Outlook Quick Steps

With just a few clicks you can perform numerous steps in routine emailing tasks! Once you begin creating your own quick steps with the Quick Step tool, you'll wonder how you ever managed your inbox without with them.

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How to add Quick Steps in Outlook video transcript:

Do you ever find yourself in Outlook spending a lot of time doing routine tasks? For example: Let’s say your boss loves positive feedback so much that he wants you to forward him all positive feedback emails from customers. Additionally, he wants you to reply to all feedback with a personal “thank you for your feedback” message, and on top of that, he wants you to file the email to quickly pull up later. This is a routine task. Wouldn’t it be great if we could do all this in just a few clicks?

We can. With Quick Steps.

Here’s my outlook inbox. I’ve already identified these 4 emails as positive feedback by simply flagging them for follow up. I already have a feedback folder, but I’m going to create a positive feedback subfolder by right clicking my feedback folder and selecting New Folder. We’ll call it Positive Feedback.

Let’s eliminate this routine busywork and create a Quick Step.

Under the home tab in the Quick Steps section click this very bottom diagonal arrow to get to the Quick Steps manager. Click on New. And because we are doing several different steps, let’s select custom

We’ll name the Quick Step “Positive Feedback” in this Choose an Action drop-down scroll down to Forward. And type in the boss’ email. We can edit this by clicking the Show Options link. We’ll change the subject to, “Some positive feedback!” and add some text to the forwarded message. Click on Hide Options. Now we have the first part set up.

To add the other two, select Add Action. Click the drop-down and find Reply. Show Options for Reply. And remember that we want to keep this email personal, so let’s leave the original RE: subject heading. We’ll add our "thank you for the feedback" message. I’ll show you how to personalize this more when we are sending it out. Click Hide Options.

Third, we want to file this to pull up later. Add Action. Dropdown. Move to folder. Choose folder Positive Feedback.

Let’s add one more action mark the flagged message as complete. Dropdown. Mark complete. Our Quick Step should be ready to go. Click Save.

It’s going to forward to our boss, Reply to the contact, move to the Positive Feedback Folder and Mark the flag as complete. Click Okay.

Now I can select one of these emails. And click on the Quick Step “Positive Feedback.”

Here is the email reply to our customer. I’m going to scan their feedback and add a sentence to personalize it. Hit Send.

Message to the boss. Hit Send.

And we can see the message is filed and marked complete.

Cool huh? We just performed 4 routine steps in a fraction of the time.

One last thing, you can go back to the Quick Steps manager to change the order that the Quick Steps appear in the Ribbon. And we can always Edit our quick step, Duplicate it to create one that is similar or delete our quick step if we don’t like it.

Now you know how to use Quick Steps to eliminate a lot of the busy work in routine Outlook processes.