Lessons

Lesson Info

Segment 6 - Outlook - Using Email

So in our last segment, we set up an account in outlook and I showed you how to use tests and how to use categories to set up your overall environment, and now what I'm going to do is go into the tools that people use most often email contact and calendar, so we're going to show you how to use all of those functions. So right now I'm in email that's this part right here and as you're looking at it, I want to show you a couple things to point out a couple things about the about this interface, and that is first that you can see that some of these are pink and in your in our last segment, if you'll remember, we actually started using the categories which is a really seldom used technique, but it's really fabulous for organizing your projects that you can customize of this list in any way that you want tio so it has some standard ones that people tend to use, but we added in trade shows, and we added in students, and I'm going to show you why you can use these as a way of tagging all of y...

our events and all of your contacts teo really keep things centralized the next thing that I want to bring your attention to in the email interface are this is right now broken down into today monday, two weeks ago last month, and you have options for how to arrange your in box so that it really does work for you, the under if I go to the organized tab right here, you can see this arranged by button. And so right now, this is arranged by conversations which I'm going tio keep their my newest ones are on top, which I generally prefer, because that way your newest emails all come in at the top of the list, if you had it so that the oldest her on top, all you would ever see, or the same old messages from two thousand three and all the new stuff would come in out of eyesight, so keeping things with newest on top is always the best recommendation. Now, here is the show in groups and that's what's, causing these to be grouped like this, so if you don't like that, I can go into a range by and turn off show in groups, and then I just get one email list, and usually I like to work this way. But what is nice, if you do show them in groups, is that as you accumulate more and more e mails, you can collapse these and on ly look at today's email or on ly, look at the email from earlier this week and so if you are having trouble focusing on the task at hand the groups can be a nice way of consolidating your view like I said, I'm going to turn that off some turning off show in groups now let's also look at the reading pain it used to be that reading pains were all below and so you would click on a message in the top part and seen a message down here but the drawback with that is then you always have to scroll to see your messages so now the default is to have the reading pain on the right hand side so that you have your mailboxes here your list of messages here and you can see the whole content on the right hand side so that was one of those innovations that the second they did it it was just natural to everybody so I'm really glad that we have that option now something else that's relatively new is this conversations and if I have conversations on I can see here that there's an ongoing back and forth with this person about our program at for our trade show and so what the conversations dio is give us a chance teo either close the conversation so we only see the one group or bring them together notice that this one is from way back on four seven this one came in this morning if conversations is off then all of a sudden my list gets a lot longer and I have one email about program at down here one email about the program at all the way up here now you know I only have ten messages right now so there's no big deal but if you're having an ongoing conversation over any length of time having one down here and one here in one up there makes it really hard to keep track so having conversation view on brings them together put some under one heading so if I click on an individual message I can see the individual message but if I click on the conversation it shows me not just those messages but the messages that I sent as well because how many times you go looking to see what you said to somebody so here's this message that I sent and here's another message that I sent so it's really nice to bring it all together in one place using those conversation views any questions about that so I'm going to go back to the home tab the next thing that I want you to see about these e mails is what's been marked what's red and what's unready now actually right now I have everything red so going to mark a few of these as unready just so that we have something to work with so when a message has not yet been read I can tell because it's bold it has a little icon next to it and if I look in the left hand column I can see here that there are in fact to un read messages so that's your visual once I click on an email and then click away from it it will look at this appointment since I artificially changed it I have to change it back again but normally you when you click on a message and you take the moment to read it it automatically gets marked as red so you want oh don't you want to not be fooled by this number here this does not mean that I have one email message it means that I have one unready email message and if I want to see how many e mails I actually have in that folder I turn my attention way down to the bottom where it says eight items one unready and that tells me how many e mails that I actually have I want to go ahead and maximize my window give me a little more room now different people have different email strategies you might have heard of zero in box where some people try and get all their e mails down to nothing and then there's people who are email orders where they have ten thousand messages and I really highly encourage you to fall somewhere in the middle if you're on a newsletter or you get e mails from different companies try and keep it down to the one or two most recent ones instead of keeping absolutely everything or if there's a conversation that you want to remember, maybe instead of keeping that email, launch a copy it into a one note make yourself a notebook of email correspondence you know, maybe you said something you said something noteworthy you know go ahead and store it somewhere else and get it out of your in box because the whole point of outlook or email management is to manage your business. So finding a strategy that actually reduces the clutter is a really good idea during the break, somebody also asked me a question going back teo, you know, do I use outlook? Do I use apple mail? And I actually use both? I have all of my work email in outlook and I have all of my personal email in apple mail that way I'm not distracted by the fun stuff when I'm supposed to be working, so I'm one of those people where I use both clients simultaneously. So I'm not going to go and teach