Use Your Tools - Rules for Beginners

by Kera McHugh

Today, a quick lesson in Microsoft Outlook 2000… for beginners, or those who just haven't had/made time to explore it.

How many emails are sitting in your inbox?? If you're like me, it's WAY TOO MANY… why? Because getting around to sorting and cleaning it out is almost too much like work. So, we're going to look at how to lessen the drudgery.

MAKE RULES. Umm… what are rules? Ok… RULES are handling procedures for your email that you can specify using the ORGANIZE feature. WHY? So that your email gets filed FOR you. FOR EXAMPLE: you get a lot of email from Sally@work.com, and it pertains to a project called "Operation Cashflow". Now, Sally is also a personal friend, and often you'll get mail from Sally@home.com that has nothing to do with the project. You'd like to separate the two so you don't have to sort through all the mail from Sally everytime you look for a certain message. SO - you make a rule, or two.

There are two ways to make rules…

1. Select an email from Sally that falls into the "project related" category. Click "Organize". The first thing you'll see is a set of boxes that are autofilled with the email addresses pertaining to that selected message, and a few choices as to what to do with it. Make the choices. Click CREATE! Then it will ask if you want to run the rule on the entire folder. If you have more than one message that this rule should apply to, click YES. Once it's finished, it will say DONE!

2. Click "Organize". Then, click "Rules Wizard". You will be presented with a bunch of different options. If you're really new at this, go through them slowly and read each one… select the one(s) that apply, and follow instructions. It's pretty simple. Outlook will guide you through the entire process.

Do that for each of the different filters you'd like to have on your mail. Once you have Rules in place, you'll find your email much less daunting. Then you can go through individual folders at your leisure.

SORT MESSAGES. Looking for a certain email? Can't remember when it came, but you know what the subject was? Click SUBJECT at the top of your folder list to sort alphabetically on subject contents. Outlook will ignore FW: and RE: when it sorts. You can, in fact, sort each column that way. Just click at the top of the column on the field you want to sort by - attachments, flags, to, from, date received… AND did you know you can customize the fields that show up in that list?

Click VIEW in the main Outlook toolbar. Then, Current View>Define Views… With "Current View" selected, click MODIFY. You'll get another box with a number of choices… go through the choices and select the ones you like. The FIELDS button is the one that determines which columns you'll get in your inbox folder. You can have different choices for each folder (you just have to be in the folder you want to change the view of when you start).

So. There you go. A quick lesson in making Microsoft Outlook 2000 more useful to you, personally.