If you spend a lot of your day sending and receiving mail with Outlook 2007, you will find yourself switching back and forth between the keyboard and the mouse constantly. This is clumsy, because it causes you to take your hand off the keyboard, mouse around a bit, do some clicking, then put your hand back on the keyboard and resume typing. You would be much faster and more efficient if you didn’t have to do all that switching between mouse and keyboard. With keyboard shortcuts, you can eliminate much of that mousing around, and get your work done faster. Learning the keyboard shortcuts for a few of the commands you rely on most will definitely make your work in Outlook faster and easier.

If you have previous experience with Outlook, you may already know about the old style keyboard shortcuts. But when Microsoft introduced Outlook 2007, they added the Ribbon, which led to many new keyboard shortcuts. You can take advantage of the new shortcuts are available when the Ribbon is visible. To start entering a new style shortcut, you press and release the Alt key.

From there, what you press next depends on where you are in Outlook. The length of a new-style keyboard shortcut varies, depending on how many levels down in the Ribbon the command appears, so you may have to press three or four keys to complete a command. Even so, this is a far more efficient way of getting things done than clicking your way through multiple levels of the Ribbon until you reach the command you want.

Here are a few of the shortcuts that apply when you are editing messages:

• ALT, H, U – Open the Bullet Library to turn the selected paragraphs into a bullet list
• ALT, H, A, I – Increase the level of indentation of the selected paragraph
• ALT, O, Q – Change the zoom level for the text in the editing area

As you can see, there’s a huge variety of keyboard shortcuts available to simplify your life when dealing with Outlook mail. It will definitely be worth your time to memorize a few of the more important shortcuts that you’ll use frequently. The amount of savings may not appear to be great, but multiply the savings by the number of times you repeat the same commands, and it could add up to some real benefits. The benefits are clear. Now all you need is a good resource to show you the best keyboard shortcuts available.

The Living With Outlook website contains a wide selection of the top Outlook keyboard shortcuts. To learn the top Outlook mail shortcuts, including a cool procedure for sending mail without ever touching the mouse, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/keyboard-shortcuts.html

Comments are closed.