Microsoft Outlook Overview

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Before we even begin this course, I'd like us to just consider which Outlook that you're using. And you might know that Outlook has got many different guises, or flavors, or variations, or however you want to describe it. And so in this video, I want to quickly take you through what to look out for in order to check that you're using the right variation in order to be able to follow this series of videos. So in a nutshell, this course is designed for people who are using Outlook for Windows.

0:33And when I say that, I'm meaning Outlook as a locally installed desktop application. And while I don't expect you to worry about the detail in this screenshot here, the clue is that this is the locally installed app. You can see the icon on the taskbar just here. It's the Outlook desktop application that runs alongside those old favorites like Word and Excel and whatnot. So this is the Outlook desktop application for Windows. It's not Outlook for the web that you would use through a browser. It's not the Outlook app on your mobile device. It's the traditional Microsoft Outlook offering on a Windows desktop.

1:06But having said that, there are actually two different ways that your organization might have purchased this locally installed application for you. So let me just maximize this. And if I go to the File menu and just show you my settings in office account just down here, you will see that this is the subscription product that I'm using here. The office applications have been acquired through a Microsoft 365 or an Office 365 subscription. And you can see the exact version that I was using to record these videos.

1:39And due to the fact that this is a subscription offering, you or your organization pays a monthly or annual fee, then you will periodically get feature updates, even without really realizing. And so, therefore, if you're watching these videos some months after I've recorded them, then don't be surprised to see some small changes here and there. It's just a fact of life these days that there will be some small differences. Alternatively, if you or your organization decided not to buy into these subscription product and instead, make a one-off purchase of the 2021 version of Office, well, that version does align well with this.

2:17So either a Microsoft 365 or an Office 365 subscription or Office 2021, either of those two products could be a good match for this course. But please note that the non-subscription product Office 2021 has got slightly different functionality because you're not subscribing to some of those background services that's part of the Microsoft 365 infrastructure. So some of the clever little insights and whatnot that Microsoft called their intelligence services might be missing. But the core functionality is the same.

2:47And the way that you go about doing things is the same. And the only reason why I mention it at all is so that you don't think you're going mad if on the odd occasion, you don't seem to have the same detail that I have. So please don't worry. Now, having said all of that, it is ridiculously confusing. Because at the time of recording, for users of these subscription offering only, Microsoft was in the process of changing the interface, which your organization may or may not have rolled out yet. So if you know that your organization just bought the standalone Office 2021, then you're good to go.

3:22But if you're a subscriber, then I think the best option is that you should open up your Outlook right now and see if it looks like this screenshot here. Your color scheme might be different. And you might have different display options. But do check that you've got these multiple ribbon tabs across the top. And if you right click on one of your emails, I'm expecting the right click menu, which pops up to look like this, noticing in particular that you do not have any options to pin or snooze an email.

3:53More on that in a second. So if you are confident that your Outlook looks like this, then great. You're good to go. Stick with this skill and the rest of the course. But if you're not sure, then this is what the new Outlook interface looks like. Now, at the time of recording, it's only in preview, which means that customers like me who are part of what Microsoft calls the insider program can take a look before it's rolled out officially. So, again, there might be some small differences by the time you get to use it. But distinguishing features of the new Outlook include fewer ribbon tabs up here.

4:25And on the right click menu, you will see these options to pin or to snooze an email. So if your Outlook looks like what you see here, then this course is not suitable for you. But don't worry. I will be creating a version of this course for this new interface when it does finally get released generally to Microsoft 365 subscribers. So anyway, if you're confident that you are using the original Outlook interface without snooze and pin, then as I said, stick with me. And this skill in particular is designed to be an overview of Outlook.

4:59And so I'm going to take you on a guided tour of the interface. And we'll learn the basics of sending and receiving emails. And I'll get you started do the basics of the calendar. We'll see how useful the search tool can be. And then we'll discuss what you might want to do after this skill because there are indeed other skills, which follow on from this one. But you may or may not need all of them. Anyway, let's jump in and get started.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] In this video, I'd like us to have a quick look around the interface of Outlook. Now, I have to say, if you've already been using recent versions of Outlook or other Microsoft Office applications, such as Word or Excel, for example, then I don't think you'll have too much of a problem finding a way around, in which case I won't be offended if you scoot through this video really fast or skip it altogether, for that matter. But if you are new to Microsoft Office or you haven't used it for ages, then don't worry.

0:31This is the video for you. You can see that I'm in Outlook here, and I'm currently looking in my inbox. You can see this is my list of emails. But if you want to navigate to the other parts of Outlook, then you're going to be using this very thin navigation bar down the very left-hand side. So at the very top of the envelope, that's the inbox, the mail. But if I want to switch to my calendar, for example, then I can do that or have a look at my contacts or whatever. So that's how you switch between the different parts of Outlook. And then the way that you access the commands that you need to use to do the stuff that you want to do is through this ribbon up the top.