basics like how to reply to a message or how to forward a message because I think most people are good on that if I'm mistaken moderators, please let me know when you're looking at your email list, you can see a message that has been replied to because it has a little purple arrow right there if I want to forward one if I click on it and I forward it, it will then get after it sends we'll see a little purple arrow after it I'm sorry a little blue arrow going forward so a reply is back afford is forward and when you click on any one of those messages you'll see in the message a little bar here that says you replied to this message with the date of the reply and if you want to see that reply, click on show reply and then it will bring up your scent item out of your sent messages so you don't have to go rooting around for it or searching for it it'll be right there a little bit to keep in your e mails organizing if you use this male and you have enough conduce and the highlighted thing to your one note from the mail program right now there's no way to forward it over email hopefully someday there will be right now you have to copy paste copy paste you could still get it in there in here using you yeah like if I wanted to save this for future I could highlight this and copy and then go in tow one note create a page for it and then they said ok now one of my favorite tricks is if you are replying toe on ly part of a message or forwarding on ly part of a message, if I highlight that content first and then forward it or replied to it, it on ly includes that part of that message. So especially when you have an email conversation going back and forth and it's gotten really long, or you have multiple people, if you're just replying to one part, just highlight that one part somebody like typed in and answers on my actually e mails like, how did they do that through this? So that's an easy way to cut out the clutter as a piece of etiquette? Also, I don't have any examples here, but you know how people will send an email that has, like twenty five email addresses in it? First, make sure that if you are replying to that message that you're not replying toe all and sending it out to all twenty five people, the other part is that once you've started the reply, you can also trim out that information, so if I highlight it and simply delete it, you know, when you get that big list of twenty five email addresses, just wipe them out, and then you're not forwarding of secure yes, it just a few pieces of etiquette right there, okay, now, when I am sending an email, I do have all of my formatting tools specifically from word so I can know this is messy this is not what it what I would really send right now I'm just playing with the techniques just to show you but I can make it bold and I could make a night alec and I can take you know certain words right here and turn them colors and I have a highlighter and numbering and centering and so you khun do any kind of formatting that you want to to the text in the message you can also attach making do attachments so I'm going to set this message aside for a moment remember how we took that contract in the less mess in the last session and signed it so if I want to send it back to this person here's my contract I reply to it and now I can either use this attach to take that file what did I say that and on go ahead and select it and attach it and so you can see it right here in the attachments another way of attaching it would also be if you have a file anywhere in your on your computer you can also pick it up and drag it now I have a a tool open that's not allowing me to see both of my two windows at the same time but if you were just stop for a second I can't, but if you had the two windows side by side, you can simply pick up that file and drop it in the message itself and attack do attachments that way does that make sense even though I can't demonstrate it? Okay, so just put the two windows next to each other and just shoot I wanted it to the next okay, now if you want to add pictures to an email message there's a picture button right inside the message and one of the places where I do see people getting confused is notice that the message itself has a different ribbon then the interface and so I've had people say to me, but I can't find the picture button and but I can't find the formatting tools and it's because you only see them when you're looking at a message that you can add it so I'll click on picture and it gives me either photo browser or picture from file the photo browser is directly connected to your eye photo and so anything that you have in your eye photo you can now pick up and drag into an email message as well. Now I want to talk about the cc and the bcc lines that's carbon copy and blind carbon copy if you don't see both of those if you go to the options there's a b c c button here that turns that on and off and what they dio carbon copy, which is ironic because most people today and never ask we seen a carbon copy of a carbon copy is a duplicate and so if I am emailing, I'm e mailing this back to the trade show organizer, but if I want my business partner to see it, I can type their name into the cc and then they're getting a copy of it. So when you receive an email where your name is in the c c that's telling you, hey, I want to keep you in the loop this is for your information, but you don't have to do anything with this. I'm not expecting you to take any action. I just wanted you to know about it the bcc is taking it a step further that's a c c but with a little bit of security if there's a name in the bcc the person who's receiving it both the two and the c c I don't know that it was also sent to this other person so it's good. If you are planning a surprise party, you put all the names in the bcc. If you are communicating with a colleague and you want your supervisor to see the conversation, you would be see see them if you are sending the list to twenty five names, put them in the bcc that way they don't see all the other names either they'll just see that it was sent just to them or occasionally you'll see an email it's you'll get a meal it says undisclosed recipients that was done with the bcc line and so that way you're not sending out twenty five different email addresses to people who don't who shouldn't have them which cuts down spam cuts down inappropriate contact um so you have any questions about b, c, c or city security issue a militia if somebody bc sees you and you click reply all well the bcc be included in that which you know I don't think so I don't think so either, but I've always been curious for a definitive answer from that one because you never know do because you don't even know they're there in the first place I don't even know it's there in the first place, so I don't think that that list is attached to that email in any way any more makes sense with yeah, ok, good question ok, so some other features when you are sending e mails while I'm here