Outlook Tips To Help Improve Productivity
With over 400 million active users, Microsoft Outlook is still a top of choice for many businesses despite steep competition from Gmail. Outlook’s winning features include the fact that it’s user-friendly and works well with numerous third party add-ons. Here are a few things you can do with Outlook in order to increase your daily productivity.
Learn Shortcuts
Memorize frequently used Outlook shortcuts in order to save time. It may not seem like much but a few seconds here and there can really add up. Common Outlook shortcuts include CTRL+N to create a new email, CTRL+R to reply and ALT+W to forward a message. You can view a list of common shortcuts here.
Block Spam
Tired of unwanted e-mails clogging up your inbox every day? The Washington Post reports that spam costs users about $14 billion if we assume that the average person’s time is worth $25 an hour and it takes them 5 seconds to report and delete each spam message. Free up more time by uncluttering your inbox. Mailwasher is an app that deletes spam messages on the server before you can download them. Best of all it’s free. You can also create a whitelist in order to ensure that your contacts go through.
Integrate Task Management
77% of companies use project management software on a daily basis and Trello is one of the more popular options with over 1 million daily users. Trello enables you to assign tasks to various personnel with the status marked as “in progress” or “complete”. It’s now available as an add-on for Outlook and allows you to add incoming sales queries to a virtual board. The benefit of the Trello add-on is that you won’t have to search through old e-mails; important information is pinned in one place and accessible to all members of your team.
Back Up Emails To PDF
Backing up all of your Outlook emails as PDF or DOC files will free up large amounts of space and help your mail program perform more efficiently. Total Outlook Converter Pro performs this job smoothly and saves the emails as EML files which means that you’ll be able to open the file with other email programs. Total Outlook Converter Pro is a huge time saver for any businesses like legal practices who need to back up and archive a large number of emails on a regular basis.
Store Project Notes
Evernote is a popular app that is used to take and organized notes. Evernote’s Outlook add-on allows you to store important project notes an e-mails in the same place and share them with your co-workers. The emails can be saved to your Evernote account and archived for storing purposes.
Send Canned Responses
If you do any sort of outreach or respond to sales inquiries personally on a regular basis, you know the importance of canned responses. Text Lightning is an app that allows you to generate an automated response which can be personalized for optimum results. Examples where this program can come in handy is if a prospective client wants to know how much a specific service costs.
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