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The purpose of the Ribbon in Outlook is to help you become more efficient in getting your work done – be that processing e-mail in your Inbox (Mail Home Tab), managing your Calendar (Calendar Home Tab), or doing work in Tasks (Tasks Home Tab). In designing the Ribbons, we strove for consistency so that you’ll always be able to look to the left side to create a new item or to the right side to find a contact – and to the middle to get what you need to do - done. In Mail, the center of the Ribbon is all about Quick Steps.
What are Quick Steps? Quick Steps are easy-to-use one-click buttons which perform multiple actions at once. If you file your mail, they can be a life saver – one click and that conversation is filed away and marked as read. If you send e-mail to the same people over and over – one click and you have a new email to your team. As your work style in Outlook changes, you can configure Quick Steps to work the way you do.
So you like to file your mail… It turns out that 70% of people file mail into folders in Outlook. In Outlook 2007, and every release before that, there were two ways of filing manually: either you dragged it to the folder or you clicked “Move to folder” and choose the folder. Enter Quick Steps: out of the box, the first two Quick Steps are all about filing your mail. The first Quick Step allows you to file mail into a folder (by default the last folder you filed mail into) and mark it as read in one click. The second Quick Step, Move to: ? is there to give you the idea that you could have a series of Quick Steps for each folder you file into regularly.
The first time you click on a Quick Step (other than Forward:FYI, Meeting Reply, or Reply & Delete) you’ll be prompted to set it up.
Once it is set up, you won’t see this dialog again. In this example, you can just click “1-Reference” in the Ribbon to file mail away.
Not into filing? Quick Steps still has something to offer! Have you ever been on a long e-mail conversation and you just need to get into a room and sort it out? Click Meeting Reply and set up a meeting with the people on the conversation. There are also a series of Quick Steps that rely on your corporate address book to help you: To Manager, Team E-mail, and Team Meeting. These default Quick Steps come prepopulated if your company’s address book knows your organization. If not, you can decide who is on “your team” the first time you click them.
Want to create your own? To create your own Quick Step, just click Create New or drop the gallery to use a template from New Quick Step fly out.
If you click Create New, you’ll be able to pick from a list of actions. Note that in this dialog you can also change the icon (just click on the dot in the upper left), pick a shortcut key, and write your own custom tooltip – to help you remember what this Quick Step is for.
Get more sophisticated: Manage your Quick Steps You can rearrange, duplicate, modify, and delete any Quick Step from the Manage Quick Steps dialog. And if you don’t like what you’ve come up with, you can always reset Quick Steps back to the defaults.
Tip: To get to this dialog quickly, just click on the small arrow in the lower right corner of the Quick Steps group in the Ribbon.
One trick to share with your friends Right click on any “move” Quick Step to easily navigate to that folder:
Or hold down the Control key while clicking on the Quick Step to navigate to the folder.
I hope that you enjoy using Outlook 2010 and Quick Steps. Please play around with them: I’d love to know which Quick Steps you use – maybe they will be defaults in the next Beta!
Melissa MacBeth Program Manager
Note for IMAP users:
If you have an IMAP account and aren’t seeing Quick Steps, there is a known bug that may be the cause. To get Quick Steps back, right click on the Ribbon and click Customize Ribbon, create a new group in the Ribbon, and add Quick Steps to that group.
More info on Quick Steps:
Outlook Quick Steps: One-click shortcutsMy Favorite Feature: Quick StepsOutlook 2010 can save your hide: Use Quick Steps (Crabby's Daily Tip)Cut the email drudge work with Outlook Quick Steps: MVP #9 on Office 2010Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps Best practices for Outlook 2010
Comments: (22) Collapse
i've downloaded the office 2007 professional trial and cannot find outlook ... word excel access etc is there but outlook is missing
pls advise
nice article..will give it a try.
70% of Outlook users file their e-mail using folders, eh? Then why in God's name hasn't Microsoft added heirarchcial folders as a feature to Windows Live HoTMaiL yet?!!!!! Tell the HoTMaiL team to fix it guys!
Outlook Business Contact Management Turkish edition I cannot see Quick Steps where is it?
Can I access the Quick Steps using customized keyboard shortcuts? For some reason not very obvious to me Outlook has been very restrictive in offering possibilities to customize keyboard shortcuts in previous versions (unlike other Office programs).
Steven: Because Outlook is not a Hotmail client. Outlook is an Exchange client (and on the side note it is capable of managing POP/IMAP accounts too). Subfolders on Hotmail would be good though.
Question: How can I back up and restore my Quick Steps settings? I don't want to configure them each time I install Outlook on a new machine.
I'm really glad I stumbled across this. I just upgraded from Outlook 2010 Beta 1 to Outlook 2010 Beta 2 and decided to give Quick Steps a try. Prior to upgrading to the Office 2010 platform, I used ClearContext on Outlook 2007 to help manage email within Outlook. It's a great addition to Outlook, however it doesn't work on Outlook 2010 yet, so going to native Outlook was tough. However, using Quick Steps, I can mirror much of the ClearContext functionality to do the key things I need. One improvement would be to allow any shortcut key combo the user wants. I use shortcut keys instead of a mouse in Outlook, so the change from ALT+L to now having to use SHIFT+CTRL+R is frustrating. Can't find where you remap the shortcut keys so if anyone knows, please reply! Thx. Jason.Volpe@comcast.net
Nice feature but it's a right pain not to be able to insert HTML links into any message text I create with a quickstep (e.g. I regulary set up web conferences by email attendees from outlook, and I'd like to put a live HTML link in for them so they can click the link and be taken to the conference).
When I played with Quick Steps I've removed Team E-mail one, though it appears to be useful.
How do I recreate it?
As far as I can see it nicely synchs with org structure defined in Exchange server, but when I create a new step for sending e-mail, it asks me to manually add contacts, thus I'm quite sure that my manually created quite step will synch up with org structure automatically.
Hi Melissa,
We are using Quick Steps for a number of situations where we want to forward an e-mail to a fixed number of recipients, and/or with a specific subject line. It is very handy.
Quick steps allows to specify recipients in To: CC: and BCC: But as we often send on behalf of another account, it would be an improvement if als the From: field could be specified. This would make Quick Steps an even greater asset. (And it seems a small change :-)
Moving multiple emails in a quick step does not always work. Examples are doing it in search result and conversations. Hope this bug can be fixed.
I totally agree with Henk Bangma, since my team also uses email sent on behalf of another account as rule. We also created a step for replying and moving instead of deleting.
Quick Steps is nice but it would be a lot more useful if they were conditional. I.e. if they would be shown only if some condition is valid similar to automatic formatting. The scenario that I have in mind is when you are reading emails from inbox and either file
them or remove them afterwards. If I could automatically select the folder to file it into based on subject/sender/etc it would help a lot. Or if Move To allowed pinning some frequently used folders - I always find the recent ones removing my favorite/frequent ones.
Comments: (loading) Collapse