Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Outlook

Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Outlook

Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Outlook”.
In this tutorial, we’re going to learn about Microsoft’s Outlook, software and outlook is best known for email, but it can also do other things such as calendaring, and it has a to do list and some other things. So this is the beginner’s guide to using Microsoft Outlook. Here I am on my Windows, computer and I’m gon na do a search here in the lower left corner I’ll, just search for Outlook. Now there are different versions of Outlook. This one happens to be office 365 Outlook.

But if you have other versions of Outlook they work very. Similarly, even if you have an outdated version or even a future version of Outlook, we’ll probably have most of these same features. So now with Outlook start it up. The first thing, that’s doing is it’s asking me for an email address. It wants to be set up.

Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Outlook

This version of Outlook on my computer is not set up at all now. In most cases, I bet most of you are watching this video, because your company or your school or your organization has set up Outlook for you already so this step, you may not need to do. Having said that, it is possible to add more than one account to Outlook, and so let’s take a look at how to add an account, I’m going to type in an email address of mine and I’ll click connect. And it’s trying to add this email address. To my Outlook, it wants my password and then I like to click this check box. Remember my credentials so that I don’t have to type that in every single time that I access my email and it looks like the account has been successfully added now.

Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Outlook

At this point I can add another email address: how about my gmail account? I click Next and it’s trying to setup my gmail account in Outlook again, I need to put in my password click connect now. Sometimes this doesn’t work. So if you have any trouble with it, you can go here to Advanced Options and choose. Let me set up my account manually click done and it should take you into your Outlook, account. Ok! So here I am in Outlook and now it’s fully loaded up. My email account now there’s a lot to look at here. So let’s talk about what we’re seeing first of all, Outlook is considered to be part of the Microsoft Office suite and so, if you’re used to PowerPoint Word or Excel you’ll recognize these tabs and ribbons. Just like in those other programs, if you want to find a setting, that’s related to one of these tabs, you click on the tab. So I want to see all the folder settings.

I click on folder and the ribbon changes to give me information about folders. What about sending and receiving I click on the send received tab and I get information on the ribbon about send receive. So that’s what this is now most of your common options are here on the Home, tab home ribbon and then notice that each of the ribbons has some groups. So there’s a move group there’s a delete group, a respond group, etc.

Now there is one tab, that’s special, that’s different and that’s the file tab. When you click on file, it takes you to what’s called the backstage view. This is kind of a behind-the-scenes view of your account settings now earlier I give you a glimpse into how to add a second email account into your Microsoft Outlook, if you ever want to do that again, this is what you would do. You would click on file tab. It takes you to the backstage view and then just click account settings account settings and it lets.

You add a new email account. So that’s one aspect of what we’re looking at here, the tabs and the ribbons that we have here at the top. Now, let’s look in the lower left corner of outlook.

Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Outlook

This is what we call the navigation bar and, basically, what it’s doing is it’s showing you, the different tools that are built into Outlook, so the most commonly used outlook tool is email, that’s what this icon represents and when you click on it, you see your email Address here at the left – and you can read your emails and send emails, but let’s click on the second symbol. The second symbol is the calendar, so this is another tool, that’s built into your Outlook program. Next, to that we have contacts, it’s a list of people that you know, perhaps people that have emailed you, etc and then, next to that we have a to-do list and you can add items to your to-do list just by clicking and typing and then tap enter On the keyboard and it adds an item to the to-do list and then of course, you can set things like a due date, start date, etc. So this navigation bar is how you switch from one Outlook tool to the next.

In this tutorial, we’re going to focus pretty much exclusively on email. If there’s a lot of interest, though I would be happy to do an intermediate Outlook tutorial and maybe some advanced tutorials as well. So let me know if you’re interested so making sure that you’re in the email area of Outlook you should see here at the left your email address. Now, if you’ve set up more than one email with Outlook, you should be able to scroll down and see those other email addresses. We also have a favorites area by default, the in boxes in favorites and so are the sent folder and the deleted folder. So those are the favorites that are there by default, but you can add other things to favorites too. Let me give you an example down here. This is my email address and I have set up previously a bunch of folders that I’ve used to organize the email that I want to keep and you can see here’s a folder called computer info. If I want that folder to be considered a favorite and to stay here at the top, all I have to do is right-click on it and choose add to favorites, and it should show up there from now on at the top. Now, what if you want to set up some folders for your email, like I’ve done? How would you do that? Well, there’s probably more than one way, but the way I add a folder is I just find the email address that I want the folder to be connected to, and then I right-click over that email address and choose new folder and then just give it a name. I’Ll call this project one, so any email that comes in related to project one I’ll be able to put it in the project, one folder and there’s the folder right there. Now, once you have folders when you click on a folder, it changes the view.

