safe recipients list then their email will just not get to your inbox. It’ll finish up in your junk mail. Now other very important control in this dialog is this one, this checkbox, Permanently delete suspected junk email instead of moving it to the junk email folder. If you’re very confident in the setup of your junk mail options, then you can check this box and instead of junk mail being moved to the junk mail folder, it will be permanently deleted so it’s out of your system. You won’t even necessarily notice it’s ever been there. I tend not to have that set. Partly because I’ve got good antivirus software running as well and partly because occasionally I find that something’s been marked as junk mail that isn’t really and I am prepared to spend the time just going through the junk mail from time to time and making sure that nothing has slipped through. But that’s very much a case of personal preference. The other thing you probably noticed was that when we switched on low, first of all there are these other two checkboxes were checked and either or both of these you may want to disable. This one disables links and other functionality in fishing messages. This is one where it’s trying to get you to log in to a site like a bank site that isn’t really the bank site. It’s actually disguising itself as something else. And this one is one where there are suspicious domain names in email addresses, something attempt to pretend to be one domain when they’re really something else, perhaps a slightly different spelling of a domain name that you would otherwise consider to be safe.


Learn Outlook 2013 So these are basically the various options that you have. I generally have mine set at either low or high. Let’s put it at high for now. I’m going to leave these two checked and that one unchecked. Click on OK and then what I need to do is to basically process a couple of my incoming emails and I’ll show you what you do. Once you’ve done this once or twice, you’ll find that it becomes more and more automatic. Although from time to time you will need to look at something a little more closely. So for the toby.a account let’s now process some incoming mail. Microsoft email I consider to be safe. If I right click on that particular message and click on the junk option near the bottom, I get an option; do I want to block the sender? No. Never block sender? Of course. Never block sender’s domain? Now in this case anything @microsoft.com I’m going to trust. So I click on Never block sender’s domain. The sender of the selected message has been added to your safe senders list. I’m going to just suppress that message, click on OK. Let me just go back into junk options again, click on safe senders, low and behold @email.microsoft.com. Anything that I get from an email address that ends like that will now be considered to be safe. Now let’s look at a different example. What about Steve? Now Steve is actually writing from one of my domains but let’s treat Steve as a special case. Let’s say that for Steve, click on Junk, Never block sender. Now let’s go back into junk again. Let’s look at the safe senders. Now I’ve got a domain, @email.microsoft.com, and an individual, [email protected]. And that’s basically how it works. If I also had an incoming mail from somebody that I didn’t want to get mail from, I’d block them and they’d appear on my block senders list. So that’s it, setup of junk mail processing in Outlook 2013. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Stationery Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to take a look at using Outlook Stationery which can really improve the appearance of the emails that you send and can also let you very much personalize the way that you communicate with other people using Outlook. Now the first thing to be aware of is that in order to use stationery in your email messages, you much have your email message format set to HTML. I showed you how to do this earlier in the course, quick recap. Back into Options, choose the Mail Page. Not far from the top, there’s an option here, Compose messages in this format. That has to be set to HTML. If you try to use the stationery with another setting, rich text or plain text, then you’ll be told that you can’t do it and that the themes are not available. So make sure you’ve got that set to HTML first. Now when it comes to applying stationery to your emails, you can either by default apply the stationery to all of your emails or you can do it selectively. I’ll look at the selective case in a little while. Let’s now look at setting up stationery to go on all emails by default. I’m still on the Mail Page of Outlook Options where we’ve already checked that we’ve got our message format as HTML. Go down a couple of sections and you get to the Stationery and Fonts button. Now click on there and the Signatures and Stationery dialog appears. We looked at the email signature tab here separately earlier on in the course. This time we’re just looking at the stationery part. Now on personal stationery at the top at the moment theme, no theme is currently selected and what you can do to begin is to choose a theme. Now the range of themes is actually quite large in Outlook 2013 and they’re quite different not only in terms of coloring and so on but in the features that each of them has. Some of them also have features that are controlled by these little checkboxes down at the bottom here. So if I choose an example, let’s say Bears, Bears is really just background stationery. It doesn’t have any specific fonts. It doesn’t really use any of the features that are controlled down here. So the boxes down here are grayed out. If I choose another one like Blueprint, then those are not grayed out and I see that I’ve got these checkboxes here enabled and able for me to use. Now the middle one there, Active Graphics, controls whether any little images that are active are enabled or not. If you have that checkbox checked, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 then if there are any animated GIFs in use within this particular theme, then they will be animated in your email. So you can actually send emails with little animated characters in them. If you uncheck that, then anything that is animated becomes unanimated. Background image controls whether the background image is used. In this case, the background image is a sort of square grid but I can still disable that if I want to or enable it. There’s actually quite a long list of themes here and if you want to try one of these. Some of them look fine; some of them are absolutely over the top. Some of them I quite like some of them I don’t. But obviously it’s very much a matter of personal taste. But let’s suppose I choose a theme. Let me try Rice Paper. Click on OK and that’s now my adopted theme. I can see the name on the right there, Rice Paper. Now depending on which theme I’ve chosen, it may or may not have its own fonts and I can either say in this drop down below it, Use the themes font or I can use the font that I specify for my own emails. I can either say use my font when I’m replying or forwarding. So in other words if I’m creating a new mail, I’m going to use the themes font but I’m going to use my own font when I’m replying or forwarding. Or I can say always use my fonts. So I’m going to stick with using the themes font at the moment. I’m setup for that. I’m going to click on OK, click on OK again to save that option. Now I’m going to create a new email. Click on New Email and you can see how the Rice Paper background is already shown and the font that Rice Paper uses and any other related features such as the bullets to use in bullet lists and so on, they’ll all be utilized whenever I’m now composing an email. So having set that up as my stationery for emails, it’s quite easy to switch it off again of course. Back into Options and then all you need to do on the Mail Page is go back to Stationery and Fonts and the Personal Stationery tab just change the theme back to right at the top No theme, and then I’m back to how I was before. Now if you just want to use stationery as a one off exercise, it’s pretty straightforward. Don’t actually click on New Email in that case to create a new email. If you go to New Items and click on the button there, one of the items right down near the bottom there is Email Using and then you can say More Stationery and this will enable you to go straight into that Theme or Stationery dialog, choose a theme, and just use it as a one off for an individual email. