Recently, I have discovered in Microsoft Outlook, a feature – Quicksteps! Now whilst I wouldn’t go as far as to say it has changed my life, it has certainly taken a load off. So what is Quicksteps?
Quicksteps is a feature in Outlook that allows you to automate common Outlook tasks. The first time I used this, was out of frustration. My inbox was filling up quicker than I could reply to e-mails and I needed a quick way to let people know that I had received their e-mail and seen it, but there might be a delay in responding. I went and created a new quickstep which essentially replied to any e-mail I selected and sent the sender of the e-mail a polite message notifying them of this slight delay and that I had seen their message.
The next occasion was (you guessed it), born out of frustration. When doing various routine tasks throughout the month, I found myself repeatedly manually typing, more or less the same e-mail to a multitude of people again and again with the only difference being an invoice number or purchase order reference. Cue, Quicksteps! New Quickstep! Create new message, enter the main body of the message minus the reference number and Hey Presto! I now have 2 buttons in my Outlook that save me lots of time.
But it doesn’t stop there. This works with tasks, appointments, categories and the list goes on.
And the cherry on the cake, you don’t even have to use a Quicksteps button, you can assign a “hotkey”. So for example, for my automatic reply when I’m running behind, I simply press CTRL+SHIFT+1
Go on, give it a try, and make your life easier