One of Microsoft’s newest additions to Office, Teams is Microsoft’s competitor to Slack. Use these to turn those pesky email threads into OneNote pages. Outlook integrates directly with OneNote with both “Move to OneNote” and “Open in OneNote” buttons. Creative or knowledge-based teams can benefit from this kind of central repository of knowledge. Another use is creating a notebook that’s a shared note-taking space. Share a tab or a notebook with a working group, and your team can collaborate on a document or a chart within OneNote. OneNote started out as a high-powered note-taking software, and it’s evolved into a powerful collaboration tool. Microsoft has two main collaboration apps: OneNote and Teams. Your team will eventually get the job done, but it’s laborious, distracting, and inefficient. Over email, you’ll end up with multiple versions of the file being attached to emails, all in various states of completeness.

Take a simple task-say, filling in an Excel chart. That doesn’t stop groups of employees from trying to collaborate over email.

Use OneNote and Teams to Reduce Email VolumeĪs great a tool as email is, it’s not very good for real collaboration. Depending on your comfort level and the complexity of your role, you may eventually want to scale up to 5 to 10 folders, each with rules associated with it. We recommend starting out with 2 or 3 folders. It’s possible to set up so many folders you start to lose track of what goes where. The options included in the Rules menu are pretty deep. Keep customizing and adding rules to enhance your efficiency. Once you have a few basic rules in place, you’ll start to see the value. Keep Customizing Rules, But Don’t Overdo It Reserve your main inbox for the unexpected. Create folders for clients you interact with often, for “cold call” sales emails, and for newsletters you’re subscribed to. Try this for all sorts of email categories. If it doesn’t get it right, you can click “Create Rule…” or “Edit Rules…” and customize to your liking. Next, right-click on a message that you want to apply a rule to and select “Rules.” Outlook will try to figure out what kind of rule you want.

Here’s how:įirst, create a new folder (say, Admin Updates for all those company-specific emails you don’t need to read right away) by right-clicking on your inbox folder. Use rules to automatically route emails to specific destinations. Dealing with similar emails all at once can save time. If your business is like most, you receive many messages that fall into categories. Microsoft Outlook has a powerful tool called Rules that can prevent many emails from ever landing directly in your inbox. Use Rules to Automatically Organize and File Emails Here are 5 must-know Microsoft Office hacks that will help you gain control over your email. If you’re using Microsoft Outlook to manage your work email, you might not be using this powerful program to its fullest potential. Unless you’re one of those productivity gurus who’s already achieved inbox zero, managing your inbox can be a frustrating, overwhelming task. No matter who you are or what your business does, email is a big part of your work. Even worse, an out-of-control business email account can be disastrous. An out-of-control personal email account can cause plenty of problems, like missed bill payments. How many email notifications are staring at you? 100? 3,000? More? Drowning in email is no way to live-or to conduct business.

Microsoft outlook hacks