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 And that’s it on stationery in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Rules Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at setting up rules and rules are a very good way of saving time by automating repetitive tasks. I’m going to demonstrate how to setup a rule and how rules work using an example based on my Microsoft account. So first of all, I’ve selected my Microsoft account, go to Mail, click on the Home tab, and then in the Move Group, I’ll see the Rules button. Click on the Rules button and I have Manage Rules and Alerts, and from here I can manage my rules and alerts, including creating a new rule which is what I’m going to do here. Now the first thing to note is that the top option there is Apply changes to this folder. If I click on the drop down, I’ve got Inbox for each of my email accounts. So although I made a point of selection my Microsoft account first, if I hadn’t done, I could’ve selected it here. When I click on New Rule, I’m going to create a rule and it’s going to be added to a list of rules here. And an important point to note in the header here is Rule (applied in the order shown). So what happens is as you build up a selection of rules, they’re actually going to be applied in sequence and a rule may be applied to one message and then you may have a second rule that applies to a different message or perhaps a second rule that will apply to the same message. But you’ll see how this works more clearly when we’ve created our first rule. So let’s click on New Rule. So I now see the first page of the Rules Wizard and there’s a selection of buttons down at the bottom, Back, Next, Finish, Cancel, that I can use to control the wizard. The first thing I do, step one, is to select a template for my rule. Now there are two groups of standard rules and these are the rules that are probably the most used rules. There are Stay organized rules and there are Stay up to date rules. What I’m going to concentrate on in this section is the third type which is Starting from a blank rule. So these are the rules with the maximum flexibility. I’m going to come back to an example of that in a couple of minutes from now. But let’s start with one of the straightforward templates. Let’s take the very first one. Move messages from someone to a folder. Now these are actually rule templates which as you expect means that you get the basic rule and then you’ve got a couple of things that you can fill in. And in the bottom section of the dialog, there is a description of the rule. Now with that rule selected, © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 let’s just read the description. Apply this rule after the message arrives from and then people or public group is underlined, looks like a link, move it to the specified folder, again specified looks like a link, and stop processing more rules. Let’s talk about that last phrase here, And stop processing more rules. When you are applying rules to incoming messages or indeed to outgoing messages, you can decide that if a certain message satisfies the conditions, the criteria for the rule to be applied, then once you executed whatever that rule says, you don’t execute any of the other rules. I mentioned just now about the sequence of rules. Well, you can stop processing rules at any time or you can omit this phrase. What happens then is that even though you’ve applied one rule to a message, you might apply a second or a third rule, subject of course to any criteria that might be included in those later rules. So let’s start by taking this standard first rule, Move messages from someone to a folder, and let’s now use it as a template. So first of all, From people or public group. Click on the link and up comes a little Rule Address dialog where we can choose the person who might be sending us email and where we’re saying if the message comes from this person and the person we’re going to choose is Steve Brown. So let’s choose Mr. Steve Brown, click on OK. You can choose more than one person. You’re not restricted to a single person sending you an email. Now the rule has changed to Apply this rule after the message arrives from and then it says from Steve. And the rule next says Move it to the specified folder. Click on Specified. Now I’ve got a specific folder setup here, Inbox Steve. That’s the one I’m going to use, click on OK. So my rule now says Apply this rule after the message arrives from Steve, move it to the Inbox Steve folder. He’s got his very own inbox folder on my machine for me to deal with messages from Steve selectively or perhaps in a batch and stop processing more rules. So this is the only thing I’m going to do. Click on Next. Now although we started from a template with this rule, if we’d started from a blank rule we wouldn’t have actually ultimately have had any more flexibility because even with a template, when you go on to the next page of the Rules Wizard, you are given a list of additional conditions that you may want to apply. Now at the moment, the only condition we’ve got applied is From people or public group which is now from Steve, but I could apply any of these other conditions as well. So for instance, I could check the one that says Sent only to me and how the rule is affected is that both of these conditions then must be met. So it said Apply this rule after the message arrives, sent only to me and from Steve. And you can build up pretty complex rules by applying more and more of these conditions. Now I’m going to © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 come back to that in a moment. I want to just get this rule up and running first. So let me now click on Next. Now in the Next, I get the actions and here there are two checkboxes checked. One of them is Move it to the specified folder and the other one is Stop processing more rules. So Move it to the Inbox Steve folder and Stop processing more rules. I could do something else if I wanted to. Instead of saying move it to the specified folder, I could say delete it. Click on Next. I can specify exceptions. So I talked just now about a rule that says If sent only to me. There’s another rule here that says Except if only sent to me. So I could apply an exception. As I choose from these various options, you note how the description of the rule gets updated down at the bottom there. Click on Next again. I’ve now finished specifying my rule. I give it a name. The default name in this case is Steve’s full email address, including his name and then the actual email address itself. I could just call it the Steve Rule or any name I wanted really. And then step two on this page is to say what options I want set. There are three options here. Do I want to run this rule now on messages that I already have? So if I’ve already got some messages in my inbox folder, I could apply this rule right now. Do I want to turn the rule on now? So do I want to start applying this rule from now? You can set rules up and either not enable them straightaway or maybe if you were, say, leaving or you wanted to change things for a while you could switch the rule off for a while, switch it back on again. And then the third option is Create this rule on all accounts. If I want to use this rule for all three of my email accounts, I’d check that box. So when I’ve made my decision, I’m going to stick with the defaults on these three, I click on Finish, and there’s my rule in place and ready to use. Now one of the important things you will have gathered already I’m sure is that when you’ve got a number of rules, you need to get them in the right order because if you’re going to stop processing with some rules and not with others, you need apply them in the right order. So there are a pair of buttons here for moving the rules up and down to get them in the right sequence. There’s also a button here, Run rules now you can use where you could actually take a rule and run it instantaneously and not just when a particular message arrives. So that’s creating a rule using one of the standard rule templates. What I want to do next is to create more or less the same rule really but I want to do it from a blank rule and I want to do two things in the same rule.


