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'll focus on customizing signatures.
To learn more about the other ways to automate your email responses,
ook for the links to these videos in the description below.
Preset signatures are frequently used for outgoing messages.
Now for a majority of messages you'll likely will use a default signature.
This might include your full name, position or title, phone number,
website, social media, and other contact information.
These are often standardized within organizations,
although you may have some flexibility to build your own to be more productive.
You can create multiple signatures such as a default for work replies and
personal email.
Try one of these two techniques to create or modify signatures.
If you're in a new message, like we are here, from the Message tab,
we can go to Signatures.
You may already have some existing signatures,
but if you want to add new ones or even edit the ones that you already have
available in Outlook, you would simply choose Signatures.
The other way to get to this is from the main Outlook window.
You would pick File > Options, click the Mail tab,
and then choose Signatures from the Email Signature tab.
If you want to create a brand new signature, you would then simply choose New.
Notice that you can delete or even rename existing ones as well as edit them.
So for instance, let's say that here for this business one,
I want to edit that.
I can simply click into the body of it and we have formatting options available
to us. We can add images, we can add a hyperlink,
but let's just say for instance that we want to add a title here and then at
this point we have the option to save.
If it's a brand new signature,
then you can start with New and then name this.
So keeping in mind that these will be listed in alphabetical order,
so, for instance,
if you are responsible for responding on behalf of other people,
you might list any of those signatures with their initials or their names so
they're grouped together.
Planning this out ahead of time is helpful for the organization of your
signatures. In this case,
I'll put in here that maybe this is a personal signature when I'm replying
email.
Now in this case then we could format this, select it,
and you can select from the available formatting options just as if it was a
regular email or a document.
Decide what your font is and even if you want to make other kinds of formatting
changes towards the right hand side, we have the option here to, for instance,
add an image or to even add a hyperlink or a link.
Let's say to a website. Once you've completed that of course,
then choose Save and it will be one of the signatures that's in your list.
Towards the right hand side here we can pick the email account we want to
customize how we respond to new messages,
which one of these signatures we use for that,
and then how we might respond to replies or forwards.
That is you're responding to someone who might already have that information.
So this could be a standard reply.
That can include additional text after you finish creating or editing the
signature. Then of course you can choose, OK.
And then these signatures are available to us from this drop-down.
But that's not all.
Signatures can be much more than just include your contact information.
Let's say that you send a few basic messages over and over again,
such as a reply to requests for product information or followup response.
Let's look at this again.
So we'll go back to Signature > Signatures.
And here we have obviously,
not a real life marketing reply,
but the idea here is that this can include any of that standardized boilerplate
text that you might be using repetitively.
This is a lot faster than saving this text to a draft message or to a Microsoft
Word document where you have to paste it in here as a potential subject line.
You could fill in the blank.
This could be paragraphs of standardized text that you want to use
automatically.
and we have in other similar response.
The number and content of your customized signatures is really only limited by
your imagination.
What email responses could you automate through the use of signatures?
I'll cancel out of this just to show you that idea. So for instance,
if it was the marketing reply, now,
I could simply highlight this.
CTRL+X to cut or right click to cut,
come up to the subject CTRL+V to paste or right click and paste.
And so there is my subject line
I can fill in other information.
We could even populate this with additional text.
So consider how you might use customized signatures for your followup or your
responses.
And some of the advantages is you can create multiple signatures for responding
for different topics, even on behalf of different people. Keep in mind however,
that although you can create over a hundred signatures,
you'll likely want to limit these a bit so you're not updating them all if
there's a change to contact information or other details.
Another advantage of signatures is they can include paragraphs,
a format and text as well as images and links.
The tradeoff is you can only have one signature per message.
If you want to have a lot of repeat content than Quick Parts might be a better
option if you have a lot of different pieces that you'd like to plug into a
message.
Now you've seen how to save time and effort by customizing and automating your
work in Outlook using signatures.
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.