Tip #1: Export Your Outlook Contacts to a CSV File

Whether you’re moving away from Outlook but want to keep all the contacts you have with it, or you just want to send someone a list of all or some of your contacts, Outlook can make this easy by letting you export contacts to a CSV file. 

Tip #2: Import Contacts From Excel or a CSV File Into Outlook

Similarly, Microsoft Outlook also enables you to import contacts from CSV files or from Excel, which can save you hours of what would have been manual data entry. 

Tip #3: Set up an All Mail Folder

Normally, Outlook separates your mail into different categories like Spam, Promotions, etc. However, if you just want to see all the mail in a single folder, you can do so by setting up an All Mail folder. 

Tip #4: Create Sub-Folders

While Outlook does come with some basic folders for your mail from the get-go, you can go out of your way to create subfolders to better organize the emails you receive with greater specificity. 

Tip #5: Archiving Messages

Sometimes, getting to inbox zero isn’t so much about deleting messages as it is about tidying up your inbox in general. For those times when you don’t need to see some emails, but you don’t want to get rid of them entirely, you can archive them for safekeeping. 

Tip #6: Schedule emails

Microsoft Outlook allows you to easily schedule out emails that you don’t want to send immediately. This is great for replies you need to write up, but you don’t want to send them because it’s after business hours.  In this scenario and others, you can schedule emails to send precisely when you need them to. 

Tip #7: Edit a Received Message in Outlook

You can adjust subject lines and other important text in emails you have received with Microsoft Outlook.  This is especially useful when you want to leave notes for yourself to look over before replying to a specific email when you have more time on your hands. 

Tip #8: Move Complex and Non-Critical Emails Into a To-Do Folder

Rather than deal with non-essential emails immediately, stash them into a to-do folder for later. 

Tip #9: Automatically Filter One Sender’s Mail to a Specific Folder

For emails that you need to file away for when you’re ready to reply to in the future, you can make Outlook deposit those messages to a specific folder as soon as they are received. Just choose a sender and set Outlook to route all their future emails to a folder of your choosing. 

Tip #10: Save Multiple Attachments at Once

This simple productivity hack can save you a bit of time by saving all the attachments you’ve received in an email at once, rather than having to click “save” on each individual attachment. 

Tip #11: Make Replies to Emails Go to Another Address in Outlook

You may use multiple email addresses within your same Outlook account, and that can make it a bit difficult to keep track of all the replies you get to them.  However, with Outlook, you can make it so that whenever someone replies to an email from any of your addresses, the replies all go to your primary address, whichever one that is. 

Tip #12: Clean Up Your Inbox in a Single Click

One of the things people dread about getting back from vacation is having to dig through a heap of unimportant emails—but you have to check them because some might be valuable. It becomes a game of separating the wheat from the chaff.  However, with Outlook’s clean-up function, you can have all email replies that came to you appear in a single thread rather than a bunch of individual emails. Setting this up takes a few clicks, but once it’s done, you just have to go to the folder of your choice and click “Clean Up.”

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