Are you lost in a sea of emails? It might be useful to make certain emails stand out with a special color or formatting. Perhaps a fillable form that comes to your inbox with a specific subject could be green, or all emails from your boss could show up as red. Customizing your inbox with conditional formatting can be a huge time saving tool to help draw attention to certain emails in your inbox at glance. Let’s take a look. Before we get started, I would like to thank Michelle for having an excellent question in last week’s Outlook Advanced class that inspired this Byte.

About Conditional Formatting

Just like we experienced in Excel, conditional formatting in Outlook will look for certain conditions and apply a specific appearance to them. Here are a few caveats before we jump in:

• This feature is currently only available for the PC desktop application of Outlook (apologies to Mac users).
• Conditional Formatting applies to one folder at a time. This means that you can create separate rules for each folder. It also means that you should be cautious of which folder is selected before jumping into the view setting.
• Changes you make with this setting are at your computer application level only: it is a view setting within the Outlook desktop application. This means that other instances of Outlook (e.g. the online application, or the desktop application running on an additional computer) on will not adopt these view settings.
• If you would like to learn more about Conditional Formatting, please attend one of my Outlook Advanced sessions (listed in myTraining).

Create a Conditional Formatting Rule

1. Start by selecting the folder where you would like to apply the rule. This may just be your Inbox if you are not a big fan of folders.

2. Go to the View tab, Current View group, and select View Settings.

3. Select Conditional Formatting.

Here are all your current Conditional Formatting rules. That’s right, you already have some rules… like the way an unread message uses blue font, for instance… I would not recommend changing existing default rules.

3. On the right select Add.

4. At the bottom of the popup, you will be prompted to name your rule. Use a name that is relevant to you.

From here, there are two settings we have to create: Font and Condition. Just like with Excel, it is easy to get carried away with creating one setting and forget to do the other…

Font Settings

Let’s set the appearance first.

1. To the left of your title, select Font.

2. A popup screen appears with various font options along the top: font type, style and size…

… and of course the funnest part, in the lower left, Color!

3. Make your font and color selections, then press OK once.

Condition Settings

This second part is easy to forget. Sometimes we spend a lot of time crafting the perfect appearance, and then forget to tell Outlook what the Condition is where the appearance should be applied.

1. Below where you selected Font, select Condition.

Take a look at your options… you have the ability to format based on:

• Specific words in a subject field
• Emails from or to specific people
• Situations where you are the only person in the To: line
• … and we will see some more examples shortly.

2. For this scenario, I am going to set a condition based on emails From a specific person. Click on the From button to browse the directory. Double click on the person’s name, then press OK.

• This option works best if you browse for a name, rather than typing in the full email.

3. Let’s take a look at the More Choices tab, because things get even more interesting here. Not only are more options present here, but we could layer these on top of the previous selection… here are conditions based on:

• Category
• Only unread or read items
• Items with attachments
• Importance level
• Items that are flagged

So think about this, you could set your formatting to color code emails from a specific person that are unread; or emails that have specific words in the title that also have attachments. So many possibilities!

4. Once you have this set how you would like, press OK. Then OK again to get back to your Outlook folder.

If all went well, you should be able to see the effects of your lovely new rule. I picked purple for mine…

Thoughts?

What do you think about Conditional Formatting in Outlook? Do you think you will apply some of these rules to your Outlook folders? I would love to hear from you!

Congratulations, Power Users!

Congratulations to our newest Power Users! For the full gallery, and more information about the WSU Microsoft Office Power User Program, please visit: wichita.edu/poweruser

Samantha Dolan

Search Folders often elicit an “aha!” moment for attendees in Outlook Advanced training. Many people discover these handy folders can take the place of their existing complicated folder rules. Let’s see how these special folders work.

Exercise File

Hey there is no exercise file for you today! Just open up your Outlook and follow along.

Oh, and if you are a Mac user and think this won’t apply to you, think again! I have a solution for you toward the end.

PC Users: Create a Search Folder

On the left side of your Outlook mail, you likely have all sorts of folders. Scroll all the way down to the bottom, and you will find Search Folders

1. Right click on top of Search Folder and select New Search Folder.

2. A popup screen will appear with a plethora of options. Lets start with one toward the top: Mail Flagged for Follow Up. Select this option and press OK.

3. A new folder appears on the left side of your screen under Search Folders. Click on it, and here is a shortcut to all the mail you have flagged for follow up.

