Top 10 Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Tricks

When Gmail is taking emailing to new heights, Microsoft can’t simply wait and watch. The Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 comes with sophisticated changes that has added to its features and performance. The new Outlook 2007 has improved upon the earlier versions to incorporate better editing and reading experience. With a new Ribbon user interface, Office Outlook 2007 has not only embraced both the compose and reading experience for all Outlook item types like e-mail, calendar items, contacts, tasks and more. This is my effort to acquaint you with some efficiency-boosting tips and tricks to enhance your skills for handling Office Outlook 2007. Here’s the list of top 10 Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Tricks for your convenience.

1. Color Code to Identify Key Messages

Often when you open your Outlook, your are lost in a zoo of emails while you need the most important one’s immediately. What you got to do is color code the important messages so that you can identify the important emails from your seniors, clients, staff or other team members . This saves a lot of time and ensures that you don’t overlook the key messages.

Follow the steps below to color code the emails in Outlook

Step 1: Highlight a message from a contact.
Step 2: Choose Tools, then go to Organize. This opens a new window at the top of your Inbox window.
Step 3: Choose the option Using Colors (found at the left of the window).
Step  4: Pick from option, Choose color for selected message and Apply Color.
Step5: Additionally, you can also pick Show messages sent only to me as a way to highlight messages that are not part of a group distribution.
Step 6: Optionally, choose Automatic Formatting (upper-right corner of window) to view coloring choices or even to apply a different font.
Step 7: Close the Organize window when you are done. All messages in your Inbox from the selected contact are now color coded.

2. How to send SMS using Microsoft Outlook 2007 and SMS Officer

Now, that you have updated to Microsoft Outlook 2007 you can send SMS to mobile phones using built-in text messaging features. In order to send messages through Microsoft Outlook 2007 you need sign up or register for an account with SMSOfficer. Once you register you will be given a password. You will get the password on your mobile phone. Using the password set up and configure a Outlook Mobile Service Account.
Select the New/Text Message, type your messages and click on send. WIth SMSOfficer you can send a maximum of 160 characters for each SMS. Moreover, with SMS officer users can forward important emails, memo, etc to the recipients.

4. How to create an e-mail signature

Well, there are some reply that you need to send frequently. Like for instance, many a times you need to reply to the request for product information. Save these responses as signatures. These can be inserted into the e-mail so that you don’t have to retype them every time you send an e-mail.

Step 1: Go to Tools, then to Options and click on Mail Format tab
Step 2: Click on Signature, select New
Step 3: Type a name for the new signature, type the content for signature and choose Font and Paragraph. To format the text of the signature.
Step 4: Finish to complete the signature.
Step 5: Under the Mail Format tab, optionally specify your choice for Signature for new messages, which sets your default signature for every time you create an e-mail message.
Step 6: click OK.

5. How to turn off Personalized Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Outlook

Nobody knows why do need the Personalized Menus and Toolbars to eclipse your view to select toolbar buttons and menu commands. There’s a cool hack to get rid of them, follow the steps below:

Step 1: Start by creating a new Outlook message
Step 2: Select the Tools and Customize
Step 3: click on the Options tab
Step 4: In the section Personalized Menus and Toolbars and check the options “Show Formatting and Standard toolbars on two rows” and “Always show full menus.”
Step 5: Hit Close and close the new message without saving

6. How to streamline the Outlook inbox?

To organize the messages you need to categorize them. In order to categorize the messages you need to go with these steps

Step 1: Go to Edit, then to Categories and choose the Categories list
Step 2: Add new categories to denote the groupings for your business or personal e-mail
Step 3: Click on the Ok two time to save the setting and exit.

Moreover, you can categorize the e-mails, calenders, entries, tasks and other such items in the same manner.

7. How to hack the Microsoft Outlook’s Inbox for email addresses

If you want to hack the Outlook’s inbox for email addresses follow the steps below

Step 1: Download and install the free software
Step 2: Ensure that Outlook is open and you can see the Inbox
Step 3: To select all the messages press Ctrl +A. All the entries in your Inbox should be highlighted.
Step 4: Select File and Save As outlook.txt
Step 5: Run and switch to Drag and Drop E-mail List Manager.
Step 6: Select File and Import outlook.txt

8. How to send a read receipt?

Sometimes you need to turn on the Read Receipts for the e-mail. Whenever the email is read by another Outlook users you will be notified with an e-mail in its destination.

Step 1. Select the Tools and go to Options.
Step 2. Select the Preferences tab from the dialog box
Step 3. Click the button E-Mail Options
Step 4. Next, click the Tracking Options button
Step 5. There are three radio button options: Always send a response, Never send a response, Ask me before sending a response. Click on any one of them.
Step 6. Click OK thrice to finish

9. How to use Advanced find

In Outlook you have to wait too long to search messages. It is tiring to scroll through the search results to get a given search term. The short skip for this would be to use the Advanced Find. This is what you need to do

Step 1: Click Ctrl+Shift+F to bring up a dialog for it.

Step 2: Now, choose options like searching only in the Subject field of e-mails. This will save a lot of time.

9. How to Prevent Spelling Errors automatically

Often we forget to check the spellings when you are sending an email. This can be easily checked if you turn on the spell check feature.
To do that

Step 1: Choose the Tools, go to options and click on the Spelling tab.

Step 2:  Check the option Always Check Before Sending

Step 3: Click on Ok

Next time you send an email Outlook will automatically check the spellings before you press the send  button.

10. How to sort out emails easily

This is a trick that we rarely use with Outlook 2007. Here here are different types of sorting process.

To sort out the messages by the sender: click  once on the Sender heading.
To make changes to ascending A-Z: Click twice on a column heading.