Six ways to work faster in MS Outlook

CNET - Organizations large and small rely on Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations to get the job done. In some ways Outlook is the poor cousin of the three high-profile Office apps. But the true workhorse in Microsoft's ubiquitous suite is the unglamorous e-mail/contact manager/task scheduler.

These six tips for Outlook 2010, 2007, and 2003 will let you spend less time reopening archived messages, jog your memory about reminders, drag files to send them as attachments, add terms to the spell checker, clear space on the taskbar, and enhance your list of click-saving keyboard shortcuts for Outlook.

Archive a folder's messages on your schedule
Many people have no need to archive their Outlook e-mail, choosing instead to delete old messages or simply to let them accumulate. However, most organizations cap the size of individual Outlook accounts, so you may receive a notice from the IT folks to archive some of your old e-mail.

Archiving can prevent folder bloat, but retrieving archived messages takes longer than reopening nonarchived ones. You may need easy access to messages older than Outlook's default auto-archive-age setting of 6 months. It's easy to delay all Outlook archiving or the program's archiving of specific folders and messages.

(Note that Outlook 2010's Clean Up feature automatically removes what it identifies as redundant messages in selected folders. That's not the same as archiving old e-mail.)
To enable automatic archiving for mail in a specific folder, right-click the folder and choose Properties > AutoArchive. By default, the archiver runs every 14 days and applies to messages older than six months. To change the default settings, choose the Default Archive Settings button to open the AutoArchive dialog. Here you can change the frequency of archiving, the length of time messages remain unarchived, and the location of your archive.pst file.

Tweak Outlook's auto-archive settings to adjust the 

frequency of archiving, the age of archived messages, 

the archive location, and other options.

(Credit: screenshot by Dennis O'Reilly/CNET)

 

To customize a single folder's archive settings, right-click it, choose Properties > AutoArchive, select "Archive this folder using these settings," and make your choices. To prevent an individual message from being archived, open it and click File > Info > Properties in Outlook 2010 and 2007 or File > Properties in Outlook 2003. Check "Do not AutoArchive this item."     More