Learn Outlook 2013 Now it’s important to realize that what I’m doing here I could do by amending the existing rule. So I could select it and do Change Rule and do everything that I’m doing in this second demonstration. But let me just take it from scratch with another new rule. So it’s New Rule, Start from a blank rule, Apply rule on messages I receive. I can apply rules on messages I send, particularly filing messages away or perhaps filing them for action and so on. But let’s say I’m going to stick with applying rule on messages I receive. Note that the rule description only says at this stage Apply this rule after the message arrives. Click on Next. Now what are we going to do? We’re going to say From people or public group, and the people or public group is going to be Steve again so that’s fine. Click on Next. Now choose the action. Well, I want to forward it to Sally. So, Forward it to people or public group. So let’s forward it to Sally. And I want to move it to the specified folder so I’m going to again move it to the Inbox Steve folder and I want to Stop processing more rules which is down at the bottom there. Click on Next. Now I come to the exceptions. I’m not going to have any exceptions to this rule so click on Next again. Now let’s give it a better name, Steve forward and file for action. Let’s call it that. I’m going to leave those three options with their default values as I did before and that’s it so click on Finish. Now I have two rules in place. Now clearly if those two could interact or depend in some way, I’d need to get the sequence correct but I’m going to disable the first one and what I’m going to do is run the new one. But before I do, I’ll click on OK. Let me just show you. In the inbox here, I’ve got a message from Steve. Now normally, once that rule is enabled, it will be auctioned as soon as email arrives. But this is a message from Steve that I’ve had probably for three or four hours now. So let’s go back into the rules. Let’s take that particular rule and let’s run it now and see what happens. So click on Run rules now. Steve forward and file for action, click on Run now. It applies it to that inbox and you won’t be surprised to learn that it’s been moved to the Steve Inbox and a copy of it has been forwarded to Sally which is exactly what I wanted to happen. So that is basically how you create, modify, and apply rules in Outlook 2013. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Quick Steps Toby: Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, we’re going to take a look at Quick Steps, a feature that introduced in Outlook 2010 and which to some extent appears a little bit like the rules feature. The difference with quick steps is that you can define a sequence of steps to be performed but there are no conditions attached to these. It’s basically a way of taking a fixed set of steps and making them into a sequence that you can operate with as little interaction on your part as possible. Now in order to demonstrate quick steps what I’m going to do is use an example related to my board presentation project. As part of working on that project, I periodically send an email to other members of the team and whenever I send an email to them, I want to file it away in a folder I’ve already got setup on my Microsoft account called Board Presentation.

