Do you get the most out of Outlook?

Originally published in GP magazine .

Written for GP magazine around 2011. This is the version I submitted - the published article may have been edited.

Do you get the most out of Outlook? Are you like a lot of users who read and delete emails and occasionally send one, but have no idea what else it can do? In my experience clinicians put IT skills training very low on their list of learning activities, despite it being something we do every day. Here are some things that you might not have known Outlook could do. Several of them might save you time and effort or make you more productive.

Don’t just use one big inbox to save all your emails. It is very easy to set up folders for specific topics or subjects and move all related messages into them to make them easier to find and deal with.

Use automatic rules for dealing with emails as they come in. It can notify you when a certain person has emailed you, or move emails into the folders you created above. I know several people who use them to automatically delete any emails where they are not in the main subject.

Distribution lists allow you to email a whole group of people without having to type their names every time. How many emails have you come across where either someone has been missed off (presumably by accident) or the list of people copied in just grows and grows as each person adds people to the list? If you know which eight people are on that committee, then just email them with one distribution list.

Insist on calendar invites. These are special emails that you send when arranging a meeting. The organiser can keep the venue details and timing up to date, and should the meeting be moved or cancelled it will show up in your calendar as such. I’ve been known to turn up to meetings that have been moved because the person organising hadn’t emailed the whole distribution list, so I never found out.

Sharing information is good. If correctly set up, you can see other people’s calendars and they can see yours, though you can keep things private.

In my experience one of the least used or known-about functions is delegate access, which lets someone, usually your secretary or practice manager, read and reply and even send emails on your behalf. Indeed, practice managers should probably set this up with their deputies for times of absence.

Try not to send attachments if possible. This may be difficult unless it is set up for you, but there are several ways of sending a link to a file rather than the file itself. It uses a lot less memory - and with email quotas this can be good. Secondly, if done correctly you can maintain version control, where everyone sees the same latest version of the document, not the copy that was current when they received it.