Introducing Quick Steps

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 shortcuts

My Favorite Feature: Quick Steps

Outlook 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 2010

Automate common or repetitive tasks with Quick Steps

Best practices for Outlook 2010