Try These Efficient Outlook 2007 Mail Keyboard Shortcuts

If you spend a lot of your day sending and receiving mail with Outlook 2007, you will find yourself going between the keyboard and the mouse hundreds of times. This is clumsy, because it causes you to take your hand off the keyboard, mouse around a bit, do some clicking, then put your hand back in the right spot on the keyboard and resume typing. You would be much faster and more efficient if you didn’t have to do all that switching between mouse and keyboard. Outlook keyboard shortcuts can eliminate much of that mousing around, and get your work done faster. Learning the keyboard shortcuts for the commands you rely on most will certainly make your work in Outlook more efficient.

If you have previous experience with Outlook (or other Microsoft products), you may already have some experience with keyboard shortcuts. But things changed when Microsoft introduced Outlook 2007. In many areas of Outlook, you will encounter the Ribbon, which spawned a whole new style of shortcuts. You can take advantage of the new shortcuts are available when the Ribbon is visible. To start entering a new style shortcut, you press and release the Alt key.

Exactly what you press next depends on where you are in Outlook. The length of a new-style shortcut varies, depending on how many levels down in the Ribbon the command appears, so you may have to press several keys in sequence to complete an action. Still, this is a far faster and more efficient way of getting things done than mousing through multiple levels of the Ribbon until you find the command you need.

What follows are a few of the shortcuts that apply when you are editing mail:

• ALT, H, A, C – Center the selected paragraph
• ALT, H, A, O – Decrease the indent of the selected paragraph
• ALT, N, P – Open the Insert Picture dialog box so you can insert a picture at the cursor location

As the examples above show, there’s a huge variety of things you can do with keyboard shortcuts. It will definitely be worth your time to memorize a few key shortcuts that you’ll use frequently. The amount of savings may not seem like much at first, but even if you save a second or two, when you multiply the savings by the number of times you repeat the same commands, and it could add up to some real benefits. The benefits are clear. Now all you need is a good resource to show you the best keyboard shortcuts to learn.

The Living With Outlook website contains a wide selection of the top Outlook keyboard shortcuts for you to choose from. To see more, including a very useful procedure for sending a mail message without touching the mouse, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/keyboard-shortcuts.html