In the rest of Outlook, because I clicked on inbox, it shows me a list of all emails that are in my inbox and it picks one of those and puts it in front of me here so that I can actually read that email. Now. One thing to watch out for, as you use outlook, you’ll, probably notice a lot of arrows in Outlook, so, for example, favorites has an arrow next to it. If I click that arrow, whether on purpose or accidentally, it will collapse all of the items underneath favorites and hide them basically, and then you can reveal them again by clicking the arrow again and the same things gon na happen with your email address. Probably at some point so all of my subfolders that are in my account have become hidden because I click that arrow. If I click it again, they’re revealed again now.

You’Ll also see some arrows, they’re very small, but here on the ribbons you’ll see some arrows anytime. You see a little arrow. That means that there are additional options that you could use if you click on the arrow. Okay, so watch out for those little arrows, they’re powerful, but they’re easy to overlook if you’re not on the lookout for them. Ok, so I can click on a folder to read the email. That’S in it, I’m gon na start with my inbox, and I want you to look over here in the lower right corner of outlook.

You can see that it says all folders are up to date and I’m connected to in this case to Microsoft Exchange those are important messages. It tells me that I’m getting updates if I’ve recently deleted something out of a folder or put something into a folder at this point, it’s completely up to date that change has been synced and because I’m connected to Microsoft Exchange. I know that if a new email has been sent to me that I’ll get it momentarily, let’s look now at how to read email, so I have two emails that I should read and they both look a little off. If you look closely, there are some broken images by default. Outlook doesn’t want to download pictures. So if you want to see the email as intended by the sender, you might have to click here and just click download pictures it loads. The pictures in – and it looks a lot better – I can do that here as well download pictures now as you’re reading your email. If you need to you, can adjust the widths of the different parts of your screen. You can make the list of all your emails. A little bit wider or the actual window, where you read the email, make that wider and same with the panel at the left. You can adjust it so that it’s wider or more narrow.

Now for me at this point, I only have two in the list, but imagine what, if I had a thousand emails in here or a couple hundred emails, it might be useful to sort them in different ways, and we have a tool here to do that. I can sort by date and that’s typically, the way it is by default. If I want, though I can arrange by who sent the email alphabetically, I can also sort it by the subject of the email, but in most cases I think you’ll want to choose arranged by or sort by date.

You can also click and show only unread mail that helps you to focus in on the items that you haven’t seen yet, in addition to sorting you can also search. So if I’m interested in just Bandcamp emails, I type in BAM camp, and it only shows me that email to get back to the view of all emails, I just X out of the search, and it takes me back next. Let’S look at how to compose an email in Outlook. Let’S say that I would like to respond to this email. All I have to do is make sure that I’ve selected the email and then go up here to the Home, tab, home, ribbon and click reply. Now, if there’s more than one person that was included in the email, I could click reply all and everyone involved would get my reply in this case because I was the only one included in the original email.

It’S only sending my reply back to the original sender. At this point I can type my message. I can include attachments if I would like, and there are a couple of ways to do – that when you’re composing your message, you should get a message, tab and message ribbon and there you’ll find attach file. You can also attach using this tool here on the right. So I’m gon na click attach file browse this PC and now it’s looking on my computer for a file to attach to the email I selected the file and it’s now part of my email as I’m composing, my email. I can use all of the typical font and formatting options that you find in most Microsoft Office tools.

You can see. I can bold text, I can change the color of the text Center. The text underline use bullets, there’s just lots of options that I have available to me when I’m ready to send the email I might consider who else I could send the same email to you do what’s called a carbon copy. If you click on the CC button, it lets you select someone else to send the email to, or you can just go down and type the email address of the person that you would like to send a copy of the email to you can also do a Blind carbon copy and blind carbon copy means that this person will receive a copy of my email, but the other recipients won’t know that this person was included on the email. So it’s kind of like sending a secret copy of the email to someone that you want included on it, so I’m gon na click, OK and I’m ready to send the email. So I click the send button. My message has been sent and you can see that there’s a symbol here showing that I’ve replied to this email. I can also go here to send items, and my message also shows up there so that I know that it was really sent. So, even though outlook can be intimidating for a lot of people, I hope that this tutorial has helped you to become more familiar with it and that you understand the basics of how to get started using Microsoft Outlook in the future. If there’s interest, I will post some intermediate and advanced outlook tutorials, but for now, if you found this tutorial to be helpful, please click the like button below and consider connecting with me on my social media accounts like Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, and definitely do subscribe to My youtube channel for more videos about technology for teachers and students and when you do subscribe, please click the bell next to the subscribe button that way you’ll be notified whenever I post another video and watch for another video from me at least every Monday, if you’d, Like to support my youtube channel, please consider becoming a patron of mine through my patreon account and you’ll find links to that in the description below .