So the

sequence is create and email, and then file I away in Board Presentation. When I create the email, I’m going to send it to the other two members of my team, to Steve and to Sally. And of course, I could setup a distribution list for them but I don’t actually have a distribution list. But as you’ll see that isn’t really going to be a problem. So to access quick steps, you need to be in mail. I’m in mail in my Microsoft account. And to access all of the available options, click on, say, the inbox there. Quick Steps Group is in the middle of the Home tab and click on the drop down here at the bottom right of the little gallery and you have six standard quick steps. Now in fact really the last one is more of a create new quick step. And then you also have an option here, New quick step, which gives you options for starting off your own quick step procedure. And you also have Manage quick steps which takes you into a dialog where you can manage the quick steps that you’ve created. Now what I’m going to do is to demonstrate quick steps with one particular example, but let me just briefly talk about some of the standard ones. The first one there, Move to question mark. You can setup this quick step to move the selected item to a specific folder. The significance of the question mark there is that the first time you run it you’ll be asked what that folder is. To Manager is a quick step that you can use to forward a message to somebody else without deleting it. Team email is the one that you can use to send email to members of a team. It creates the message and puts in the addressees as well. Done is a quick step which basically marks a © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 selected message as complete, marks it as read, and moves it to a designated folder. And then Reply and delete pretty much tells you what it does. It enables you to reply to a message and delete it as well. Now what we’re going to do is to do team email, so let’s click on Team email. So first of all, let’s give it a better name. Let’s call it and then it’s a new message. It’s checked there for a new message. Now let’s decide on who we’re going to send this email to. It’s going to go to the other members of the team so let me just go to my contacts list in my Microsoft account. It’s Steve and Sally. Okay. And that is basically it. I’ve setup a quick step. So I’m going to save this and then we’ll try it out. Okay let’s try it out. Let’s click on Board Presentation and as you can see I get a blank email created. It’s already addressed to the two other members of the team from me and it’s ready for me to type the subject in. Now that already saves me a certain amount of time if I do say ten emails a day to members of the team, each time it’s not only going to save me a little bit of time but it reduces the chance of making a mistake, forgetting one of the people to send it to. Now of course, I could setup a distribution list for the members of the team but you can also set other options when you’re creating an email like this as I will show you next. So I’m not actually going to send this one. Let’s close this one down and let us amend the quick step that we’ve already created. So I’ll close this without sending it. Now in the Quick Steps Group, you’ve got a couple of options. If you look at the little drop down there, one of the options is Manage Quick Steps. You could do that or we’ve got a Dialog Box Launcher in the bottom right hand corner of the group. It does the same thing. So if I go to Board Presentation and click on Edit, I can edit the quick step that I’ve already created. And one of the things that I can do, if I look at Show Options here, Show Options I can choose other options for this message. Now, for instance, if I knew that whenever I sent them a message, I was going to put as the subject or at least the beginning of the subject Board Presentation, colon, and then I could just type the east of the subject at the end there. I could also say that in terms of importance anything to do with the board presentation is of high importance. And then I could also put in the beginnings of the text. That’s fine. Let me do Save, click on OK. Let’s try that


Learn Outlook 2013 again. Now what you can see is I’ve got the beginnings of the text so I can really no longer need to have to worry about typing in the text. I’ve got the beginnings of the subject and so on. Now I’m not going to send this one either. I’m just going to demonstrate one other thing here. If again I go back into Manage, go into edit that again. One of the other options you have here is you can actually create a keyboard shortcut to make that even easier for you to use. And I’m not going to go into this now but just to demonstrate it’s possible, if you have a particular action that you’re performing using a quick step, you could add a subsequent action as well. So you can choose from a range of subsequent actions that will all be covered within the same quick step. Now clearly you need to be careful about this, about which messages you are for instance deleting, and if you’re categorizing messages and so on. But you can build up these quick steps to make them quite complex and still potentially each of them operated with a single keyboard shortcut. So let me cancel that now. I’m not going to make anymore changes. Click on OK. Let’s try that once more. Let’s just check if it works okay, just a test, and then after where it says that I’ll say Test message, send it, and that should be fine. If I look in my Sent Items now I’ll now see that the test message has gone to Steve and Sally. So there we are. That’s a demonstration of quick steps. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Outlook Journal Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to just introduce you to the journal in Outlook 2013 and I’m going to begin by talking about the journal for those of you who’ve used earlier versions of Outlook. As Microsoft themselves say, the use of the journal has steadily declined over time. And in Outlook 2013, the use of the journal is significantly deprecated.

There is no longer any

automatic journaling in Outlook 2013 and so the only type of journaling we have is manual journaling. Now some people do still use journaling and I think it’s still useful to know what journaling can do for you. But I’m only going to spend a little bit time on it on this course just to show you the basics because it really is quite a minority interest nowadays. One group of people that may well find the journal useful are people who work on the basis of billable hours though. So I’m going to show you the features that may be particularly relevant to people in that situation. So, first of all, what is the journal? The journal is a mechanism for keeping track of what you’ve done and when you did it. In earlier versions of Outlook, it could do this automatically and it could also interact with some of the other components of Office. So for instance, it could interact with things that you were doing in Microsoft Word.

