In today’s corporate world, the norm is to use a web-based email client to send and receive emails. A program like Microsoft Outlook, whose first perpetual version debuted back in 1997, is often thought of by younger professionals as outdated. But in truth, MS Outlook possesses several unique features that account for its longevity—and more importantly, it’s been on the receiving end of some innovative updates from Microsoft.

More than a mere email client, MS Outlook is a powerful personal information and task manager. Its most recent updates allow it to do so much more than what’s expected of a basic email service. Instead of using email as nothing more than a means for passive exchange, you can use MS Outlook’s various email solutions to save time, focus your attention on important tasks, and ultimately increase your productivity from your physical or virtual office.

MS Outlook is a program worth learning to a greater extent because of how it can change your mindset towards emails. Adjusting your email workflow through MS Outlook—and learning all the best tips and tricks behind it—will make you a master of both time management and project management.

To illustrate how your workflow can change through the use of MS Outlook, here’s a treatise on why you should sign up for a course on how to effectively use Microsoft Outlook for smarter time management, collaboration, and priority planning. It may be one of the best upskilling decisions you make in the coming calendar year.

Five Reasons Why You Should Start Your Microsoft Outlook Training

1. MS Outlook Will Allow You to Maximise the “4D” Approach for Email Management

Microsoft is responsible not only for the creation and maintenance of MS Outlook, but also for an effective email management strategy that works best with the program. The email management model is called the “4D” approach because it advocates doing one of the following things to every email to streamline productivity:

  • Delete the email and clear your inbox of virtual clutter.
  • Do the task that comes with the email, especially if it needs your immediate attention or can be settled right away.
  • Delegate the message to someone else who may be better equipped to handle it than you at the time you receive the email.
  • Decide when you will action your email when the time is to complete the task efficiently.

Which Ds should apply to the emails in your inbox? How should you prioritise certain emails over others? What are the best ways to handle an email that you can’t answer right away? Additional training in MS Outlook will help you determine what exactly you should do with any given email and make you proficient at applying the 4D approach to your email account.

2. MS Outlook Sports Excellent Calendaring and Scheduling Features That You Should Learn How to Use

Another good reason to upskill yourself in the use of MS Outlook for office-related tasks is its excellent calendaring and scheduling features. The program ensures full integration of your daily calendar and your contacts with your email account. There’s a Scheduling Assistant feature that can help align your free time with that of your email contacts, the option to manage and edit several calendars so that you aren’t amiss in meeting specific project deadlines, and even a feature that helps you collate appointments and reservations from emails you’ve received in your Outlook account.

These features make MS Outlook quite distinctive from web-based email clients, so if you’re used to sending emails from the latter, it might require a bit of a learning curve. A training course for MS Outlook is one of the best avenues to familiarise yourself with these features and see how you can apply them for your specific purposes.

3. MS Outlook’s Quick Steps and Quick Parts Will Help You Learn Valuable Shortcuts for Emails

Two other unique capabilities that come with MS Outlook are its Quick Steps and Quick Parts shortcuts. Quick Steps will allow you to implement custom actions to your emails without having to go through so many commands, while Quick Parts can help you insert entire pre-typed messages or blocks of text without having to manually retype them.

In your MS Outlook training course, you’ll be taught how to use these shortcuts for your emails as well as which situations you can apply them to. Learning how to cut the redundancies in your email workflow will definitely empower you to work smarter and take full control of your email productivity.

4. MS Outlook Training Will Acquaint You with the Use of Rules

In MS Outlook, rules are functions that allow you to either respond or move emails to certain folders automatically. All you need to do is specify a particular condition to kick off the rule, and MS Outlook will do the moving and sorting for you.

One of the most valuable things that you can learn in your MS Outlook course is how to configure rules within the email client and which situations necessitate the use of the rules function. That knowledge can help you manage hundreds of emails without you needing to go through each of them one by one.

5. MS Outlook Training Will Help You Survey Your Progress with Tasking

Lastly, MS Outlook allows you to use the Microsoft-exclusive feature Tasks, which comes in the form of a dashboard-like pane detailing business tasks that you’re responsible for. When you use Tasks in MS Outlook, you’ll get both a view of your emails and a list of other tasks that you need to clock off on within the workday. You can add, delete, or move tasks around, and you can also click Reply on the Task pane to respond to a task using your Outlook email.

A great takeaway that you’ll get from your MS Outlook training is how to consolidate all your work priorities so that they’re visible in one place. Even when you’re doing a specific task like responding to an email, you won’t lose sight of the “bigger picture” of what you have to accomplish during your workday.

Work Sm@rt and Heighten Your Productivity with Priority Management

Priority Management’s Working Sm@rt with Microsoft Outlook will do more than help you learn your way around the program. After going through the different units, you’ll be able to discern how to use MS Outlook functionalities to deal with large amounts of email traffic, delegate email-related tasks efficiently, and develop your own system for prioritising and responding to the right emails. Email will not just be about managing messages but about increasing your overall productivity and focus at work.

Expand your Outlook toolset and sign up for Working Sm@rt with Microsoft Outlook, which is currently among our top work-from-home courses. Priority Management Australia offers online training for Microsoft Outlook.