It’s no secret: Students get a flood of emails — from professors, the administration, clubs and classmates. Sometimes it feels like it never stops and manually sorting these can be overwhelming. Luckily, Microsoft Outlook offers tools that can make life a lot easier. We’ll be sharing five essential Outlook tricks every student at the University of Connecticut should know.
Staying organized is half the battle and Outlook’s “Categories” feature lets you assign colors to different types of emails and calendar events. You could assign red for lectures, green for clubs and blue for work or sports, for example. By visually separating these categories, you’ll quickly see what’s on your plate for the day and avoid accidental overlap or double-booking.
Outlook also comes with a calendar which auto-populates based on email invites. A good idea is to synchronize it with your phone calendar, so you get notifications when important events are coming up. Outlook also integrates seamlessly with Microsoft To-Do, allowing you to track assignments and deadlines right within your inbox. Set reminders and due dates for tasks and add them to your calendar to stay on top of assignments. It’s a simple way to keep both your emails and tasks in one organized place.
Still, we need to talk about all those emails. By using Outlook’s “Rules” feature, you can create automated instructions for incoming emails. For instance, emails from your professors can go straight to a “Classes” folder, while newsletters and campus announcements can be sent to “Updates” or “Info.” This system helps ensure important emails never get buried. You can also add those daily emails into their own folder.
The “Focused Inbox” in Outlook helps you manage your inbox by sorting emails into two tabs: Focused and Other. You may have noticed this already — emails you most likely to want to see are automatically placed in Focused, while less relevant ones go into Other. That is, unless UConn has it set up where what they say is important gets served up front-and-center. But you should be able to teach your inbox what you’d like. This feature is especially helpful when you’re on a tight schedule, allowing you to see high-priority messages first and deal with everything else later.
Need to send a reminder to your study group? Or an email to a professor you’d rather schedule for the morning? Outlook’s “Delay Delivery” option allows you to draft and schedule emails to be sent at a future time. This way, you can manage your responsibilities ahead of time without disturbing someone late at night or on the weekend.
You can also send Outlook emails and calendar information to OneNote — just open the message and near the top right of the message or calendar item’s window, there is an “Apps” icon. It looks like a waffle (no joke). If you click it, choose “Send to OneNote” — The subject line of each imported message or meeting becomes the title of that item’s linked page in OneNote, and the date and time stamp of the original item is the same. No longer do students have to do copy-and-paste with the fear that something slipped through the cracks.
With these Outlook email tricks, students can streamline communication and stay organized, making it easier to focus on what really matters. Plus, you’ll save time and who doesn’t love that? See you again next week — until then, I’m going back “Under the Rock.”