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Overview
Office 2013 For Dummies is the key to your brand new Office!
Packed with straightforward, friendly instruction, this update to one of the bestselling Office books of all time gets you thoroughly up to speed and helps you learn how to take full advantage of the new features in Office 2013. After coverage of the fundamentals, you'll discover how to spice up your Word documents, edit Excel spreadsheets and create formulas, add pizazz to your PowerPoint presentation, and much more.
- Helps you harness the power of all five Office 2013 applications: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access
- Discusses typing and formatting text in Word and easy ways to dress up your documents
with color, graphics, and more
The fun and friendly approach of Office 2013 For Dummies makes doing Office work easy and efficient!
Microsoft Office 2013 comes jam-packed with features. See shortcuts and tips for using the keyboard, mouse, and ribbon to get fast access to the most commonly used commands. You'll master Office 2013 in no time!
About The Author
Wallace Wang specializes in making complex topics understandable. His assorted For Dummies tech books have sold nearly half a million copies. He has a master’s degree in computer science along with side hustles in stand-up comedy and screenwriting because life is too short to focus on just one thing.
Articles From The Book
3 results
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Articles
Even though computers and software programs like Outlook 2013 are supposed to save you time, some days this just doesn't seem to be the case. Juggling buttons, keys, and Ribbons can seem to take all day. Here are some shortcuts that can save you time and tension.Use the New Items tool.To create a new item in whatever module you’re in, just click the New Items tool at the far-left end of the Ribbon.
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Outlook 2013 and LinkedIn make a productive pair. LinkedIn invites you to create links with people you know, both business acquaintances and personal friends. However, the people with whom you create connections on LinkedIn must be LinkedIn members, too.
LinkedIn is the largest and best-known social media service.
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There’s no substitute for effective antivirus software if you use your computer the way most people do. Most antivirus programs automatically connect to Outlook 2013, scan incoming message for viruses, and automatically block any message that might be infected.
One of the biggest risks for every computer owner is a virus infection.
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To make reading e-mail messages easier in Outlook 2013, you can set up Outlook to display your messages in three different ways. The Reading pane can be set to display on the right or below your list of messages. Or, you can set the Reading pane to the Off position, in which you have to double-click a message to read it.
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Addressing messages is one of the most productive drag-and-drop techniques in Outlook 2013. E-mail addresses can be cumbersome and difficult to remember, and if your spelling of an e-mail address is off by even one letter, your message won’t go through. It’s best to just keep the e-mail addresses of the people to whom you sent messages in your Contacts list and use those addresses to create new messages.
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Outlook 2013 enables you to slice and dice the information in every section nearly any way you can imagine, using different views. You could easily fill a cookbook with the different views you can create.
If you want to cook up a calendar arrangement that nobody’s ever thought of before, Outlook will probably let you.
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When your business goals drive you to launch a campaign of mass mailings and e-mail marketing, Outlook 2013’s built-in tools are a good enough place to start, but you may want to consider using one of the fine professional services that specialize in e-mail marketing.
In addition to making your campaigns look more businesslike, a professional service can help you grow your mailing list.
General Microsoft
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Outlook 2013 starts you out with a limited number of columns in the Phone view of your Contacts list. If you want more columns, you can easily add some. You can display as many columns as you want in Outlook, but you may have to scroll across the screen to see the information that you want to see.
To add a column in any Table view, follow these steps:Right-click any column title in the gray header row of the column.
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When you forward or reply to a message in Outlook 2013, it helps to include parts of the original message that you're forwarding or replying to so that the person reading your message knows exactly what you're responding to. The question is, how will the reader know which comments are from the original e-mail and which are yours?
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When it’s not what you know but who you know, you need a good tool for keeping track of who’s who. Outlook 2013 is a great tool for managing your names and addresses, and it’s just as easy to use as your Little Black Book.To enter a new contact, click the People button in the Navigation bar and click the New Contact icon in the Ribbon.
