How can you save time in Microsoft outlook?
There are four ways to automate email responses: Templates,
Signatures, Quick Parts, and Automatic Replies,
often referred to as Out of Office replies. I'm Dawn Bjork,
The Software Pro.
I'm also a Microsoft Certified Trainer and certified Outlook Specialist.
In this online training we will focus on Quick Parts.
To learn more about the other ways to automate your email responses,
look for the links to these videos in the description below.
Whether you are composing a new message or replying to an existing message,
Quick Parts might be one of the most time saving ways to easily build a message.
You can use Quick Parts to store or reuse boilerplate text and content you want
to use on an ongoing basis.
These might include responses to requests for information,
common replies or other repetitive content.
To create a Quick Parts,
the easiest thing to do is either reply to an existing message or create a new
one that contains the text you want to reuse,
so you simply need to be able to have access to that text. In this case,
I'll reply to this particular message.
So this text is actually text that I received at one point in reply to an
inquiry about working with this particular agency.
We would highlight the text that we want to store.
So this could be something that you have in an old message.
You just pull it up from your sent folder and you highlight that content,
all of the formatting and content that will all be stored as part of a Quick
Part.
Next we move to the Insert tab towards the right hand side in the Text group is
Quick Parts.
From here we can see existing Quick Parts that we have and one of the options
then with that is that we can save this selection to the Quick Parts Gallery.
Notice that these also have specific categories that you can create.
So I'm going to save the selection to the Quick Parts Gallery.
What do I want to call it?
Here I might call this Supplier Resources.
Where do I want to store it? That will it be in Quick Parts.
What's the category? Well there's General,
Proposals is one that was created and maybe I will create this as a new category
that I will call Suppliers.
What's the description?
This is optional, but the more specific it can be helpful there.
Where do you want to save it? By default it would go to this template,
NormalEmail.dotm
and then there are options as well for how it's inserted.
In this case we'll move forward to, OK.
So now that is stored as one of your Quick Parts.
Let's go ahead and create a brand new message and when you want to work with the
Quick Parts,
simply move to Insert, Quick Parts. You
will see each one of these as a possibility
and when we hover over the one we just created.
Notice that we see then the label for that,
the category for it and the description as well displays.
So from here I'll simply select it,
it will be added to this message and notice that even if it was a lot of
content, which this one is,
it all is part of this email.
But the big advantage here is that not only does it include formatting links and
graphics,
but you can also use multiple Quick Parts entries within one email message.
At any point, if you want to edit those, you move to the Quick Parts,
right click and you'll notice that here's some options.
One is that we could organize them and that means that we might rename some
things or put them in different categories.
You also would have the flexibility because there are multiple ones here that
you could insert at the current position. Move it to the beginning of the end,
so lots of flexibility with Quick Parts.
The only trade off with that, and there really isn't a big downside,
is if you create a number of Quick Parts,
you'll probably be pretty attached to them and you'll also want to make sure
then that you back up the file where they're stored before you might be upgraded
to a new computer. Otherwise you'll have to build them all again.
If you wanted to share them with other people,
one option would be then to copy that template file,
that NormalEmail.dotm file,
or you could potentially add them all into one email and then that would mean
that someone else could then create these Quick Parts as they wish.
How could you leverage Quick Parts to save time and to more easily automate your
email responses?
Now you've seen how to save time and effort by customizing and automating your
work in Outlook using Quick Parts.
For more tips on being productive with Outlook,
head to TheSoftwarePro.com/Outlook.
If this online training was helpful,
please like and comment on this video and subscribe to this channel.
This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.