Did You Know…Outlook Rules

Task: It can be difficult managing multiple accounts and endless content in Outlook. Outlook Rules can help you better maintain content and accounts.

Solution: Create some Outlook rules that will allow the ability to manage items with ease. Simplify calendars, mailboxes or contact lists by establishing rules that will help better manage your content. These rules can be simple, or more complex, but are helpful regardless.

How: Setup Outlook rules to help better manage your content.

Example: Automatically sorting emails so they don’t all arrive in my Inbox

Issue: Receiving large numbers of email messages, making Inbox too full and hard to manage.

Resolution: Create a rule so that emails from certain people get automatically filed into specific folders.

Steps:

1. Create a Rule
   1. Right click on a message from the sender for whom you would like to create a rule
   2. Click “Rules” and then “Create Rules”
   3. In the pop up box create your parameters.  In this example it will say “When I get e-mail with all of the selected conditions” and you will choose “From (the name of the sender will be listed)”.  Under “Do the Following” choose “Move the item to folder” and click “Select Folder” and navigate to the correct folder, click on the folder and then click “OK“.
   4. Click “Ok” from the main Create Rule box.
   5. You can then choose to run the rule with messages already in the current folder if you would like.
   6. After the rule has been created, every time you receive an email from that particular sender it will automatically move into the folder you had selected.
   7. To manage or delete rules at a later date go the “Rules” dropdown in your Home ribbon, choose “Manage Rules & Alerts” and it will show all of your current rules.

Example: Multiple Outlook calendars combined into one.

Issue: Two email accounts resulting in two calendars. Would like to combine both calendars into one primary calendar.

Resolution: Create an Outlook rule that will automatically arrange everything on the primary account calendar.

Steps

1. First you will want to create a rule by going to the “FILE” tab in Outlook (top left) and click on “Manage Rules and Alerts”.

1. You then will want to create the new rule by choosing “New Rule” at the top left.

1. Here you will need to make the actual rule, so first you will want to select the option for “Apply rule on messages I receive” (located towards bottom of list) and then click “Next“

1. You will need to be specific that the rule is for meeting invitations or update messages being received so for the conditions check the box “which is a meeting invitation or update” (you may need to scroll down through the list to find this item) and then click “Next“

1. Next you need to choose what you want to do with this message, so check the box “forward it to people or public group”.

1. After choosing this, at the bottom of this same screen, you can then click on the highlighted/underlined value “people or public group” link and add any email address you’d like in the “To” section.  You will want to make sure this is the main email address you will use the calendar with, then click “Next“.

1. You do not need any exceptions so click “Next“. On the next page select “Finish“.

1. Now you are all set!  You will now receive any meeting invites or updates to your main email address, where you can accept and update so it will show up on your main calendar and not on any others.  You can do this for as many email addresses as you’d like!

If this is setup correctly, when the notification is received on the main account, simply selecting ‘Accept’ will bring the event to your primary accounts calendar.

Steps, and additional ideas for creating rules in Outlook can be found below:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/manage-email-messages-by-using-rules-HA010355682.aspx

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