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Many people today have multiple email accounts. There are lots of good reasons for this, but it tends to create a headache because you usually have to manage each email account separately. Happily, if you’re willing to learn a few simple procedures, you can convince Outlook 2007 to manage all your email accounts in one place. Think of the time and hassle that will save. The rest of this article explains how you do this.

When you Receive Messages

Let’s talk about how Outlook receives messages from different accounts. Outlook automatically checks each email account (the settings in your Send/Receive groups determine when). Messages from most types of email accounts end up in the Inbox, while messages from HTTP mail accounts, like Hotmail, end up in their own collection of mail folders.

Wondering how you will know which messages are associated with which accounts? It turns out that’s easy. The Hotmail messages end up in their own set of folders. For accounts that end up in the Inbox, if you can’t tell just by who they’re from, you can look at the message’s To: field. The email address the message was sent to (and hence the account), appears on that line.

Except when it doesn’t. Sometimes you’ll see a nickname instead of the actual email address in the To: field. If there’s a nickname, you can follow these steps to find out the actual email address associated with that nickname:

1. Right-click the nickname in the To: field of the message.
2. In the shortcut menu, click Outlook Properties.
3. In the dialog box, look on the E-mail Addresses tabbed page to see which address the message was sent to.

How to Send Messages from Multiple Accounts

When you are sending messages, you’re in control of which account Outlook uses. Outlook always has a default account for sending messages (usually the first account you set up), but you can tell Outlook to use a different account. Here’s how it works:

• When you create a new message, Outlook assumes you’ll want to use the default account to send it unless you tell it to do something different.
• When you’re replying to a message you received, Outlook uses the account that the message came in on. That is, if you receive a message sent to your account named xyz@mymailserver.com, and you clicked Reply or Reply to All, Outlook would assume you want to send the reply using the xyz@mymailserver.com account. That said, you can always tell Outlook to use a different account.
• If you’re forwarding a message, Outlook likewise assumes you want to reply using the same account that the original message came to.

This is all well and good, but what if you don’t want to use the account Outlook wants you to? How do you tell Outlook to use a different account?

You tell Outlook which email account to use when the message window is open. When you have multiple accounts set up, you will see an Account button below the Send button. Click the Account button, and Outlook displays a menu containing all your e-mail accounts. Select one, and Outlook uses that one to send your message.

How to Change the Default Email Account

You may sometimes decide that you want Outlook to use a different email account as your default. If you want to change the default, follow these steps:

1. Go to the main Outlook menu and click Tools > Account Settings to open the Account Settings dialog box.
2. On the E-mail tabbed page of the Account Settings dialog box, you should find the box listing all your email accounts. Click the name of the account you want to make your new default account.
3. Once you’ve selected the new default account, look above the account list, find and click Set as Default. Outlook dims this option until you select a new account to use as the default.
4. The new default option moves to the top of the list.
5. Click Close.

You are ready to manage your multiple email accounts.

Learning how to work with multiple email accounts is just one of the things covered in the third lesson of the 6-week online course, Introduction to Outlook 2007. If strengthening your skills with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 makes sense to you in these uncertain economic times, and you like the idea of a structured class with the ability to interact with your instructor, I strongly suggest you visit http://IntroToOutlook2007.info to learn more.

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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

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