1:02So the ribbon is the set of buttons. And these are the ribbon tabs, which will change what buttons will show. But notice that this will change depending on which bit of Outlook that you're in. So I'm in my inbox, so therefore on this ribbon I've got things like replying to messages or forwarding them on or whatever, whereas if I go to my calendar, then those buttons will change to more calendar-y type commands. But let me just go back to mail, and let's talk about some other things that we can do with this ribbon. Because what you're looking at on my screen may or may not look the same as the way you've got it laid out in your copy of Outlook, because we do have some other options.

1:37So at the very far right-hand side of the ribbon, you've got the little dropdown. And the first thing to consider is what layout you want for your ribbon. And you'll see that I've currently got it's shown as the simplified ribbon, which is a single line ribbon. It's quite a streamlined ribbon. It doesn't give you that many buttons. And this little ellipsis will give you some of the overflow commands, as it were. But if you change it to the classic ribbon-- well, firstly, that might look more familiar to you because it's a bit wider. It's got more buttons and whatnot. That might be what you're used to if you've used other Microsoft Office applications.

2:07But I think really it's personal choice. I'm going to stick with this classic view of the ribbon because the whole purpose of this course is to teach you how to use many of these commands, so it's going to be helpful to us if we do have them available. But hey, personal choice. If you do like the more streamlined, simplified ribbon, then that's exactly the reason why we have those choices. You choose what makes sense to you. Now, you already know that you can click these ribbon tabs to change what buttons show on that ribbon, so, yeah. Great. But also note that it's scarily easy to accidentally get rid of the ribbon. So if you double-click, either on purpose or by mistake, one of these little ribbon tabs, then it will actually collapse that ribbon.

2:42It'll kind of hide it. And you think, well, where have those buttons gone? But you'll notice when you click another ribbon tab, the ribbon will show, but only temporarily while you choose the command. And then when you click somewhere else, it'll disappear again. So sometimes people do do that by mistake and they wonder what on earth they've done. So all you do is just double-click again, and that will pin the ribbon. But a slightly more controlled way of doing the same thing is on that same dropdown at the right-hand side where we swapped the layout-- so you can see here in the Show Ribbon bit will always show the ribbon. That's what I've now got. But if we changed it to show tabs only, then that's what we did accidentally by double-clicking on the ribbon tabs.

3:18And we now know that to get it back to how we had it before, you can just double-click again on any of those ribbon tabs, and that ribbon will persist for you. But there is another option on that same dropdown over here on the right-hand side. And that's this. Show the Quick Access Toolbar. Now, yours may or may not already be shown, but mine isn't, because there's no big green tick. So I'm going to choose the option to show the Quick Access toolbar. And that will give me this extra row of buttons just underneath the ribbon where my mouse is moving. Yours might not look quite the same as this because I've already put a few things on here. But that's an extra area for you to add buttons which will always be visible, regardless as to which ribbon tab you're in or even which part of Outlook that you're in.

3:57Can you see that doesn't change? If I flip between the different ribbon tabs or the different parts of Outlook, that Quick Access toolbar is always there. Now, you'll see that it's currently below the ribbon. But I have a preference to show it above the ribbon. So if you right-click anywhere on the Quick Access toolbar, you'll see you've got a few more options, including show the Quick Access toolbar above the ribbon. So now it's appearing up here. And it's a bit of a contracted version when it's up there. I haven't got the buttons all spread out with the text. I've just got small buttons, so I quite like that. And the beauty of this is, can add any buttons you like to the Quick Access Toolbar, and it's dead easy to do.

4:32So let's imagine I want to add the Delete button. So right-click, Add to Quick Access Toolbar. Let's just add a couple of others. Let's choose, oh, I don't know, right-click Add Quick Access Toolbar. I've just added a few random buttons up there. To get rid of a button, if you were just playing along, then you can right-click on it up on the Quick Access toolbar to remove it. And as I say, the beauty being when you are in different parts of Outlook, that will always be visible. So for example, I'm now in the calendar. Let's imagine I want to add this Teams Meeting button to the Quick Access Toolbar. Well, let's do that as well. So right-click. Add to Quick Access Toolbar.

5:03It's now shown up there as a little miniature version of that button. But that does mean if I'm now in my inbox, I can quickly click that button to create a new Teams meeting without having to go into the calendar part of Outlook first and then click the New Teams Meeting button. So it's a good way of streamlining the things that you often do. But I won't save that new Teams meeting for now. So the Quick Access Toolbar and the ribbon are a very characteristic way of accessing the commands throughout the whole of the Microsoft Office applications. But also note that Outlook has a slight-- I would say peculiarity.

5:35It's not really that peculiar, but it does catch people out. So sure, we've got the Quick Access toolbar and this ribbon with the different tabs. And we already know that changes to different commands when we go to the different parts of Outlook. But look at this. If I now click within my email part of Outlook, if I now click the New Email button to start a brand-new email message, that's opened up as a separate window on top of my Outlook application underneath. And this message has now got its own ribbon. And even, if you click that dropdown over on the right-hand side, its own set of options like we saw for the main ribbon when we're looking at the Outlook interface.