But as I said earlier this

functionality is really quite reduced in Outlook 2013 and now it’s primarily a way of keeping track of interactions you’ve had using Outlook. And it can keep track not only of the kinds of interaction that we’ve looked at so far such as sending and receiving emails, but it can also be used to track things like phone calls. So if you are in the situation of charging clients on the basis of billable hours, it’s really quite a useful way of keeping track of say how long a particular phone call took. So let’s look, first of all, at how you access the journal. Now presumably to reflect its reduced situation in life, the journal in Outlook 2013 is actually quite tricky to find until you know where it is. But if you go down to the Navigation bar where it says Mail, Calendar, etc., click on the three dots; one of the options is Folders. Click on Folders to see the folder list. You see a folder list for each account and some of the accounts, including my work account there, Outlook data file one has got a journal. But also my Microsoft account


Learn Outlook 2013 has got a journal and I’m going to use the one in my Microsoft account. So it’s that one. Journal, this computer only it says. So, first of all, let me click on Journal and we’ll see what’s in it. And what we see at the moment is that the journal is completely empty. It says we didn’t find anything to show here. Now there are a few ways of putting things into the journal and let me show you a couple of those ways and then I’ll explain one of the reasons you might use the journal and how you might use it. So let’s look at the inbox here for my Microsoft account. Let’s take that calendar item there which was a reminder about a meeting. If I select something like that and just drag it on to the journal, it gets journaled. I get a journal entry item here automatically. I can type something into it but basically it has that marketing initiative weekly meeting reminder there. And then I have a number of options I can use when I’m actually entering this journal entry. Now for the moment, I’m just going to take this one as it is and click on Save and Close. And if I now click on Journal again, what I’ll see is that I have a journal entry and the journal entry is marked in time. So I received that message on Thursday, April 11th approximately, roughly in the middle of the day. So I can see against the timeline when I got that email message which was a reminder. So that’s one way of journaling items, adding items to the journal. Now I mentioned earlier that one way that the journal can be very useful is in terms of recording things like billable hours and activities working on a project or an account. And what I’m going to demonstrate now is that for a particular project, this board presentation project that we’re working on, I’m going to just keep a track not only of all the incoming and outgoing emails but I’m also going to keep track of things like phone calls. Now in this particular case, that may not mean that I’m going to bill somebody for the time but maybe just so I know what proportion of my own time I’ve used on that project. Apart from the method I’ve just shown you for adding an Outlook item to the journal, I can manually create journal entries and I could manually create a journal entry for a phone call. On the Home tab when I’ve got journal selected, right on the left there’s Journal Entry. If I click on Journal Entry, it brings up a manual journal entry and I can give it a subject. I can choose a type. It defaults here to phone call, the last one that I used. Many others; I can have things like putting a note in, creating a task, and so on. But I’m going to stick with phone call and I’ve even © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 got a little timer. So I’m going to start the timer now and while I do a couple of other things, I’m going to leave the timer running and pretend that I’m on the phone all the time this is going on. If I get an interruption and I want to pause the timer and restart it, I’ve got that there as well. But at the moment, I’m just going to leave the timer running and my subject is going to be Steve rearrangements for presentation. There we go; spelling mistake there. Okay. Now when I come to save that, obviously it will be journaled but I want to make sure that it’s against this project and one of the things I have here on the Journal Entry Tab when I’m manually creating a journal entry is I can categorize, and categorization as we saw much earlier on in the course is a good way of setting up projects and so on.

So if I categorize that I’ve already got my board

presentation project setup, if I click on Board Presentation I’ll see the color bar there, the blue for the board presentation project and then when I come to save this particular entry, it will be saved against that. So I’m going to minimize that. I’m not going to save it for the moment. I’ll save it in a little while. And let’s go back now to my Steve Inbox. Now Steve Inbox is an inbox we’ve setup specifically for things for Steve and the one I’m looking at here is again specifically about that board presentation. So let me now just drag that on to the journal as well. So I’m journaling this particular item as well. Again journal entry, I can add or modify as necessary. No I’m just going to save it as it is. Let me click back now on the journal. You can see now that I have two items in there on the journal now. Now let me go back to that phone call after I left it running for a short period of time. Okay, I’ve clocked up ten minutes on the phone call. So let’s do a Save and Close, and the phone call is journaled as well now and you can see it down there. Now one of the things to note here when you’re looking at the journal is that the journal currently is grouped according to entry type. So I’ve got an entry type of email messages first, then an entry type of phone call. If you go to the View tab when you’re looking at the journal, you can arrange it in different ways and one of the ways you can arrange it is by category. So if I clicked on categories, I would effectively given the way that I’m using categories I would divide it into projects. So the two things I’ve currently journaled in relation to the board presentation project are shown here and if I look at one of them such as this phone call, double click to open it up, I can see that it was a ten minute phone call. I can see what time it happened. © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 So you can see that that’s a pretty good basis on which to keep track of a project and possibly to keep track of billable time, etc. Now there’s just one other thing to mention in relation to the journal in case you do decide that you might want to try to use it. You can, of course, incorporate it into rules in Outlook. So for instance, you could as a matter of course if say board presentation was in the subject of an email message or if the category was board presentation, you could actually make a point of automatically moving an email message into the journal, for example. So although the journal can’t be automated quite in the same way that it used to be, you can achieve quite a high level of automation using the rules in Outlook 2013. So that’s it on the journal from me for now. I’ll see you in the next section.