on the options tab background color did exactly the same thing that background color did earlier and remember when we saved a color in our previous lesson I can then use that color again which allows me to be consistent across my branding by reusing the same colors be careful though when you're sending e mails this with background colors this way you can't actually guarantee what they're going to see and some email programs might actually strip out the color so especially if you go with the dark color and then um take that text and make it white so it stands out you might actually be shooting yourself in the foot because depending on their email reader they might see nothing at all so I'm going to undo that ok? So that's the background colors there is also a feature for a background picture and this works but it doesn't really work because watch what happens I'm going to go ahead and pick one of the images that I have in the course I'm going to go into the desktop publishing files that come with the course and just pick up this image right here of my jewelry designs the problem with using this as a background is that it tiles and you also have some big contrast problems so they include it but it's not something that I ever really recommend that somebody uses I mean it might look fabulous if your email window is this big and you find a way to balance out the text but overall it's going to cause more problems than it solves so I am again going to undo that actually doesn't let me that ground picture removed if my message is high priority I can give it a red exclamation point if it's not very important I can set it to low priority but I think I've only received maybe two or three e mails ever that were actually set as low priority like here let me send you this but it's not important so you'll see a high priority message is you should pay attention to those but the low priorities you know mostly somebody sending a joke but somebody sending a joke probably doesn't know there's a little priority button so I'll set this the high priority just for kicks ok, now there is also a czech names but in here this on lee really works if you are on an exchange network to make sure that when you put in their email address that really does exist on the system so if you're in a corporation you might use this but otherwise most of the time you don't need it so those are some of the ins and outs of making a of doing a message uh let me talk about signatures you'll notice that well before I talk about signatures one thing I want to point out is that this email has a warning here to protect your privacy some pictures in this message we're not downloaded what that means is that's a protection given to you by outlook because spammers one of the things they dio tio let you know that toe find out if your address is real or not is they'll include a little image just like maybe a one pixel one white pixel in it but if you open up the email message it goes and it downloads that pixel and then it says to the spammer hate this is a really email address and so outlook by default will not download your pictures and so when you want tio, when you know that this is a genuine email from somebody you know, then it's safe to see the pictures in it so I can download the pictures and so I can see that little image, these images that came up at the bottom so it's a little security measure that outlook provides, which I really appreciate and so at the bottom of this I see this information right down here. Now I'm sure that brian doesn't type this into every single email message this is what's called a signature and a signature can be your logo it can be your name it could be your contact information, it can be a market and quote like I could use my elevator pitch um your phone number anything that you would want to include at the bottom of a message and to create your own signature there's I can get there from a couple different places within the email window I have a button here too put in my state to get to my signatures, but I can also get two signatures from the preferences, so I'm going to go upto outlook and down to preferences just to show you the rial place where it lives and then here I can see signatures so this button takes me to the same place as this button richer and I can see that I have one signature in here so far but there's actually nothing in it I can see those two little separator lines, those two lines if you are just tagging information down at the bottom of the message, you can leave those two lines in but what a lot of people dio now instead is take that out and then put in their closing as well and maybe I'll put in my your ella's well and ok, so now I have that signature now maybe you have more than one signature maybe you have both your business and your personal in here. Maybe you're like a lot of us and you actually have two different businesses like I have wandering star but then I also have royal wise solutions my computer trading company. So I'm going to change the name of this from standard the wandering star and then I'm going to make another one for royal I solutions so I put the name in here I put the signature in here you also have an option to see this little column here that says random in this case I definitely don't want these to be read them because my royal eyes customers a royal eyes in my wondering started wandering star but like maybe you have a whole selection of quotes you can have several different quotes listed here and then if you randomize it every time you start a new email a different quote will show up at the bottom so that you're not sending somebody the same joke over and over and over again so there's my two signatures and I'll close that so now when I want to pick my signatures I have but I can choose between wandering star and royal eyes no nos the's air cumulative I have to actually pick one and then delete the other one but that gives you an opportunity to have multiple signatures now when ok I'm going to go ahead and send this message now when I'm making a new blank email it should default to whichever email address um you were clicked on at the time and each of these two e mails have their own set of signatures so I would actually have to go in and um set and I can go in and set this so let me back up to where I was because I did that too quick so from the signatures but and I went into edit signatures and down here, where it says, default signatures, this allows me to set which email address is attached. Teo which of the company's now I know that says w star. But just for the sake of this, les and I can now set a default signature assigned to each of the two accounts. And this time, if I'm in one account and I make a new message, it defaults to that signature. And if I'm in this email account and I make a new email message, it defaults to that signature. And now, when I reply, it will go back and forth. It will reply with the signature from whichever account that I set as that default.