6:11Oh my goodness. So we've got menus and ribbons within menus and ribbons. Ugh. And we've even got the ability to have a Quick Access toolbar visible that we use within the message. So again, it's shown by default underneath the ribbon. So let's just right-click again to put it all above the ribbon. So that means while we're writing email messages, if there are particular options that we like to have Quick Access to but we don't want to have to hunt through, oh, which ribbon tab is it on? Maybe spell check, for example. I never remember it's on the Review ribbon tab. Well, let's right-click on the spellcheck button, choose to add it to Quick Access toolbar.

6:44It now appears up there. So I can write my message and run a spell check from the Quick Access toolbar rather than having to remember that spellcheck lives on the Review ribbon tab. And while we are talking about the ribbon, let's imagine I'm writing an email and I want to insert a table. I mean, you're just starting to get a feel here for the amount of functionality we've got in Outlook, but let me just stick a quick table in. Keep your eye up there on the ribbon. I've now got some extra ribbon tabs because I'm now clicked in a table. So I've got some table functionality available, including the design of the table and the layout of the table.

7:15But if I click somewhere else in the message so that the table is no longer active, notice that those table ribbon tabs have gone away. Click back in the table and they come back. So make sure that the relevant part of the screen is active before you start looking up at the ribbon for the relevant commands. But anyway, I'm going to close down this separate window that is this new message that I was just playing with. So let me just close that. And no, I won't save changes to that new message. So I'm back to the regular Outlook interface now. And just one or two other things to point out to you because the File menu-- that's a bit different to these ribbon tabs.

7:49The File menu takes you to a whole screen of stuff. And there's quite a lot here to look through. I'm not going to go through every option. But you can see on the info part of it, it's giving me some account information. So if I wanted to add another email account or whatever, or, I don't know, print my emails, then that's the option. Also, further down, so down towards the bottom-left-ish, Office Account, this will give you a bit of information about the license that you're using for Microsoft Office. You can see I've got a CBT Nuggets Microsoft Office license, and I'm using the subscription product here.

8:21You can also see what connected services you've got, and by that we're meaning your OneDrive and your SharePoint sites. I can also change a few things, for example, like the Office theme. So if you'd like to use a more of a dark gray look, then you can change that. But I tend to have it just mirroring whatever my system is set to. And if you look down at the very bottom left-hand corner, you've also got other options. And this will take you to the dialog box where you can flick through literally 101 different options to control how Outlook behaves. But more on some of those another time. So that was your first quick tour of the interface.

8:51Obviously, we're going to learn more about what all of these commands do as we progress through this course. But for now, I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Now that we've familiarized ourselves a little bit with the Outlook interface, in this Nugget, I want to crack on with the basics of sending an email. We'll address it to people internal and external to our organization. And we'll format it and spellcheck it. And we'll even add an attachment. Now, as a general rule, on the Home ribbon tab in Outlook, the very first button will enable you to create a new thing for that particular part of Outlook.

0:31So I'm in Mail, so the very first button will give you a brand new email. Whereas, if I was in the Calendar, that very first button would give me a New Appointment. And it would be the same for the other parts as well. So obviously, we're going to click that in a second. But if you tend to prefer to have your ribbon collapsed-- do you remember we talked about that in the last video-- so let's just double-click the ribbon tab there to collapse it. You will see that that button appears at the top of this folder list area just here. And it would be the same also in the Calendar. You can see the New Appointment button appears over on the left-hand side. But anyway, I tend to prefer to have the ribbon showing.

1:01So let me show that again. And we're in the inbox, so let's just press that very first button. Or if you do like a keyboard shortcut-- you can see the tooltip there-- then Control-N. But anyway-- a brand new email. And as we saw in the last video, that will open up as a separate window, which you can maximize. I'm just going to leave it as a floating window because that's how I tend to work. And probably the very first thing you will do is address this email to the recipient. But also, notice that I've got the From field showing here. Now, you may not have that showing. I have that showing because I have got multiple email accounts associated with this installation of Outlook.

1:36So it needs to know which email account we are sending from. But if you just use it with a single, straightforward account, you probably won't have that showing. But anyway, let's address it to some people. A couple of different approaches here-- you could click the To button, and that will take you to, what we call, the Address List. And we're going to talk in more detail about what all of these different address books and whatnot actually means when we talk about People and Contacts in a different skill. But you can see, I've got a list of all of the people internal to my organization here. So let's imagine, I think, yes, I want to send this message to Diego.

2:07I'm going to double-click on Diego's name. And his name appears down here in the To part. And if I were to click OK to that, then Diego is showing just here. But I have to say, I think most people, most of the time, will type in here directly, rather than clicking the To button. I mean, it's a personal choice. But anyway, let's say I also want to send this to Adele. So I start typing Adele. So I'm starting to type the A, and it's going to give me some suggestions. And if there are some suggestions on here which, perhaps, it's an old email address for somebody that you don't want anymore, you'll see that you can get rid of a suggestion by clicking the little X there.

2:43And also, notice that the suggestions will include any contact groups that your organization has set up-- maybe an all-company email or the marketing department or whatever, you know the idea. Now, those distribution groups-- so it's a whole bunch of names, all collected together in a group-- so they will appear there. And we're going to talk more about how we set up those groups and whatnot when we talk about Contacts and People and whatnot in a different skill. But anyway, I digress. It was Adele I wanted to add. So let's just add her. I'm also going to add in James. So I just started typing James. And since my hands are on the keyboard, I'm just going to press Enter to accept that suggestion-- and also Lalo.