Learn Outlook 2013

Video: Mail Merge using Word Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In this section, I’d like to take a look at mail merge using Microsoft Word. One of the complications with demonstrating mail merge from Outlook is that most of the work involved in mail merge is generally in the product, the application that is actually doing the composition of the letter or the creation of the envelopes or whatever it might be. Now you may use all sorts of different pieces of software to do this, although probably quite a few of you use Microsoft Word. But the complications come into the fact that for example different people have different versions of Word and also that your knowledge of Word may or may not support the ability to do a mail merge. So what I’m going to do in this section is really just to show you the general approach and the general principles with a very simple example. We’re just going to create some mailing labels. In fact, we’re going to create some index cards as a very simple example of a mail merge just to give you the general principle so that you know how to get started and then if you’re knowledge of Word is good enough, then you’re going to be able to pick up at this point and I’m sure mail merge very successfully. So the first thing we’re going to do is to go to the contacts, the people for my Microsoft account and do a mail merge to create an index card for each of them. So click on People and then the contacts here. I’ve actually got them shown here, let me just move that over, in Business Card View and I think there are about seven or eight of them. There we are. Most of them I have some kind of address for, some of them I don’t. Some I have company, some of them I have home address and so on. So they’re the ones to use. I could select a subset of them but I’m not going to at this stage. I’m just going to do a mail merge to all of them. On the Home Tab in the Actions Group, middle button there, Mail Merge; mail merge contact. So, first of all, am I going to merge all the contacts in the current view or only selected contacts? Well, I’m going to merge all of the contacts in the current view. If I want to filter the contacts in some way, then I can apply a filter and a select subset of the contacts. Now I may want to mail merge them into a new document or into an existing document. And if I specify existing document, I can browse here and it will look for an existing Word document. But I’m going to do a new document on this occasion. And in terms of the contact data I’m going © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 to use, I can use an existing file. When I generate the data for these contacts, I could store it in a file and I could use that same file at some point in the future or I can use a file that I created before. Now on this occasion, I’m not going to save a data file and I’m not going to use an existing data file. I’m just going to use all of these contacts that I’ve got in view at the moment. The next option is merge options. What sort of document do I want to produce? I have a choice of form letters, mailing labels, envelopes, or catalogue. I’m going to go for mailing labels and I’m going to merge to a new document. Now if I were say creating form letters, so say I’ve got these sort of eight, nine, ten contacts and I’m going to send each of them a letter. I really would have sort of two documents. I’d have the letter that I’m going to use as my source letter and then for each of them I’d have the letter individually addressed to them. Now that set of letters individually addressed to them is the merge to document and on this occasion it’s going to be a new document. I could add it to an existing document if I wanted to. But they’ll all be generated in one document that I can then print out and then in the case of letters they’d each get a letter. In this case, they’ll each get a label or an index card. So I’m going to produce one document which has got all of these index cards in it. I could then print it on to the appropriate material, card probably, and then my index cards will be made. So that’s all the settings I need. Now I click on OK and one thing that will happen is that Microsoft Word will start up. So you get this message from Word. I’m sorry it doesn’t quite all fit on the screen but you can see all of the words. Outlook created a mail merge document and prepared your contact data for you. To complete the setup for mailing labels press the Setup button in section one of the Mail Merge Helper dialog. Now basically what happens here by default is that between the two of them Outlook and Word decide what’s going where on your mailing labels, your index cards in this case, and its prepared both a Word document to do that job for you and the list of contacts. So I click on OK and what I see is this mail merge helper. Now in the first part, we have the main document. So basically these are the mailing labels, the index cards, and I can go in there and set that up which is what I’m going to do at the moment. The second part is the data source. This is effectively unless I’ve specified saving a permanent file with the list of contacts in, this is a temporary file with that contact data in it. And then when I’m happy with my contact data, which I am knowing in effect I know I’ve got quite a mix of contact data there; some business contacts, home contacts as well. So things might look a little © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 bit messy but I’m just showing the principles of this. So when I’m happy with this source document, the layout of my mailing labels, and I’m happy with the data source then I can do the merge and I’ll have my mailing labels, my index cards ready to use. Now the only thing I really need to check is the setup of the mailing labels, the index cards. So click on Setup and in the label options here I choose which label I want. Now currently I’ve got index cards four by six, height four, width six. I might go for the smaller index cards actually. So I’m going to click on OK to go for smaller index cards. Then I can close the helper because I’m going to trust the contact data that’s coming out and I’ve chosen my mailing labels. Click there. Now that on the screen is the size of these index cards and now I click on Update Labels. If you are creating labels update all the labels in the document to use information from the recipient list. Now basically what this is going to show me is how a label is going to look. If I click on Address Block, it shows me that that is what the layout is going to be. In this case for Mr. Don Anderton, it’s going to say Mr. Don Anderton, SureFire Software Inc. like that. I’ve got a set of controls up here where I can step through and see how that layouts going to look. Now if I wanted to I could change the layout to say put the city and the state and zip code on separate lines but I think that’s a generally acceptable layout. So I can have a little scroll through there and say well Steve Brown doesn’t, well we haven’t got any other information on Steve. I can either leave Steve out when I make my original selection of contacts or when I merge everything, I can just not print the card for Steve or I can delete him from the output document that’s produced from Word. But in principle that all looks fine; click on OK. And if I want to preview the results within Word, if I click on Preview results here now, I can step through and there we are. You can see exactly how they’re going to look. Now some of them I may want, some of them I may not want. As I said I can delete them, choose to print or not to print them. But when I’ve finished I click on Finish and Merge, and that produces for me the Word document that I can either then use as a Word document or, of course, I can print it out and make my index cards. So that’s the principle of doing a mail merge from Outlook 2013. If you’ve got the Word skills, then I’m sure you can take that and turn it into a very successful mail merge yourself. If you don’t have the Word skills, then I can assure you that doing a pretty straightforward merge into labels like this in the way we’ve shown it here works absolutely fine. And I should also point © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 out that you can do the merge from the Word end. So you can start this in Word. I’m not going to show you that here because some of you may not use Microsoft Word. But you can start from Word and say I want to get my contact information from Outlook. So that’s it, a quick demo of the basics of mail merge. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 24 – Safety and Security Video: Trust Center Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. Since you will almost certainly be using Outlook to communicate extensively with the outside world, Outlook is one of the ways in which your system, your PC, your tablet, whatever device you’re using can be compromised. And it isn’t really just a matter of potential damage to the machine but it can also involve things like the theft of your identity. So it’s very important to have a full set of tools to protect yourself and your device or devices from harm. Now one or two of those things are covered elsewhere in the course where we talk about antivirus or we talk about junk mail and so on, but in this section I’m going to look at the Trust Center because this is one area of Outlook 2013 where it’s very important that you’re aware of its main features and how to have them setup correctly. Now the Trust Center is one of the pages in Outlook Options. If you select the Trust Center, there’s some general information from Microsoft but the main settings are accessed via this button here, Trust Center Settings. And that in turn leads to another page with six or seven pages and I’m going to step through most of these and just explain basically what each of them is about. Now the first page is outside the scope of this course but let me briefly explain it. If you use software such as add-ins or macros or perhaps a thing called an ActiveX control; various sort of extras that you can put on Office in general or on Outlook in particular, then you may designate a publisher, a provider of that kind of software as a trusted publisher. And if you try to use a piece of software from a trusted publisher, the nature of being trusted means that that software will be allowed to run. And you may well have the system setup in such a way that only software from trusted publishers can be run. Now we’ve not added any Add-ins, controls, or macros in this course so it’s not really relevant to this course but it’s worth being aware of the concept of a trusted publisher, particularly if your future use of Outlook might include the use of external or additional software.


