Quick Actions in Outlook
You might have noticed that when you hover your mouse over an email in Outlook, a set of small icons appears that look something like this.
These icons let you quickly and easily perform actions on the email. In the example above, you can delete the email,
mark the email as unread,
flag the message for future action
and pin the email to always appear at the top of the folder.
Did you know that you can change these icons? You can choose which actions are visible from an available list. This means that you can choose the actions that you perform most often to save you time and effort when working in Outlook.
To find out how to change the actions to match your needs, follow these instructions.
Quick Actions for Outlook in a Browser
Click on the settings icon from the top right-hand corner of your browser window. It looks like the cog of a wheel.
The settings pane will appear on the right-hand side of your browser window. At the bottom of the pane, click on the line that reads “View all Outlook settings”.
The settings window will open. In the first column, click on “Email” and in the second column, click on “Customise actions”.
The contents of the right-hand side of the window will change to display the different quick actions that are available.
There are three areas where you can choose to change your quick actions. The first area is the email message list. This is the example we showed at the top of this post. For any email shown in a message list, you can display any 4 of these 6 available actions.
Just place a tick in the box next to the action that you want to be displayed.
Scroll down the right-hand side of the window and you will come to the second area. This shows all the quick actions that are available when you open and read a single email.
The list of available actions for a single email is much more extensive and there is no limit to the number you choose that will be visible.
Scroll down the right-hand side of the window again and you will come to the final area. This shows all the quick actions that are available when you are composing an email to send to someone.
There is also no limit here for the number of actions that you can choose to be visible.
When you have made all the changes you want for the visible actions, click on the “Save” icon which will appear at the bottom right of the settings window.
The settings window will close, the settings changes will be saved and the new action icons will be visible to you in Outlook.
Quick Actions for Outlook on Windows Desktop
Hover your mouse over any email in your email list so that the quick action icons appear.
Right mouse click and a drop-down menu will appear.
From this menu, click on the line “Set Quick Actions…”.
The quick actions window will open.
Unlike Outlook in a browser, you can only choose a maximum of 2 visible actions here. Click on the arrow next to each field
and you will be able to choose which action you want to see from the available list.
When you are happy with your choices, click on the “OK” button.
This will close the window and save any changes you made.
Recent Comments