3:18Again, just press Enter to accept that suggestion. So I've got multiple names appearing on the To line. If I want to add somebody external to my organization and that might be somebody that I haven't emailed before, than I would just type in their whole email address. And you can see, I'm about to type in CharlesDowns@hotmail.com. If I hadn't sent an email to him before, I could just keep on typing. But in this case, I have. So I'm just, again, going to press Enter to accept the suggestion. But that's an external person. And you can see that his whole email address is shown here, rather than just the display name for these internal people.

3:50But take a look at the area just above where we've been typing. I've got a few messages that Outlook is mentioning to me here. So firstly, it's saying, the following recipient is outside of your organization. So that was the external recipient, Charles Downs, that I've just added. And it's flagging that because if this was some kind of sensitive email, I might think twice about sending it to somebody outside of my organization. So I've got a quick way of removing that person if I want to. But I'm going to leave him. And the next message is telling me that Lalo is currently out of the office because he has got his automatic reply switched on.

4:24So I'm thinking, oh, well, actually, there's no point in me sending this to Lalo. I'd forgotten he's out of the office. So yes, I will take advantage of this, to remove Lalo from the address line there. And I've got another message that says, how about you send this email during most recipients' working hours? So it has cleverly detected that most of these people are working in a different time zone to me. All of my American colleagues are still asleep. So I could choose to schedule this email to send it at a different time. But I'm going to leave it as it is. But do keep a lookout for these messages that appear up here. You'll see, I've also got a copy box, so I can carbon copy somebody in.

4:57So let's carbon copy Miriam, for example. And if you ever tend to use the Blind Carbon Copy, the BCC field, then on the Options ribbon tab, you will see-- there we go-- that's where you can turn on or off the blind copy field box. And it just means that the recipients won't be able to see the names that were in the blind copy field. So some people like to use that. But I think it's a little bit outdated these days. I think we all tend to be a bit more open about who we're sending our email to. But anyway, I'm now going to type in a subject line. So just down in this area, let's just type in catering.

5:29And I could click in the main body of the message to start typing the message itself. But since my hands are on the keyboard, I may as well just press Enter, and that will take me down to the next part of the dialog box. Let's just type in "Dear all," and I've got a first sentence just on my Clipboard for me to paste in because you probably don't want to watch me do too much typing. Oh, but I have just noticed it's repeated the "Dear all." But it doesn't matter what the text is. It's just a demo. But I am going to do a little bit of typing because I want you to spot the corrections that Outlook will make for me and the spelling mistakes and whatnot. So I'm going to type in, "I would be grateful if you could respond"-- so I'm adding a few spelling mistakes here-- "by Friday 5 PM.

6:10I attach a copy of the latest agenda for"-- and I'm going to type in, "for your reference." But I'm going to spell "your" wrong-- so Y-U-O-R-- a bit of a typo there. And did you see that Outlook corrected it automatically? So let's just type in, "for your reference." Full stop. Right. So you saw that particular correction happening automatically. If you're a Microsoft Word user, you'll be familiar with this type of cleverness. If you didn't want it to do that automatic correction, then you can see this little button here will allow you to change it back to what you did actually type and give you some control over what happens with those autocorrections, as I say, much like in Microsoft Word.

6:46But also, the red wiggly underlines are indicating spelling mistakes. And you can go through individually and make the corrections. Or you could run a spellcheck. And you will remember, in the last video, we added the spellcheck button to the Quick Access Toolbar, didn't we? But if you didn't do that, then you're going to find it on the Review ribbon tab. So there's the spellcheck button. But then you might say to me, well, actually, I would rather that this email was automatically spellchecked before I sent it. And that is, indeed, an option that we can set. So I'm just going to go back to the main Outlook screen in the background here and go File and then Options.

7:21And then in the Mail category-- there we go-- there's a checkbox here-- always check spelling before sending. So that's very much your choice. And that's where we go into the Spelling and Autocorrect options, if you're interested. But anyway, let me just cancel out of that. And then I think, oh well, what's happened to that email that I was halfway through. It seems to have disappeared. Well, it hasn't. It's just in a separate window, remember. So look down at your Taskbar. There's the main Outlook window. And there's that message that I was halfway through. But if you still can't find it or maybe you had closed that window-- argh-- well, actually, that message will be in your Drafts.

7:55So look at the folder list on the left-hand side here. If you've got it collapsed, then you can pop it out again. But this folder list will show you your folders, including your Drafts. And I can see that there's one in there. There's a "1" in brackets. So let's go and have a look. And sure enough, there's that message that I was halfway through. So let's just run a quick spellcheck manually because I didn't choose the option to have it automatically checking when I send it. So yes, that should be "you." So I'm using this panel down the right-hand side. Yes, I'll delete the repeated word. So it's just going through the different errors there.