Learn Outlook 2013 The next page, the Privacy Options page really relates to Office in general. And the checkboxes here determine whether you’re basically going to allow Office to get online information for you. Now the first one which is checked here, Allow Office to connect to the internet, let me just get the screen tip there. When you’re connected to the internet, Office can use online services and find the latest online content. So you need to have this checked if you’re going to do things like use the weather bar that we saw as one of the new features of Outlook 2013, as well as other online services. And a little bit further down from there, you’ve got another checkbox here, Allow the Research Task Pane to check for and install new services. Now we haven’t looked at the Research Task Pane in this course but basically it’s a facility whereby you have a number of research resources that includes dictionaries, encyclopedias. And from time to time, Microsoft enables additional and new services and if you want Office to be able to check for and install those new services, you need to have this checkbox checked as well. Now there are some further options down here related to translation and research. It’s also important for you to look into if either of those are of particular interest to you, but I’m not going to go into those now. The next page deals with email security and primarily this is concerned with encrypting email. If you need to be able to communicate with a particular person or in fact with everybody using encrypted email, then this is the page where you setup the relevant settings. But in order to do this, you will have to have a digital ID; you’ll need a digital certificate. And to communicate with somebody else using encrypted email, they will need a digital certificate as well. So basically you have a pair of keys, both of you need your half of that pair of keys in order to be able to communicate. If you try to send an encrypted email to somebody who doesn’t have the facility to receive it in encrypted form, you’re given the option of sending it unencrypted to that person. And also if you are in a position to communicate with somebody else using encrypted email, attachments will be encrypted as well. Now once again I’m not going to go into the process of getting a digital ID, getting a digital certificate, now but if that’s important to you this is where you go. You need to get yourself setup with a digital ID and then you need to make sure that the recipient or recipients of your email can handle the other half. The Outlook Help on encrypted email is actually very useful. So if you are planning to do this, I refer you to the Outlook Help.


