Conversation View in Outlook 365

Submitted by schwarz on June 15, 2015 - 9:45am

If you don't like having Outlook 365 cluster email messages & their replies — but would rather see each email message on its own — here's how you can fix your view of email threads.

The screenshot below shows a set of email messages posted to the WisPubLib listserv as seen in Outlook 365, with Conversation View turned on (which is the default setting). I've circled in majenta (2) and red (4) the numbers that indicate there's multiple messages grouped together because they have the same subject line:

Monitor & Maintain the Size of Your Outlook Mailbox

Submitted by schwarz on August 14, 2014 - 3:53pm

Staff at libraries in our system learned this spring we need to keep our Outlook mailboxes under 1 gigabite (1 GB) in size. (The amount of email stored on our Exchange server had grown enough that reducing each staffperson's mailbox quota could save backup space and improve the efficiency of our email server.)

For some staff, getting below 1 GB wasn't a problem. But others (like me) needed to pare down our mailboxes in a big way, so we set about archiving messages and saving & removing attachments to get under the 1GB mark. I'd met my goal by the deadline, but after a month passed — and more attachment-heavy emails arrived — I thought I might be close to bumping up against my limit again. I checked my Outlook's mailbox size, and sure enough — I realized I'd need to regularly monitor my mailbox size to ensure I wouldn't go over my quota.

Here's what I did, and you can too:

How to Open Outlook Mail, Contacts & Calendar in Separate Windows

Submitted by schwarz on February 12, 2014 - 4:38pm

If you work in Outlook most of the day, you may need to navigate from the Mail view to the Calendar, then to Contacts, and then back to Mail. Juggling those aspects of Outlook can be awkward.

Instead, try this simple tip to open Mail, Calendar, Contacts & Tasks in separate windows, it works in Outlook 2003, 2007, and 2010:

Clean Your Mailbox: Large Messages Need to go First

Submitted by schwarz on November 15, 2013 - 5:00pm

It's time to clean out your email account!

Don't waste time getting rid of twenty small messages — take care of the largest items to get the job done faster.

Attachments take up the most room on Winnefox's email server, so find those emails first, and save & delete the attachments.

The Quick Way to Forward Multiple Email Messages

Submitted by schwarz on September 13, 2013 - 9:56am

When you need to collect and send lots of email messages related to a project, instead of forwarding each individual message, it's easy to gather them and attach them to just one message.

Here's how to do it:

Create Mailing Labels from Excel or Outlook

Submitted by schwarz on January 15, 2013 - 8:28am

Need to create mailing labels from an Excel spreadsheet or your Outlook Contacts? Go from raw data to a sheet of Avery labels that are ready to affix to your mailing:

How to Attach an Email to an Email

Submitted by schwarz on November 15, 2012 - 9:28am

You already know you can attach a file — like a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet — to an email message in Outlook. But did you know you can also attach one email message to another message?

Here's how you do it:

Outlook's People Pane Being a Pain? Here's How to Hide It

Submitted by schwarz on September 14, 2012 - 2:54pm

This morning I had another frustrating time accidentally clicking the People Pane in an Outlook email message — argh. The People Pane is a new feature of Outlook 2010 called the "Outlook Social Connector" that brings in information from popular social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Here's what the people pane looks like in an Outlook 2010 email message:

Speed Up Email Tasks with Quick Steps in Outlook 2010

Submitted by schwarz on July 13, 2012 - 11:08am

Quick Steps is a new feature in Microsoft Outlook 2010 that applies multiple actions at the same time to email messages to help quickly manage your mailbox.

For example, if you often reply to a message and then move it to a folder, you can create a Quick Step to move the message in one click to simplify the task.

A set of default Quick Steps comes loaded with Outlook 2010, but you can customize existing ones or create your own to make a custom gallery of email actions.

Watch this video to see how Quick Steps help you act on your e-mail messages more efficiently, and how to make custom Quick Steps to do your own repetitive tasks:

Timesaving Tip: Create Email Distribution Lists

Submitted by schwarz on June 15, 2012 - 5:21pm

mailboxes Why address an email message to 10 people when you can address it to one? If you often send email messages to a group of of people — library board trustees, members of your Friends group, volunteers, etc. — it pays to create a Distribution List or Contact Group to make it easy on yourself.

A Distribution List (Outlook 2007) or Contact Group (Outlook 2010) is a grouping of email addresses collected under one Contact name. Whenever you send a message to a List or Group, it goes to every e-mail address in that list.

The Ides

Outlook