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A good Contacts list is precious. Outlook.com can help you keep your Contacts list up to date from wherever you are. For example, if you go to a conference or convention and exchange business cards with lots of people, you probably want to get those names into your Contacts list as soon as possible.
Whether you’re using a laptop, tablet, or your smartphone (or the nearest public library or Internet café), you can log on to your account remotely, and enter all those new addresses before you go home.
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You can include a picture with the contact information you collect in Outlook 2013, and not just for decoration. Now that many cell phones and other mobile devices synchronize with the Outlook Contacts list, you can make someone’s picture appear on your cell phone screen every time he or she calls or texts.
Those pictures also appear when you pick the Business Card view of your Outlook contacts.
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When you receive a plain e-mail announcement in Outlook 2013 about an event and you want to plug its details into your calendar, you can do that in Outlook.
The most popular way to make plans with other people is through e-mail; it's cheap, fast, and complete. Whether you are asking people to lunch, hosting a party, putting on a show, or organizing an exhibition, you probably already know how convenient e-mail can be for organizing get-togethers.
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The Ruler in Microsoft Office 2013 Word defines the left and right margins for your text paragraphs. You can use the Ruler to change these paragraph margins. Follow these steps:Make sure that the Ruler appears visible.Select the Ruler checkbox in the Show group of the View tab to display the ruler if it is not already visible.
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You can assign a task in Outlook 2013 to another person and keep track of that person’s progress. As Tom Sawyer could tell you, anything worth doing is worth getting someone else to do for you.
To assign a task to someone else, follow these steps:Click Tasks in the Navigation bar.The Task list opens.
Right-click an item in your Task list.
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Outlook 2013 flags can pop up and remind you to do something at any time you choose. They can also pop up and pester someone else when you put a reminder on a message you send. (Who could resist that?) Adding a reminder to a flag takes more than one click — but not much more.
To attach a flag to your e-mail messages (those you send and those you receive), follow these steps:Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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Notes in Outlook 2013 follow all the rules that other Windows boxes follow, so if you're an old hand at moving and resizing boxes in Windows, you’ll be okay. If you’re new to Windows and dialog boxes, don’t worry — notes are as easy to resize as they are to write and read.
To change the size of a note, follow these steps:Click the Notes button in the Navigation pane—you may need to click the three dots to see the Notes button (or press Ctrl+5).
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No sooner do you enter a new task in Outlook 2013 than it seems that you need to change it. Sometimes you can enter a task and then change some of the particulars later — add a due date, a reminder, an added step, or whatever. Fortunately, editing tasks is easy.Click the Tasks button in the Navigation pane (or press Ctrl+4).
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Procrastination used to be an art; Outlook 2013makes it a science. When someone nags you with a reminder, you can still put it off. To change the date on a reminder that someone sent you, follow these steps:Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).The Inbox screen opens, showing your incoming mail.
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You can be as fickle as you want with Outlook 2013. In fact, to change the time of a scheduled item, just drag the appointment from where it is to where you want it to be. Or back again . . . maybe . . . if you feel like it. . . .
To change an appointment, follow these steps:
Click the appointment in the Calendar view.
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Each time you organize a meeting with Outlook 2013, you create a small flurry of e-mail messages inviting people to attend, and they respond with a flurry of messages either accepting or declining your invitation. You may have a good enough memory to recall who said yes and no, but fortunately, Outlook keeps track of who said what.
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Formatting data based on certain criteria is known as conditional formatting. A report in Access 2013 can display data, but sometimes you may want help in identifying certain types of data. While you can manually examine a report and highlight information yourself, it’s faster and more accurate to let Access do it instead.
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Although you can create e-mail messages very quickly in Outlook 2013, you may prefer a more detailed approach to creating an e-mail message. If you have a yen for fancy e-mail — especially if you want to take advantage of every bell and whistle Outlook can add to your message — follow these steps:Click the Mail button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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You may need to create a set of mailing labels for everyone in your Outlook 2013 Contacts list in a flash. The list connects to Word’s Mail Merge feature, so you don’t have to mess around with exporting files and figuring out where they went.
