Linda posted on June 21, 2010 09:51
As promised, I have been looking more closely at Office 2010. I have found some interesting new features in Outlook that I wanted to share with you.
While Quick Steps will jump right out at you, you may not immediately understand just what Quick Steps are or why you should use them. Quick Steps are a means to make tasks that you perform regularly quick and easy. For example, you may regularly send email to your team - perhaps a group of employees or co-workers. The Team E-Mail Quick Step is easily customized to have the proper recipients. Send a message to the team is now as simple as clicking the Team E-Mail Quick Step.
Other Quick Steps may move or copy messages to a specific folder, reply to a message and then delete it, or forward the message to a group and then delete it. On my screen, the Quick Step area will accomodate 9 Quick Steps without having to scroll to access them all. This week I will be thinking about what 9 actions I want to use my Quick Steps for to make email handling more efficient.
Conversation View is not so obvious, but I think I will find this to be extremely helpful. I regularly find myself sorting my email by who it is from so that I can find previous messages in the thread. Of course, a few minutes later, I'm sorting by date so I can see new messages easily. I probably re-sort my messages at least a half dozen times every day.
Conversation View will list all messages that are part of the same thread together. You must turn this feature on to take advantage of it, and you can turn it on only for selected folders. You access this feature, and the related options, from the View tab.
Once you have turned it on, you will see arrows in front of messages that are part of conversations. Click on the arrow to see all of the messages in the conversation. When you move to a different message in the folder, the messages are once again collapsed. I have noticed that some conversations automatically expand and others do not. I haven't figured out exactly why. And the initial expansion shows only messages from others to you. Expanding again will show your replies as well.
Another feature that was available as a plug-in before is the Outlook Social Connector. This feature links to LinkedIn and pulls photos of your contacts into Outlook for you. This option also shows all messages and attachments from someone grouped together. However I have just noticed that the photo currently pulled for me is definitely someone else - and I'm not even sure who it is!
If you have tried these features, or if you have found something I have missed, I would love to hear from you!