Don’t have any messages flagged for follow up? No problem, we are going to create some more folders.

Create Another Search Folder

1. Follow step 1 above, and this time select Mail from and to specific people.

2. Toward the bottom of the popup, press Choose to search for a person.

3. You will be taken to the old familiar search screen (blurred out here for WSU employees’ privacy). In the upper left, type the last name of someone who emails you often.

4. When you find their name on the list, select it, and press OK.

5. Now you have a folder of all the emails in your inbox from this person.

More options

It is worth your time to look through all the Search Folder options. Popular Search Folders include:

• Unread mail
• Mail flagged for follow up
• Important mail
• Mail from specific people
• Categorized mail
• Mail with attachments
• Mail with specific words (think about form results that come to you with the same title)
• Custom Search Folder: if all else fails, you can completely design your own

Since most of us have a lot of activity on the left side of our Outlook screen, if you want to draw attention to your new Search Folder, you can add it to favorites by right clicking on it.

In this way, and a couple other ways, Search Folders are going to behave very much like other folders. But there are some important differences.

A Word About Search Folders

Since they behave similar to regular folders, it is easy to forget that Search Folders are a different type of animal.

A shortcut to search

A search folder is a shortcut to search, nothing more. It is a window into what could have been an advanced search. This is important for several reasons:

• The mail in the folders still only exist in your inbox, not a separate folder within the inbox.
• Deleting a search folder will not delete the contents, just the search window.

If you delete a search folder, you will even receive a message that tells you as much.

Note: be careful when you do so that you are selecting Delete Folder, not Delete All.

Mac Users: Smart Folders

Mac users, it is finally your turn! While you don’t have Search Folders, you have something arguably cooler. They are called Smart Folders.

1. Start by clicking into the Search bar in the upper right. This will activate the contextual Search tab.

2. Click on the Search tab, and create a customized search: perhaps email from a specific person, then plugging in their name underneath.

3. In the upper right of the Search tab, press Save Search.

4. A new folder is created in your Smart Folders, all you have left to do is name it!

In a lot of ways, the Mac Smart Folders are more user friendly than the PC Search Folders, but they both accomplish the same task: they give you a very special window into a search of your inbox.

Thoughts?

What do you think? Will you find a use for Search Folders or Smart Folders? Will this eliminate the need for some of your folder rules?

Congratulations, Power Users!

Congratulations to our newest Power Users! For the full gallery, and more information about the WSU Microsoft Office Power User Program, please visit: wichita.edu/poweruser

There are a variety of reasons that you may want to delay delivery of an email in Outlook. Perhaps you are waiting until a specific time to send a reminder, or maybe you need to delay sending emails to specific people until 4:59 pm (or 7:59 am). Outlook’s Delay Delivery feature may be just what you are looking for.

Mac Users

It looks like this feature will be coming in the future to Mac users (365 and 2019 versions of Outlook), so stay tuned! It will be called “Send Later,” and will appear as a dropdown next to the Send button.

PC Users: Outlook Options

To start, try testing this out on a test email, not an important one.

1. Create a New Email.
   
2. Select the Options tab in the ribbon
3. In the More Options group, press Delay Delivery
   
4. In the pop up screen, Delivery Options section, make sure the box next to Do not Deliver before is checked. Set the date and time for delivery and pressIf you want to see the feature in action, try delaying your test email for just a few minutes.
   
5. When you are ready to send the message, press Send, just like usual.
   
6. The email will be in your Outbox until the delivery time. To make a change or delete the message, go to your outbox. Double click on the message to reopen and access the Options tab on the ribbon.
   

Important Caveats

Closing Outlook

• When you use this feature in Outlook, your Outlook program must be up and running for the delivery to occur. So, if the delivery time occurs while your Outlook is closed, the delivery will not occur until you reopen Outlook.
• If you Delay Delivery and close your Outlook, you will receive a reminder message that there are items in your Outbox.

Button Defaults

• As soon as you press the Delay Delivery button, the email will be delayed until a default time until you uncheck Do Not Deliver Before In other words, if you press this button to look at the feature but do not want to delay delivery, be sure to uncheck the box next to Do Not Deliver Before.

Thoughts?

What do you think? Do you have great ideas for using this cool feature in Outlook?

Congratulations, Power Users!

Congratulations to our newest Power Users! For the full gallery, and more information about the WSU Microsoft Office Power User Program, please visit: wichita.edu/poweruser

• Susie Jacques
  
• Heather Merchant
  (as Flash Phil!)