Make sure you have the right labels in your printer. Then, follow these steps to create a set of mailing labels:Click People in the Navigation pane.
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In Outlook 2013, you can create multiple calendars. Why would you need more than one calendar? You might need one for work and one to keep track of your family's sporting events, medical appointments, and social obligations.
To create an additional Outlook calendar, do this:Click the Calendar button in the Navigator pane.
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You can reduce your effort by saving frequently used text as a Quick Part in Outlook 2013. When you find yourself typing the same text into your e-mail messages over and over, Quick Parts come in handy. Quick Parts sound like Quick Steps — they're different things, but they're both ridiculously simple.
To create a Quick Part:Drag your mouse over some text in an e-mail message to select it.
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In Outlook 2013's Calendar, you can create recurring appointments. Some appointments are like a meal at a Chinese restaurant: As soon as you’re done with one, you’re ready for another. With Outlook, you can easily create an appointment that comes back like last night’s spicy Szechwan noodles.
To create a recurring (that is, regularly scheduled) appointment, follow these steps:Click the appointment that you want to repeat.
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Creating a Contact group in Outlook 2013 is a simple matter of making up a name for your list and choosing from the collection of names you’ve stored on your system. A Contact group doesn’t keep track of phone numbers and mailing addresses, just e-mail addresses.
To create a Contact group in your Contacts module, follow these steps:Click the New Contact Group button in the Home tab’s Ribbon (or press Ctrl+Shift+L).
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You can easily send form letters from Outlook 2013. A form letter is a letter with standard text that’s printed over and over but with a different name and address printed on each copy. An annual newsletter to family and friends is one form letter you may want to create.
Follow these steps to create a form letter from Outlook 2013:Click People in the Navigation pane.
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You can drag an item from any other Outlook 2013 module to the People button, but the only item that makes sense to drag there is an e-mail message. That is, you can drag an e-mail message to the People button to create a contact record that includes the e-mail address.
You not only save work by dragging a message to the People button, but you also eliminate the risk of misspelling the e-mail address.
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The simplest way to manage incoming mail in Outlook 2013 is just to file it. Before you file a message, you need to create at least one folder in which to file your messages. You only need to create a folder once; it’s there for good after you create it (unless, of course, you later decide to delete it).
You can create as many folders as you want; you may have dozens or just one or two.
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A regenerating task in Outlook 2013 is like a recurring task, except that it recurs only when a certain amount of time passes after the last time you completed the task.
Suppose that you mow the lawn every two weeks. If it rains for a week and one mowing happens a week late, you still want to wait two weeks for the next one.
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Many people like to add a signature to the end of every message they send in Outlook 2013. A signature is usually a small portion of text that identifies you to everyone who reads your message and tells something you want everyone to know. Many people include their name, the name of their business, their business's web address, their motto, a little sales slogan, or some squib of personal information.
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You get to decide when to include the one signature you’re allowed to create in Outlook.com. Your signature for business might be very grand and official, the better to impress lackeys and sycophants as well as to intimidate rivals. In that case, you might prefer to leave it off the messages you send to your friends — unless, of course, your only friends are lackeys and sycophants.
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In addition to the six Quick Steps that appear in the Quick Step box when Outlook 2013 is first installed, you have even more Quick Step templates that you can choose from. To use these additional Quick Step templates, follow these instructions:Click the Inbox icon in the Mail module's Folder pane (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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Outlook 2013's Quick Access toolbar lets you keep a few icons for your favorite functions at the top of the screen so that you can use them anytime. When Outlook 2013 is freshly installed, only three icons appear on the Quick Access toolbar: Send/Receive, Undo, and Customize Quick Access Toolbar. You can customize the Quick Access toolbar to include commands that you use frequently, such as Print, Delete, and more.
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The Quick Access toolbar looks the same no matter which Outlook 2013 module you’re using, so you might consider holding off on customizing the Ribbon until you’re sure that you can’t get what you’re after by customizing the Quick Access toolbar instead.
