I think most of us at this stage in our careers are used to creating rules in Outlook in order to help us manage our email a little bit more effectively. But the thing with rules is that once you create a rule, that rule is going to run on your entire inbox and it will handle all emails. For example, if I have a rule set up that says, whenever I receive an email from Pam, send it directly to the deleted items folder.
That rule is going to run every single time Pam sends me an email. And to be honest with you, that's not a bad thing. However, sometimes you don't necessarily want a rule to run on your entire inbox every single time. You might want to just run the rule on an individual email when you choose to. And that is where Quick Steps in Outlook come in.
So, let's take a look at what they're all about. I'll show you how to set them up and how useful they can be. So, here I am in my Outlook account. And if we go to the Home tab, notice in the middle here we have this Quick Steps group. And I guarantee this is probably a group that you've never really looked at before.
Now, if we click on the corner here where we have the diagonal arrow, that is going to take us into the manage QuickSteps dialogue box. And this is where we can come to view QuickSteps that we already have set up and also create new QuickSteps. So I'm going to click on new and we can choose an action for our QuickStep.
Now I have a colleague called Adele and maybe when I receive an email from Adele, I want to flag it and move it to a folder. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to choose flag and move and I can now create my quick step. So I'm going to call this Adele flag and move. So I'm going to flag the message.
I can choose the flag. I'm going to flag it for today. And this is where I can go in and choose a specific folder that I want to use. So I'm going to expand inbox and you can see I have a folder already there called mails from Adele. So we're going to move it to that folder, but I don't want to mark it as red so I don't miss it.
So let's deselect that option. I'm going to click on Finish and OK. Now I haven't created a rule. So when a mail comes in from Adele, it's not automatically going to move it and flag it. But if I have mails from Adele in my inbox, for example, this one down here, I can run that quick step on this individual email.
So all I would need to do is either right-click. Go to Quick Steps and choose Adele, flag a move, and it's going to do exactly that. I have another one just here. I could go to the home ribbon and in quick steps, Adele, flag, and move. And if I just check that, if I expand out my inbox and go to mails from Adele, you can see those two mails just there are showing as flagged and obviously they've been moved to the correct folder.
Now, the reason why they're not showing as unread is because I'd already read these mails prior to running the QuickStep. So that is how QuickSteps work. You can set up as many different types of QuickStep as you want, and they're just a quick way of executing multiple different actions on an email to make you a bit more efficient.
And they differ from rules because they don't apply automatically to everything coming into your inbox.
