The Microsoft Outlook shortcuts that I use everyday

I use Outlook everyday. It is my principal business tool. This is particularly weird because in my former life as a schoolteacher I hated Outlook. I did everything I could to avoid using it. I had email forwarded to webmail as an alternative. One of the key reasons for this was to do with my mailbox size limit. I don’t want this post to turn into a rant about school IT systems, but suffice to say that in my current job I have no limit. Most of us and this office have inboxes of 5 to 10 GB. In one of my jobs about five years ago I had a limit of 250 MB. I was continually asked to empty my deleted items, and I could not refer to emails that I had received about a year ago.

Anyway, there are a bunch of key shortcuts that I’ve learnt over the last couple of months that I now use in every day.

ctrl-r – reply
ctrl-f – forward
ctrl-d – delete
ctrl-enter – send message

What are your shortcuts? Do you like Outlook?

2 Comments to “The Microsoft Outlook shortcuts that I use everyday”

  1. Jared 28 April 2012 at 3:50 am #

    Agreed. Outlook is productivity central, and email is 5% of it. Recently, and tragically, I came to realise first hand that ‘Lotus’ is still around and its email application ‘Notes’ is in use by some companies, although the arguments for and against are still flying over my head at this stage. However, I think it really says something for an application that just works exactly how you’d expect. Outlook is flexible to the way you work, and we all work differently. Every job requires a different way of managing tasks/workflow/people/groups etc.

    Interesting:
    If you feel you are receiving far too many emails, copy your inbox out to Excel and graph email count over date received. Something to frame next to your desk.

    Tip:
    ctrl-enter is not for those who often paragraph with shift-enter. Sending a half written email is never a good thing.

  2. Olli Warelius 26 May 2012 at 7:18 pm #

    Admiring the persistence you put into your site and in depth information you provide. It’s good to come across a blog every once in a while that isn’t the same outdated rehashed information. Wonderful read! I’ve bookmarked your site and I’m including your RSS feeds to my Google account.


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