Remember, also, that the Ribbon is made up of several tabs, and each Outlook module has a different Ribbon, each of which has a different set of tabs and a different set of buttons.
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You can use Outlook 2013 to exchange e-mail through more than one e-mail address. For example, you might have different e-mail addresses for business use and personal use. If you want to create a similar arrangement, just set up a separate account for each address.
Telling one Outlook account apart from another isn’t too tough.
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Sometimes you may not want to print your entire Excel 2013 spreadsheet but just a certain part of it, called the print area. To define the print area, follow these steps:Select the cells that you want to print.Click the Page Layout tab.
Click the Print Area icon in the Page Setup group.A pull-down menu appears.
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When you encrypt a message in Outlook 2013, your system scrambles the contents of your outgoing message so that only your intended recipient can read your message. Back in the days of radio, millions of children loved to exchange “secret” messages that they encoded with Little Orphan Annie’s Secret Decoder Ring.
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Appointments you set up for work in the Outlook 2013 Calendar often require you to include a little more information than you’d need for your personal appointments. When you want to give an appointment the full treatment, use the following method:Click Calendar in the Navigator pane.Your calendar appears.
Click the New Appointment button in the Home tab’s Ribbon.
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The appointments and meetings that you post in Outlook are linked to Outlook.com, so from any web-enabled device you can see where you should be and with whom. Now you’ll know when you’re available for meetings, lunches, and random tongue lashings.
If you want your Outlook 2013 data and your Outlook.com data to sync automatically, you must be using the same e-mail address on both systems.
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The official way to enter a task in Outlook 2013 is through the Task form, which requires some effort but lets you enter much more detailed information. But you don’t need to work your fingers to the bone — as long as you enter a name for the task, you’ve done all you really must do.
If you want to go hog-wild and enter all sorts of due dates or have Outlook remind you to actually complete the tasks you’ve entered (heaven forbid!
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Sometimes you need Outlook 2013 to remind you about important dates or follow-up activities. You can use flags, for example, to remind you to call someone next week. The best way to help yourself remember is to flag that person’s name in the Contacts list. A reminder will pop up in your Calendar.
Contacts aren’t the only items you can flag.
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Outlook 2013 can forward an electronic business card to any other person who uses Outlook (or any other program that understands how to use digital business cards). It’s a handy way to e-mail any contact record in your list to anybody else. The most obvious thing you may want to send this way is your own contact information.
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Forwarding a note in Outlook 2013 really means sending an e-mail message with a note included as an attachment. It’s helpful if the person to whom you’re forwarding the note uses Outlook, too.
Follow these steps to forward a note:Click Notes in the Navigation pane.The Notes list appears.
Click the title of the note you want to forward and click the Forward button on the Ribbon’s Home tab.
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You may not always have the answer to every e-mail message you get in Outlook 2013. You may need to send a message along to somebody else to answer, so pass it on. To forward a message, follow these steps:Click the Mail button in the Navigation pane (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).The Inbox screen opens, showing your incoming mail.
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No doubt you’ve been looking at calendars your whole life, so Outlook 2013 Calendar will be pretty simple for you to understand. It looks like a calendar: plain old rows of dates, Monday through Friday plus weekends, and so on. You don’t have to think like a computer to understand your schedule.
If you want to see more information about something in your calendar, most of the time, you just click the calendar with your mouse.
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If you want to take advantage of Outlook 2013’s security features, the first step to take is to get yourself a Digital ID. If you work in a large organization, your employer may have gotten that for you. If you want to get a Digital ID for your own use, you can get one from a company that issues and maintains Digital ID services by following these steps:Click the File tab in the Ribbon.
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Sorting and grouping in Outlook 2013 are similar. Both procedures organize items in your table according to columns. Grouping is different from sorting in that it creates bunches of similar items that you can open or close. You can look at only the bunches that interest you and ignore all the other bunches.
For example, when you balance your checkbook, you probably sort your checks by check number.
