Make Working With Outlook 2007 Messages More Efficient With These Keyboard Shortcuts
If you spend a lot of your day sending and receiving mail with Outlook 2007, you end up switching between the keyboard and the mouse hundreds of times. This is inefficient, because it causes you to take your hand off the keyboard, mouse around a bit, do some clicking, then put your hand back on the keyboard and resume typing. You would be much faster and more efficient if you didn’t have to constantly jump back and forth like that. Outlook keyboard shortcuts can save you from much of that switching back and forth, which allows you to get your work done faster. Applying the keyboard shortcuts for the commands you rely on most will certainly make working with Outlook faster and easier.
If you have previous experience with Outlook, you may already know about keyboard shortcuts. But when Microsoft introduced Outlook 2007, they added 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 what you are doing at the time. The length of a new-style keyboard 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 to do things than clicking your way through multiple levels of the Ribbon to reach the command you want.
What follows are a few of the keyboard shortcuts available for editing messages:
- ALT, H, A, L – Left align the selected paragraph
- ALT, H, F, F – Select a list of fonts you can apply to 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 keyboard shortcuts available to make things easier for yourself when dealing with Outlook mail. It will definitely be worth your time to memorize a few of the more common shortcuts that you will use many times each day. The time and energy savings may not seem like much at first, but multiply the savings by how many times you repeat the same commands, and it could really add up. The benefits are clear. Now you just need to find a good source of information on the best keyboard shortcuts to apply.
The Living With Outlook website lists many of the top Outlook keyboard shortcuts for you to choose from. To learn the top Outlook mail shortcuts, including a cool procedure for sending a mail message without ever touching the mouse, go to http://www.living-with-outlook.com/keyboard-shortcuts.html