If you find yourself performing the same actions over and over again on your Outlook emails, then this video is for you because this is where I introduce you to Quick Steps in Outlook. Quick steps allow us to take an email that comes into our inbox and apply multiple actions to it.
So let's take a look. Now, if you've never used Quick Steps before, you are gonna find them up here on the Home Ribbon in the Quick Steps Group. And you can see in here we have some that have already been set up. We are gonna create a brand new Quick step from scratch. So let's click on Create New. Now we need to give our Quickstep a name.
Now the Quick step that I am creating is going to be a Quick step that does three different things. It moves the email to a folder that I specify. It categorises the email, and it also forwards it onto somebody else. In this case, my secondary email. So I'm gonna call this Move Categorize and Forward, and I would recommend you give it a descriptive name so you can find it from your list of Quick steps.
So the first thing I want it to do is move the email to a specified folder. So we're gonna click the dropdown here underneath Choose Action, and we're gonna select Move to a folder. I can then click choose folder, and it's gonna bring up the sub folders that I have in my email account. So I want to move this to the Project Beta folder.
I can then click Add an Action because the second action I want it to perform is to categorise the email. So we're gonna click the dropdown and we're gonna choose Categorize Message. And I can choose what category I want to assign to this email. Now this is related to Project Beta, so let's give it that category.
And then the final action that I want to add is I simply want to forward it onto my secondary email account. So if we scroll down, you can see we have an option for forward, and then I can type in my email address. There we go. And I could carry on going, adding more actions if I wanted to do other things.
We are gonna stick with three, note to the bottom we can also assign a keyboard shortcut to it. So I could assign, let's say, Ctrl + Shift + (1) one to this. I could add some tool tip text. I'm not gonna bother just to save a little bit of time, but let's click on finish. So now let's say that I want to perform this action on an email that's just come into my inbox.
So we'll go for this one just here. All I would need to do to apply all of those actions is either go up to Quick steps. Click the dropdown and choose the Quick step I've just created from here. Or alternatively, because we did assign a keyboard shortcut, I can simply press Ctrl + Shift + (1) and it's going to execute those steps.
And you can see it's opened up on the screen because it does allow you to check the email before clicking send in order to forward it. So we're gonna click on send. Off that goes. But notice that that email has now disappeared, and if I go across to the Project Beta sub folder, I should find that it's in there, which it is.
So it's executed. The move. I can see it's applied, the category, there we go, Project Beta, and then it will forward it to my secondary inbox. If we click down here, you can see there it is, and it's showing as a forward. So Quick steps are a great little thing to know about in Outlook, particularly if you find yourself repeating the same tasks over and over again on specific mails.
And one of the best things about these is that they're not automatic, so they're not applied to your inbox. They're not going to automatically run when a new email hits your inbox. You have to physically click on the Quick step to execute the actions, or if you've assigned a keyboard shortcut, do it that way.