8:25And I'm choosing the appropriate corrections until it's happy that everything is complete. Good. And we just finish that email. So "Thanks, Simona." We will talk more about adding signatures and whatnot at the end in a different skill. That Editor panel over on the right-hand side, you can close it now that the spellcheck is complete. But let's go and send that message. And Outlook has cleverly noted that somewhere in this email, I talked about an attachment, but I forgot to actually attach a file. So I quite like this. So I think, oh, thanks for the reminder, Outlook. Let's not send that just yet because I do need to attach that file.

8:56So back on the Message ribbon tab, you will see this Attach button. And that might change slightly, depending on how big the window is. Can you see that now this button is called Include, with a few options. But if the window is a bit bigger, then it does expand out to say Attach File. But either way, look for the paperclip. And I've got some options. What it will do, it will spot recent items. So that is, indeed, the one that I want to add. Or you could browse for a particular file on your PC or browse your cloud locations, such as your OneDrive and whatnot.

9:27But that's actually the file I want to add. It's one that I created quite recently. It's stored on my company OneDrive. So when I choose it, I get the choice, do I want to share a link to this file, or do I want to attach a separate copy? So I'm thinking, well, it's stored in a cloud location. I think, yeah, I'm going to share a link. Perfect. Let me choose that. You can see, it's now added to the email. And also, the permissions have been automatically set. And I did that such that anybody can edit this file. And if I click the dropdown there, that's where I could change the permissions if I wanted to. But anyway, if you wanted to add any further formatting, then just like a word processor, you select the appropriate word.

10:03And then up on the ribbon, you've got all of your usual formatting options if you wanted to make something bold or italics or a different font style or size and whatnot. You've got all of the options that you would expect. But I think, finally, at last, we're now ready to send that email. You'll see I'm still looking in the Drafts folder. Let me just pop out that folder list again. And I shall just pin it so that it stays open. And the Drafts folder is now empty because it's no longer a draft. It's now been sent. So that email will now appear in my Sent Items folder. There we go. That's the email that I have just sent.

10:34So now we can wait for people's responses to come in. And for that, we'll have to wait for the next video. I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] Having sent an email in the last video, in this one, let's talk about receiving emails. We're looking at my inbox here. And if we look over in the folder list, we can see that, yeah, there's the inbox in the folder list. And that number 40 there is indicating how many unread emails that I have got in my inbox. And an unread email is shown with bold and this sort of heavy line just to the left of it there. So for example, this message at the top, I have read it.

0:32It's not showing as bold. And the order of these emails, well, you're probably going to expect the most recent email at the top of the list. And you can control that. So over here, you can see, yes, mine is sorted by date. Weird, if I hover over that. There we go, newest on top. But I can click that to reverse the sort. And also click this dropdown here to either, for example, filter out to just see the unread email or to arrange by some other field rather than by date or to change the sorting order. But also, you'll see down here that my focused inbox is switched on.

1:03That's what the green check mark is telling me. And the focused inbox, well, people have a love or hate relationship with the focused inbox. Because what you'll see is that it has divided my emails into what it thinks I want to focus on and everything else. So can you see? I've got these two tabs just up here. So what it'll do, it'll automatically filter out stuff that it doesn't think is that important into this other tab. And that's normally going to be emails from mailing lists and whatnot. So I don't get too bogged down with all of that nonsense in my main inbox.

1:34But if you don't like that, if you're finding that things are getting through, and you keep forgetting to look in the other inbox, then as we saw at the bottom of this list, you can turn off that focused inbox. So now, I don't have that focus on other tab. I can switch between all and unread, which you may prefer. Now you will have already deduced that whichever email you're clicked on in the list here will get previewed for you over on the right-hand side here. And this is called the reading pane. So if I click on this next email down, for example, you can see that there are a few attachments. And I can even preview some attachments in this reading pane as well.

2:08It depends on what the file type is. So common file types like PowerPoint in this example will indeed show in that reading pane, which is quite nice because it means you can easily just flick through the presentation without having to open it up as a separate window or open up the file. But also note that as I move on to other messages-- so let's just click that one again. And scroll up and down. And then move on. Can you see that it has started to mark those messages as read? Because I was clicked on them for a few moments and interacting with the reading pane. And you'll see now, the number of unread messages has gone down to 38.

2:40And again, if I click on this one, and have a look at that conversation, and then move on, that has now been marked as unread. So there are one or two options that you can set with regards to that reading pane. So if you take yourself to the view ribbon tab, quite a few options to have a look at. But of particular interest right now in the layout category, I've got the reading pane. And you'll see that mine is switched on and shown to the right-hand side. And that probably is the default that you have got. And I would say for most people, most of the time, that is a good idea. You can turn it off. But in my opinion, it looks a bit ugly.

3:12But sometimes, people prefer that, particularly, if they work with very sensitive emails. And they don't want to risk people looking over their shoulder and seeing the contents of emails. So there may be scenarios, where you might want to do that. But for most of us most of the time, running with screens with quite nice high resolution, and we've got plenty of room on the screen to display not only the list, but also the contents in that reading pane over there. But also, we've got a few options we can set for that reading pane with regards to whether it marks it as read, when we move on to another message or whatever. So take a look at those if you're interested.