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If you use Outlook 2013, you can easily invite several people to a meeting without making a bunch of phone calls. In Outlook, you can check everyone’s schedule, pick a time, and suggest a meeting time that everyone can work with in the first place — with a single message.
To invite several people to a meeting, follow these steps:Click the Calendar button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+2).
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Outlook 2013 can remind you whenever a recurring task comes around. Lots of tasks crop up on a regular basis. You know how it goes — same stuff, different day. To save you the effort of entering a task, such as a monthly sales report or a quarterly tax payment, over and over again, just set it up as a recurring task.
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You can set Outlook 2013 to make Journal entries for nearly everything you do, or you can shut the Journal off entirely and make no entries in it. If you put nothing in the Journal, you get nothing out.
In previous versions of Outlook you could record everything automatically, but that feature is no longer supported in Outlook 2013.
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Marking off completed tasks in Outlook 2013 (or on any to-do list) is even more fun than entering them, and it’s much easier. If you can see the task you want to mark complete in either the To-Do bar or your Task list, just right-click the item and choose Mark Complete. Nothing could be simpler.
To mark a task complete, follow these steps:
Click the Tasks button in the Navigation pane (or press Ctrl+4).
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You can print your Journal (or parts of it) to see recent or upcoming activities. Stick it on the wall where you can look at it often. Some folks just don’t get a complete picture from information on a screen. They still like to print their work on paper to see what they’ve done.
To print your Journal, follow these steps:
With the Journal open, click the entries you want to print.
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Outlook 2013 gives you the capability to print out your appointments from the Calendar — sort of. To be brutally honest, Outlook’s calendar-printing feature stinks. If you can’t figure out how to print your calendar the way you want, it’s probably not your fault.
You use the same basic steps to print from any module in Outlook.
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After you’ve subscribed to an RSS feed, it appears in the RSS Feeds folder in the Outlook 2013 Folder list. No matter whether you’ve subscribed to YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs, or anything else, you can read feeds as easily as you read e-mail.
The Navigation pane has no button for RSS feeds, so you have to open the RSS folder to see what’s inside.
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Whether you’re catching up on juicy office gossip or deleting spam from Nigerian oil tycoons, you can log on to Outlook.com from any browser to keep yourself in the loop. Because Outlook.com is web mail, you can get to it anywhere you have web access. All of your Hotmail, Messenger, and (of course) Outlook.com mail is available.
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Sending a reply to an e-mail message in Outlook 2013 is so easy. You don't even need to know the person's address when you're sending a reply; just click the Reply button and Outlook takes care of it for you.
Here's how you reply to a message:Click the Mail button in the Navigation pane (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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Even if you don’t organize meetings and send invitations in Outlook 2013, you may get invited to meetings now and then, so it’s a good idea to know how to respond to a meeting request if you get one. (“Politely” is a good concept to start with.)
When you’ve been invited to a meeting, you get a special e-mail message that offers these buttons:
Accept: Outlook automatically adds the meeting to your schedule and creates a new e-mail message to the person who organized the meeting, telling that person your decision.
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A PowerPoint hyperlink can also run any program from within a presentation. For example, you can create a presentation that explains how to market a new computer program, and then create a hyperlink to that same program so you can demonstrate how that program actually works. When you exit that program, you return to your PowerPoint presentation again.
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Nothing is handier than knowing what you've sent and when you sent it. You can save all your outgoing mail in Outlook 2013 so that you can go back and look up the messages you've sent. Outlook starts saving sent items when you first install the program, but you can turn this feature on and off.
So before you go changing your options, look in your Sent Messages folder to see whether it contains messages.
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You may create or receive an e-mail message in Outlook 2013 that’s so wonderful (or terrible) that you just have to save it. You may need to print the message and show it to someone else, save it to disk, or send (export) it to a desktop-publishing program.
To save a message as a file, follow these steps:With the message already open, select the File tab from the Ribbon and then choose Save As (or press F12).
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You may create or receive an e-mail message in Outlook 2013 that's so wonderful (or terrible) that you just have to save it. You may need to print the message to show to someone else, save it to disk, or send (export) it to a desktop-publishing program.With the message already open, select the File tab from the Ribbon and then choose Save As (or press F12).