Power Users will have to pardon me for repeating myself, but I can’t stop shouting about the Journal feature in Outlook. What a cool tool; deceptively simple yet useful in a multitude of ways, this creature is a favorite in Outlook Essentials training.

There are many ways you might choose to organize your phone calls and conversations; OneNote, an old-fashioned spiral notebook, your impeccable memory… but the Journal is by far my favorite go-to for this. It integrates seamlessly into Outlook; it is searchable, compatible with your calendar, and a welcome addition to the Outlook universe.

Have you never used this feature? You are not alone. I rarely meet someone before Outlook Essentials training who has heard of it.

Apologies to Mac Users

Before I jump in too deep, I have sad news for Mac users… there is not a Journal feature in the Mac version of Outlook. This is only within the desktop PC Outlook program. Not fair! I am sorry, Mac friends.

Where is the Journal?

Even for PC users, Outlook does not make the Journal easy to find.

To find the Journal:

1. In the lower left navigation, go to Mail Module

2. Click the “…” on the right side of the Navigation

3. Select Folders

4. On the left side of the screen select Journal.

Make a Shortcut

Since it is a bit of a trek to find the Journal, you might find it helpful to create a shortcut. There are a couple ways to accomplish this, but I am particularly fond of the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). The QAT is a series of tiny buttons above the ribbon in Microsoft programs.

To add the Journal to the QAT:

1. Press the down arrow on the right side and select More Commands

2. In the dropdown at the top of the popup, change Popular Commands to All Commands

3. Scroll down until you find the Journal (the entries are alphabetical). Select the Journal on the left pane, press the Add button between the two panes. Then it will appear on the right pane

4. Press OK.

Now you can navigate to the Journal by pressing your newly created Journal button in the QAT.

Journal Entries

Making a journal entry is remarkably intuitive. Let’s create one. First,  navigate to your Journal by pressing the new QAT button.

In the ribbon of the Journal, select the first button, Journal Entry.

In the popup screen notice the ability to enter a subject, an Entry type (e.g. phone, conversation, etc).

You can manually enter a start and end time, or you can make use of the built in Timer.

I particularly like the timer for phone calls.

Once you have created a Journal entry, press Save and Close on the left side of the ribbon.

Searching

Now you have created a searchable entry in Outlook. While you are still in the Journal module, there is a search feature in the upper left. If a couple weeks go by and you can’t remember certain details, now you can search by a word and quickly find all the Journal entries

Calendar Integration

You might want to add a Journal entry to your calendar. Perhaps your phone call was particularly long, or perhaps you would like a record to be visible to people with whom you have shared your calendar. To add a Journal entry to your calendar:

1. Click on the entry in the Journal entry list
2. Hold down your mouse, and drag this down to the calendar icon in the lower left navigation.

This will create a calendar event with your Journal details.

Note that you will have to hand enter start and end times for the calendar event.

Thoughts?

So what do you think? Do you have great plans for the Journal in Outlook?

You have probably experienced this scenario:

On your desktop Outlook you open an email that a coworker sends you from her phone.

You notice that the formatting looks sparse, but you don’t think much about this until you start to compose your reply. Your signature looks different than usual, you can’t format text, or change fonts… even doing something simple, like making a word bold or italic, is impossible as a good portion of the ribbon is greyed out and unselectable. What is going on here?

When your coworker emailed you from her phone (or tablet), most likely the formatting of the entire email changed over to Plain Text. This means minimal to no formatting and no images, even for your responses to her email.

How to Fix

Want to hear the good news? You can fix this in two clicks.

Important: first, be sure that you are replying in a popped out message pane. We talk about this Pop Out view a lot in Outlook Essentials training, and how it opens up a whole new world of opportunities in the Outlook ribbon. This button lives right above the Send button in the Reply preview pane.

Okay, are you ready for the two steps?

1. Go to the Format Text Tab
2. In the Format group, change the selection from Plain Text to HTML by pressing the HTML button.

Go back to your Home and Insert tabs, and you will see that all of your options have returned. Happy day! Heads up though, if your signature is set to automatic, you may need to reinsert your signature to bring back the formatting in the signature.

I hope this tip prevents some frustration for you in the future. No exercise files today, unless you would like me to send you an unformatted email from my phone to test out this setting… if so, you know where to find me!