Learn Outlook 2013 The next page deals with attachment handling and the main option here right near the bottom is attachment and document preview. If you like to use attachment preview in Outlook, then you certainly don’t want to switch this off. And there’s a button here, Attachment and document previewers that lists the attachment previewers that are currently in use within your installation of Outlook for previewing attachments to emails. So if you receive an email and you click on preview for an attachment, in my case these are the pieces of software that are being used. Now you may not have for example a Visio previewer. You’ll almost certainly have the Outlook previewer. But then there are other things in here such as an XPS viewer, the WinZip preview handler, and so on. So exactly what you see in this list will depend on your installation. But it certainly shows you which pieces of software are used to preview attachments that you may be interested in previewing in received emails. The next page is an important one. If somebody sends you an email with a picture or some pictures in it, then it may be that Outlook needs to download the pictures from a server. Now generally speaking that’s fine, but if somebody sent you an email which is basically junk mail the process of downloading the pictures from an external server can verify to somebody that they’ve sent their junk email to a valid email address and you may get even more junk mail as a consequence of that. So the recommended setting here is that you don’t download pictures automatically in HTML email messages or RSS items. So basically the download of the pictures is suppressed. However, there is then a whole list of possible exceptions. I’ll let you read through all of these but let’s just look at the first one. Permit downloads in email messages from senders and to recipients defined in the safe senders and safe recipients list used by the junk email filter. So in this case, you’re saying if it’s a safe sender or somebody who’s in my safe recipients list and there’s a picture or some pictures in an email they’ve sent me, then downloading those is absolutely fine. So you’ve got basically a blanket don’t download pictures and then you can check these exceptions. And then there’s a special option right at the end, Warn me before downloading content when editing, forward, or replying to email. So that’s one to set according to your own personal requirements but the defaults are the ones that are shown there. The next page in the Trust Center is the macro settings page. If somebody is going to do some harm to your device or maybe even to a system to get information from your device, then one © Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Learn Outlook 2013 way of doing it is to run a macro. Now within the Trust Center settings you can actually choose the top option there, Disable all macros without notification. It’s a bit drastic but it will certainly work in terms of stopping people running macros on your device. But the recommended setting, the second one is Notifications for digitally signed macros, all other macros disabled. If there is a need to run a legal, legitimate macro on your device, then it should be a digitally signed macro. And with this setting, although you’ll be notified that that macro is to run, it won’t actually be prevented from running, whereas any non-digitally signed macro will be disabled. The other setting on here related to programmatic issues is Programmatic access. These settings determine when you want to be warned about suspicious activity, when another program attempts to do something programmatically. For instance, if another program tries to access your address book and the email address information that it contains or when another program tries to send email messages on your behalf. Now in that case the default setting here, Warn me about suspicious activity when my antivirus software is inactive or out of date, is the recommended setting. Now your antivirus software should be able to deal with all of that for you, but if there’s some kind of activity and your antivirus software either isn’t running or it’s out of date, then Outlook will warn you about any suspicious activity when you have this default setting set. So as you can see, there are quite a lot of settings there in the Trust Center and they are very important. You only need things to go wrong once and it will cost you a lot of time and possibly could literally cost you in terms of stolen identity. So I would suggest that you take these settings very seriously and, as I’ve mentioned already, make sure that you have a good up to date antivirus product running on the device that you’re running Outlook on. So that’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.


Learn Outlook 2013

Chapter 25 – Conclusion Video: Microsoft Updates; Closing Toby: Hello again and welcome to this final short section in our course on Outlook 2013. And I’d just like to mention a couple of things before I go. One of them is that it’s very important that you keep your antivirus software up to date. This is a factor in the use of Outlook as much as probably more than any other element of the Office 2013 suite. Outlook is the root via which many people get their systems compromised. It’s very important that you keep yours safe. As part of keeping your system safe and keeping it running in good order, it’s also very important that you have a routine for regularly checking for updates. Nowadays with Microsoft Office, the best bet for that is to do it via Microsoft Update. Plenty of roots into that via the microsoft.com website and as part of doing that you can get updates on Windows and Internet Explorer and you can also find out about new Microsoft software and so on. Make sure you keep things up to date. Make sure that you keep yourself and your system safe when you’re using Outlook 2013. My name is Toby and I very much enjoyed preparing this course and presenting it to you. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning about Outlook 2013 and that I’ll see you again online one day soon. Bye for now.