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If you want to send a document that you’ve already created in another application, you can send it as an attachment in Outlook 2013. You can attach any kind of file — word processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations from programs, such as PowerPoint. You can even send pictures or music. Any kind of file can be sent as an attachment.
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After you enter the particulars about an appointment in Outlook 2013, you may want to send that information to someone to tell that person what the appointment is about, where it occurs, and when it occurs.
To send an e-mail message with information about an appointment, follow these steps:Click the Calendar button in the Navigation bar (or press Ctrl+2).
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With Outlook 2013, you can do more than read and send e-mails, like send files. Some people swear that they do nothing but exchange e-mail all day. If you’re lucky, you probably do lots of things other than exchange e-mail; you probably do most of your daily work in programs other than Outlook.
You might create documents in Microsoft Word or build elaborate spreadsheets with Excel.
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You might create documents in Microsoft Word or build elaborate spreadsheets with Excel. When you want to send a file by e-mail, Outlook 2013 gets involved, although sometimes it works in the background.Open the document in Microsoft Word.The document appears on-screen.
Click the File tab in the upper-left corner of the screen.
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When you feel the urge to dash off a quick e-mail from your favorite Internet café, you can do that with Outlook.com in a jiffy. You’ll probably have your message finished before your barista finishes mixing that High-Octane Mocha Latte Supremo. After your caffeine jitters die down, just follow these steps:Click the Inbox in the Folder list.
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People who give out tasks really like the Assign Task feature of Outlook 2013. People who have to do those tasks are much less enthusiastic. If you’re a Task getter more often than you’re a Task giver, you have to look at the bright side: Outlook on an Exchange network can also help the boss stay informed about how much you’re doing — and doing and doing!
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After you have a Digital ID for Outlook 2013, the simplest thing you can do is send someone a message that has your digital signature. A digitally signed message does more than simply assure your recipient that you’re really yourself — who else would you want to be, after all?
Suppose that you want to send a scrambled (encrypted) message that only your recipient can read.
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In the desktop version of Outlook you can set your Out of Office message to let co-workers know when you’ll be out of town (or just plain unavailable). You have a similar tool in Outlook.com, only it’s called the Automated Vacation reply and it’s a great way to let all your friends know when you’re on vacation (and make all of them envious).
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You can’t set as many options for an individual message in Outlook.com as you can in the regular version of Outlook: only message priority and file format. Just follow these steps:
Click the Inbox in the Folder list.
Click the New button in the Ribbon.
Fill out the New Message screen.
Put your recipient’s address in the To box, a subject in the Subject box, and the message in the main box.
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The Search Folders feature in Outlook 2013 is designed to help you organize the messages in your Inbox and other folders. Search Folders provide a single place where you can always look to find a certain kind of message.
A search folder doesn’t actually move your messages; it’s really a kind of imaginary location for your messages so that you only have to look at one type of message at a time.
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After you’ve signed up with an ISP, you can set up Outlook 2013 to send and receive e-mail from your account. Although any individual Internet e-mail account requires setup only once, you can set up many such accounts if you need them.
To set up an Internet e-mail account, follow these steps:Click the File tab.
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You can control the look of the messages you forward, as well as your replies in Outlook 2013. If your office uses Microsoft Outlook, you can make your text look pretty incredible in messages you send to one another by adding graphics, wild-looking fonts, or special effects, such as blinking text.
If you're sending mail to people who use programs other than Microsoft Outlook or to people to who use web-based e-mail services, such as Gmail, some of the customizations might not translate well.
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In Outlook 2013, you can choose from three importance levels: Low, Normal, or High. Some messages are more important than others. The momentous report that you're sending to your boss demands the kind of attention that wouldn't be appropriate for the wisecrack you send to your friend in the sales department. Setting the importance level to High tells the recipient that your message requires some serious attention.