3:43And actually, with this reading pane shown here, you'll find that you very rarely ever have to double click on a message to open it up in its own separate window. I mean, you can still do that as I've just done there. But most of the time, you'll be doing what you need to do with your message in the reading pane itself. So yes, we can now say that we've got 37 unread messages in our inbox. But if for whatever reason we want to mark a red message as unread, then we can just click just to the left of that message there to make it go bold again. And you'll see that number is creeping back up to 39, 40, 41.

4:14And we can click it again to show it as unread. So that number will always reflect how many unread messages there are in the inbox. And you will also notice as you hover over the right-hand side of a message in the list, you get these other little icons that pop up. So if you want to delete a message, then you can just click the little trash can there. And it'll be gone. Well, where does it go? It actually goes into your deleted items folder over here on the left-hand side. But let's just go back to the inbox because we can also flag a message as a to-do item. Which kind of makes it really stand out. And we'll talk more about some of these things another time.

4:46But that does become useful if, for example, you want to filter out all of your flagged emails or whatever. But also, if I just scroll down, you'll see that there is a little icon that indicates what type of entry it is in your inbox. So do you remember this message here that we sent in the last video to charlesdowns@hotmail.com. You can see that it has failed. It hasn't been delivered because it was just a made up Hotmail address. But that little icon there with the red left pointing arrow indicates an undeliverable. And this icon here, I think, it's supposed to be what?

5:16A little door with a purple arrow pointing to the left. That's the automatic reply. So Lalo had got his automatic reply set up because he's out of the office at the moment. And if I scroll down, you can see a few other types. Obviously, the paperclip means there's an attachment. Oh, this loopy, purple backwards arrow means that you have replied to that message. And you can see the information there. You replied to this message on whatever date or whatever time. The blue forward arrow means that you forwarded this message. And again, it tells you when you did that. And if I just scroll down a bit further. Oh, this is an interesting one.

5:46This is one that Outlook has flagged for you. So I haven't flagged this, but Outlook has flagged it as potentially something that's a bit suspicious. So look out for that. The blue downwards arrow here is a low importance message. And if I just scroll a bit further, yeah, that red exclamation mark, somebody marked that as high importance. And then just a bit further down. Oh yes, look, this one, that little icon there with the calendar and the two people, that indicates that it's a meeting invite. So you will get quite finely tuned to spotting those little icons to identify what type of entry it is in your inbox list.

6:19But anyway, now let's imagine we're working away in Microsoft Word, for example. And somebody sends us an email. I just want to quickly talk about notifications. So from a screen that's off camera, I'm just going to quickly send a message to me from James's account. So I'm just doing that off camera, so you can't see that. So we're working away in Microsoft Word. Work, work, work doing what we do. And you might notice, there we go. There's the notification that just popped up that James has sent us a reply. So I can directly from here delete it, or flag it, or just get rid of the notification, just dismiss it.

6:53And also down here in my status bar, I've got the little yellow envelope to indicate I've got unread messages. And also, the Outlook icon itself on the taskbar has got a little envelope icon as well. So if I just click to go back in, sure enough, there's the new message from James. But you can control those notifications, if you do or don't want any combination of those different ways of being told there's a new email. So if you just go into file, and then options, and then mail, you will see, there we go, message arrival. When new messages arrive, please do all of these things.

7:23But a quick word about the desktop alert. So mine's obviously checked. And sure enough, you saw that toast notification popping up at the bottom right-hand corner when that email came in. But if that isn't working for you, you will need to check your Windows notification settings. Because Windows can overrule what applications can and can't do. So in your Windows settings, now I happen to be on Windows 11 here. So yours might look a bit different, if you're on Windows 10. But if you take yourself to system notifications, you can just search for notifications. Make sure you sort the apps by name to easily mean you can find Outlook.

7:58So there we go. So Outlook, I've got that switched on for banners and sounds. And I have a feeling that by default, that might be switched off. It certainly was for me. So that's the first thing to troubleshoot, if your desktop notifications are not working for new emails. But anyway, what might we want to do with an email once we've got it in our inbox? Well, we might want to reply to it. We know how to delete it. We might want to forward it. So looking at this top email here from James, you can see, I've got the ability over here to reply either just back to James. Or if there are multiple people that had been copied in on this message, I could choose reply to all.

8:33Or I could forward it on to somebody else. And you will also notice that I've got some shortcuts here. Outlook is suggesting that, perhaps, I could start my reply with sounds good, thanks. So if I click that, what it'll do, it'll create a reply with that little bit of text already filled in. If I change my mind, then just at the top right of that reading pane, let me just discard that. Or I could, of course, click the reply button myself and write whatever it is that I want. So let's just type thanks. If I wanted to pop this out as a separate window rather than having all of this embedded in the reading pane, then that's what that pop-out button does at the top right-hand corner of that reading pane there.