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When sorting from Table view in Outlook 2013, click the heading of a column you want to sort. The entire table is sorted according to the column you clicked — by date, name, or whatever. Although clicking a column is the easiest way to sort, doing so enables you to sort on only one column. You may want to sort on two or more columns.
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You can subscribe to podcasts in Outlook 2013 the same way that you subscribe to any other RSS feed. However, you might want to add a few more steps to make it simpler to listen to the podcast after you get it.
There’s nothing difficult about listening to podcasts, but the process is still somewhat more complex than just clicking the radio button.
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You can use Outlook 2013 as a decision-making tool if you take advantage of the Outlook voting buttons. Management gurus constantly tell us about the importance of good teamwork and decision making. But how do you get a team to make a decision when you can’t find most of the team members most of the time?
Voting is a special feature of Outlook e-mail that adds buttons to an e-mail message sent to a group of people.
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Microsoft actually provides more than one method of using Outlook 2013 to collaborate with other people. SharePoint Team Services connects to Outlook and helps you collaborate. SharePoint is basically an online-based collaboration tool that helps you coordinate meetings, projects, and activities as well as share documents with other people.
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The Categories feature in Outlook is designed to help you tell what’s urgent from what can wait. There’s a lot of value in a good collection of information. However, you can’t squeeze full value from a list of contacts or tasks if you can’t get a quick handle on which items are important and which aren’t.
Assign a category in Outlook 2013
When you first set up Outlook, you can find out what categories are available by clicking the Categorize button on the Home tab.
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Outlook 2013 has a feature called the Outlook Social Connector — the People pane — to help you keep track of your contacts’ and colleagues’ social media activities. In time you’ll appreciate being able to see your colleagues’ other activities, not just what they say in their e-mail messages. Of course, that may depend on the nature of your colleagues’ other activities — sometimes you don’t want to know.
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The Rules Wizard is called a wizard because of the way the program leads you step by step to create each rule. The process is pretty simple. To create a simple rule to move an incoming message from a certain person to a certain folder, follow these steps:Click the Inbox icon in the Folder pane of the Mail module (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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Some people see their Contacts list as pure gold. They ogle and admire it whenever they’re not busy playing Solitaire. To see your Contacts list on Outlook.com, click the arrow beside the Outlook name at the top of the screen and choose People in the Ribbon. If you’d like to sort the contents of your Contacts list, click the gear icon in the far right of the Ribbon.
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Outlook 2013 comes with several ways to view your Task list and enables you to invent and save as many custom views as you like. The views that come with Outlook take you a long way when you know how to use them.
To change the view of your tasks, click the name of one of the following views from the Current View list in the Navigation pane:
Detailed view is a little more chock-full of the fiddly bits than the Simple List view.
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A note is the only type of item you can create in Outlook 2013 that doesn’t use a normal dialog box with menus, Ribbons, or toolbars. Notes are easier to use — but somewhat trickier to explain — than other Outlook items. No name appears on the Note icon, and no name exists for the part of the note you drag when you want to resize it.
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Microsoft Office 2013 comes jam-packed with features. See shortcuts and tips for using the keyboard, mouse, and ribbon to get fast access to the most commonly used commands. You'll master Office 2013 in no time!
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Microsoft Office 2013 provides hundreds of commands, but you'll likely only use a handful of those commands on a regular basis. To save time, use these Office 2013 keyboard shortcuts. With little effort, you can open files, find content, edit that content, and more!
Function
Keystroke
Copy
Ctrl+C
Cut
Ctrl+X
F
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You can control Microsoft Office 2013 with your mouse or your keyboard. The mouse actions in this table work whether you're using Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, or Outlook.
Mouse Button Used
Action
Purpose
Left mouse button
Click
Moves the cursor, highlights an object, pulls down a menu, or
chooses a menu c
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Microsoft Office 2013 displays commands in a series of icons stored on different tabs. This combination of icons and tabs is known as the Ribbon interface, which appears in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and Access. The following tables show the commands grouped under each ribbon tab for each of the five programs.