9:10But either way, once I've typed my reply, I can click send to go ahead and send it. And that means I've now got that purple, loopy backwards arrow to indicate that, yeah, I have replied to that message. So there you go. That's the basics of what happens when you receive an email and what you might want to do with it. And we will look in more detail at functionality, such as categories, and filing, and searching, and whatnot anoother time. But for now, I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] We've got a whole separate skill elsewhere, in this course, all about working with your Outlook Calendar. And so in this overview skill, I just want to spend a few minutes getting you started quickly, in the Outlook Calendar. You already know that we can use the Navigation bar at the left-hand side of the screen, to hop to your Outlook Calendar. And I suppose, the first thing to think about is, how you want to view your Calendar. And you can see, I'm currently viewing a work week.

0:31So Monday through to Friday. And if you look up on the Home ribbon tab, you can see different views. So you might want to show the full week, including the weekends. Or just today. Or a whole month at a time. So have a play around with that, and see what makes best sense to you. And then, on the left-hand side, where we had the folder list, when we're looking at email, we've got this little date navigator thing. So if you particularly want to go and look, and see what's happening this week, here. Then you just click that on the date navigator. And you use these arrows here, to flick through to different months, or even different years, if you need to. To get back to today.

1:02Again, on the Home ribbon tab, you've got that button there, to go back to today. Now you can see that I've got all sorts of appointments, in here. So let's just quickly talk a little bit about appointments and whatnot. Because you already know that at the top left-hand corner on the Home ribbon tab, of whatever bit of Outlook that we're in, the very first button will give you a new thing, for that part of Outlook. And you can see here, it says New Appointment. But I also have the opportunity to create a New Meeting. Now, the only difference between an appointment and a meeting, is in a meeting, you invite other people to it.

1:33Whereas, an appointment is just for you. So you could just simply click that button there, to create a new appointment. Maybe you're organizing lunch with Sarah, or something. Then you fill in the details of the appointment. And put in any other details down here. If you then decide, ah, will it be useful to actually invite Sarah to this appointment, and turn it into a meeting? Then you can click this Invite attendees button. And that essentially turns it into a meeting. Can you see, this is now a meeting. If I change my mind about inviting people, I can cancel the invite, and it goes back to being an appointment.

2:03And I can even change it into a team's meeting at any time, by clicking this button, here. And that will add the log on details for the online meeting. And again, I can say, no, Don't Host Online, to get rid of that. So filling in this window here, is probably quite self-explanatory. But I've got a shortcut for you. Because if you're looking at your diary, and you think, oh, well, actually, I always play badminton at 1 o'clock on Thursdays. So what we can do is, just click and drag to select the period of time that we want to add the appointment, or the meeting for, and then just start typing.

2:35So let me just type in badminton. And if that's all we need to do, then job is done. But if you want to, for example, invite other people to it, or turn it into an online meeting. Then you double-click it. And that takes us into that dialog box, that we had already seen. And that's where we could invite attendees, or not. Or, add the Teams meeting information or not. Loads of other things, as well, which we'll look at another time. But we might want to make it a recurring meeting. So let's say, I actually play badminton every week. So we can set a recurrence pattern. So, yes, every week on Thursday.

3:05That will do nicely. Let's just click OK. I can add in more details if I want to. But if I choose Cancel Invitation, to remove the requirement to add any invitees to my badminton appointment. And close the appointment and say, yes, I'll save it, we should now see this little whirly, whirly symbol here, to indicate that that's a recurring appointment. And do you know what? For many people, that's kind of all they need to know, about Calendar. But, oh, my goodness, there is so much more to explore. But as I said, that's for another time. And so for now, I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you, for viewing.

0:00[AUDIO LOGO] The search in Outlook is really powerful. And as we'll see, it's not just about finding an email that we've lost. It can also help us find the commands that we need to actually do stuff in Outlook and get help too. Let's start off by imagining that we want to see all of the messages from Adele in our Inbox. And there are a couple of different approaches we could take here because we could use this dropdown here to change how our list is organized.

0:31So rather than being arranged by date, we could say, well, please arrange my list by who it's from. So if I choose that, then what you'll see, if I just scroll up, because Adele will be at the top of the list, there we go, you can see that those are the messages from Adele all grouped together. And I can collapse and expand that. And those are the messages from Alex, and whatnot. So that might be useful. But let me just put it back to organize by date. Or of course, we could use the search tool, which after all, is the topic of this video. So you will have spotted at the very top here, I've got a search box. If I type in that and start typing Adele, you need to be a little bit careful here because we're not doing a search for the word Adele.

1:07So if somebody had mentioned Adele in an email somewhere, we don't want those types of emails to come up. We actually want to see emails from Adele. So it's this entry. So you can see this little icon here to indicate that it's a contact. So we're looking for all emails from that particular person, from that contact. So if I choose that, then that's going to give me the results that I need. And you'll see also that the Search ribbon is showing. And this is where I can start narrowing down the scope of the search. So if this came up with hundreds and hundreds of results, all of these different emails from Adele, I could then say, well, only show me the unread messages from Adele.

1:43And that's going to narrow down the search results. Once I've finished, I can click Close Search on that Search ribbon tab. And that'll just take me back to my regular Inbox. But to do a straightforward text-based search, so let's imagine I do want to search for all messages that contain the word Contoso in some way or other. So just type in Contoso, and hit Enter. And you'll see that that looks like it's got quite a lot of search results. So if you look over at the bottom left-hand corner, you can see that it's come up with 23 items just down there.