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Outlook 2013 still uses several different Address Books that are really part of Microsoft Exchange Server. The Address Books have several separate, independent lists of names and e-mail addresses — it’s pretty confusing. Microsoft simplified the issue of dealing with Address Books in Outlook 2002 and later versions, but that doesn’t help if you use Outlook on a large corporate network.
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Outlook Web Access is part of a program called Microsoft Exchange, which many large and not-so-large organizations run to power advanced Outlook features such as public folders, shared calendars, and assigned tasks.
Not every company that uses Microsoft Exchange offers Outlook Web Access, but if yours does, you can log on to Outlook from nearly anywhere: from a computer at your local public library, an Internet café, or any old photocopy parlor.
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Every Outlook 2013 module has its own selection of views, as well as its own set of Ribbons. The calendar has (among others) a view that looks calendar-like. The Contacts module includes a view that looks like an address card. All modules enable you to use at least one type of Table view, which organizes your data in the old-fashioned row-and-column arrangement.
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You can set up the AutoArchive settings in Outlook 2013 for each of your folders individually so that you can have more control of what gets autoarchived and what doesn’t. In this example, the Inbox folder is set to autoarchive every six months:Click the Mail button in the Navigation pane (or press Ctrl+Shift+I).
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The simplest way to subscribe to YouTube channels in Outlook 2013 is to use Internet Explorer. You need Internet Explorer version 7 or later to do that. When you subscribe to a feed in either Outlook or Internet Explorer, that feed becomes available in both programs.
Internet Explorer makes it much easier to subscribe to YouTube channels and other feeds than Outlook does, so if you have a choice, Internet Explorer is the place to go to add a subscription.
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Outlook 2013 can do plenty for you without any outside help, but a few well-considered accessories can make your life even easier. Some favorite accessories make up for capabilities that Outlook ought to have but doesn’t. Some accessories help you use your Outlook data anywhere, anytime.
Smartphones
Smartphones are everywhere today, and they’re probably the most powerful Outlook “accessory.
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One common theme of Office 2013 is that all programs look and work alike. After you learn how to use Word, you’ll find it isn't much harder to learn Excel or PowerPoint because the Ribbon tabs all work in similar ways.
Even better, the same keystroke commands work alike in all Office 2013 programs. By memorizing keystroke shortcuts, you’ll be able to work faster and more efficiently with Office 2013, no matter which particular program you may be using at the time.
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You can do some formidable tasks with Outlook 2013. Time will tell (and pretty quickly at that) how much more you'll be able to do with future versions of Outlook, Internet Explorer, and all the other powerful technology associated with those applications.
Following are a few advanced Outlook adventures to try out.
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Outlook 2013 has a feature called the To-Do bar that pulls together all the things you need to do and displays them in a single part of the Outlook screen. The goal of the To-Do bar is to let you know what you need to do at a glance rather than making you check your calendar, then check your e-mail Inbox, and then check your Task list.
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As with other Outlook 2013 modules, the Journal comes with multiple views that show your entries in different ways — whether that’s a record of phone calls or a list organized by the names of the people you’ve dealt with.
The Current View choices in the Ribbon let you change quickly from one view to the next.
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For some appointments you need a quick-and-dirty method of entering them in Outlook 2013. Some appointments don’t need much explanation. If you’re having lunch with Mom on Friday, there’s no reason to make a big production out of entering the appointment.
Here's how to enter these appointments quickly:Make sure the calendar is open in a view that shows the hours of the day in a column.
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You can open your notes one by one and see what’s in them, but Outlook’s Notes module offers even handier arranging, sorting, and viewing. Decide what makes sense for you.Try Icon view — just a bunch of notes scattered all over, as they are on your desk.You may like the free-form Icon view. To use Icon view, click the Icon button in the Current View section of the Ribbon.
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Outlook.com is a free web-based e-mail service provided by Microsoft. It’s somewhat like Google’s Gmail service but has a twist — a link to your desktop Outlook data. Microsoft has combined Hotmail and Windows Live into one e-mail service, and has added support for contacts (including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and your calendar.