2:14Well, the default is it's searching the whole of the current mailbox. So that's including all of the folders that I have set up. But if I want it to only search the current folder, so only search my Inbox, so if I choose that, that's going to narrow down the search a little bit. So it's now gone down to 14 items that it's found. And again, like we saw with the Adele example, I could narrow that down even further. I could refine it and say, well, let's just see the unread messages that contain the word Contoso. How about just the unread messages with attachments that contain the word Contoso? So you can see I've now just got two results.

2:46And you can see that the word Contoso has been highlighted in the actual reading pane here. So I can see that it's done the job. But also, yeah, that's a good example. There's no highlighting of the word Contoso there. So that must mean that the word Contoso is in the attachment, in the Word document. So it is really clever at also doing the search across your attachments as well, which I absolutely love. It is so useful. Obviously, there are other options that you can have a play with as well, including some advanced criteria as well that you can set. But for most situations, what you see on the Search ribbon tab will serve you just fine.

3:19But let me close that. And let's do an example in the calendar this time. So let me just hop into the calendar. And let's imagine I'm searching for all appointments to do with a particular client called Tailspin. So let's just type in Tailspin. And press Enter. And it's done the job. But this does sometimes distract people slightly with the view that it uses. So it's found three appointments that include the word Tailspin. But it's put it in this list-type view. But you can double-click any one of those to open up the appointment and see it in perhaps the way you were expecting.

3:51But let me just close that. You can see the date of the appointment. Again, if we had a lot of results, we could use the Search ribbon tab to further refine those results. And then once we finished, we can click the Close Search button. But as I hinted in the introduction, we can also use search to get help. So let's imagine I can't find anywhere for the life of me how to set my out-of-office messages. When I go on holiday or go on vacation, how do I set those automatic messages that mean that people know that I'm not in the office. So I'm going to ask the search to help me with that.

4:22So I'm going to type in "out of office." Now, we don't want it to do a text search to search for messages that include those words. No, it's more about looking for actions. And look at what we've got here. It is actually giving me the actions, including automatic replies, which is actually what I was after. So even though I didn't use the correct name of the feature-- I called it out of office, which is what it used to be called. It's now called Automatic Replies. If I choose that, it takes me into the actual dialog box where I can go ahead and schedule my automatic replies and type in what I need.

4:53And that's brilliant. My only slight complaint about this as a way of getting to commands within Outlook is the next time I want to set automatic replies, well, I haven't learned whereabouts that feature lives. I don't know where it is. If I cancel out of that, I think, well, where does it live? I don't know. Well, the next time you do that sort of thing-- so you can see I've got some recently used searches. And there's that recently used action for the search we just did. Well, instead of clicking it to go into the dialog box, I'm going to right-click and choose to add it to my Quick Access toolbar.

5:27So if I choose that, I can now see up here, there's that little button that will enable me to go in and set my automatic replies whenever I need to. But if you are curious, Automatic Replies actually live under the file menu. It's there. That was the dialog box we got to from help. And it will also give you the ability to search the general help facility as well for help articles. So let's imagine you want to know how to mark a message-- oops, mark a message as urgent, because we didn't cover that when we were looking at messages. You'll see that it's taking me to the help articles.

5:59So if I click that, and the default behavior is that it will load the help article in this panel over on the right-hand side here. Under normal circumstances, anyway, it would load it in this panel here. Clearly, it's a bit upset with my internet connection. But I'm sure you have experienced the help articles before. So yeah, fantastically useful. And at any time, don't forget, once you've finished your searching, you can always close that search to make sure that everything is shown again in the main part of your screen. I hope this has been informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:07OK. You've got the end of this skill. And so you should now be feeling pretty comfortable with sending and receiving emails and sticking an appointment in your calendar and searching for the things you need. And so, what's next? Well, I guess there are three possible options for you. And firstly, the most obvious route, I suppose, is that you carry right on with this course and let me take you on a journey to learn more of the detail of Microsoft Outlook. And that's going to include other skills on, for example, organizing emails, you know, folders and categories and whatnot, and other skills as I've listed here on saving time in more detail on the calendar.

0:39Or what about if you need to use multiple calendars and inboxes and also skills on the people and tasks part of Outlook too? So yeah, that's the obvious route. But alternatively, rather than plodding through in the order, which I've decided on, it's more than OK to pick and choose what you need. I mean, maybe you jump straight into the calendar skill because that's what you need. And maybe you pick up some of the others another time. Or maybe you stop this course right here. Maybe you're not really a big Outlook user, and what we've learned is just enough to help you tick along just fine.

1:11That's OK too. Or you might be stopping here because you want to fast track to some Outlook tips and tricks. Now, if that's the case, then look out for the Outlook skill in my Office Tips and Tricks course. Or maybe you need to use both the desktop application and the browser based version. So maybe you now need to go and check out my training on that, which you'll find in my Microsoft 365 for End Users course. But whichever route you take, I hope this has been informative for you. And I'd like to thank you for viewing.