Outlook 2010 cheat sheet

If you’ve just upgraded to Outlook 2010 from an earlier version, expect to see some very big changes, most notably the ubiquity of the Ribbon interface. The Ribbon first made its appearance in Outlook 2007, but in a relatively minor way: On the main Outlook screen, there’s no Ribbon, but when you open or compose an email, the Ribbon appears. Now, it’s everywhere.

There are other significant changes in Outlook 2010 compared to earlier versions, including integration with social media networks like Facebook and improved handling of threaded messages.

Whether you’re coming to Outlook 2010 from Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 or a different email client, we’ve got you covered. This cheat sheet shows you how to get around; it also explores features that are brand-new in Outlook 2010.

And don’t miss our other Office 2010 cheat sheets: Word 2010, Excel 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and SharePoint 2010.

Get acclimated to the new Outlook

To help you find your way around Outlook 2010, here’s a quick tour of the revamped interface; follow along using the screenshot below.

The Ribbon. Love it or hate it, the Ribbon is the main way you’ll work with Outlook 2010. Instead of old-style menus, submenus, sub-submenus and so on, the Ribbon groups small icons for common tasks together in tabs on a big ribbon. So, for example, when you click the Send/Receive tab, the Ribbon shows buttons for sending and receiving all mail or just from certain groups, for showing the progress of mail being sent and received, for determining whether to download email headers or not, and similar tasks.

The tasks underneath each tab on the Ribbon change according to what you’re currently viewing in Outlook. For example, when you’re viewing your calendar, the Home tab has items for creating appointments and meetings, changing the calendar view and so on. When you’re viewing mail, the Home tab has items for creating a mail message, sending and receiving messages and similar tasks. You can also customize the Ribbon, as we’ll cover later in the story.

The Quick Access toolbar. Introduced in Outlook 2007, this mini toolbar offers buttons for the most commonly used commands; you can customize it with whatever buttons you like.

The File tab/Backstage. Click the File tab in Outlook 2010 and it leads you to Backstage, a new command center where you can handle an array of tasks — changing your email account settings, cleaning up your mailboxes, opening a calendar, creating rules and printing, among others.

The Navigation pane. Think of this as Command Central for Outlook — the way you navigate your mail folders, RSS feeds, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. You can expand and contract folders for easier navigation, and collapse the Navigation pane to the left to give more room to the main content area. You can also turn it off.

The content area. What you see here changes according to what you’re doing in Outlook. In Mail, it shows you a list of mail messages; in Calendar, it shows a calendar; in Contacts, it shows your contacts; and so on.

The Reading pane. As in earlier versions of Outlook, if you click a message in your inbox or another folder, the Reading pane gives you a preview of it. You can rearrange the screen so that the Reading pane is below the content area instead of to the right. You can also expand the pane so it’s large enough that you can read many messages without having to open them, shrink the pane or even turn it off.

The To-Do bar. Largely unchanged from previous versions of Outlook, the To-Do bar shows your current calendar items and any tasks you’ve created. It can be minimized by rolling it off to the right of the screen, and can also be turned off entirely.

The People pane. This new pane shows you information about the person who has sent you an email or to whom you have sent an email. It includes the person’s name and email address, and a list of previous communications with him or her. With the Outlook Social Connector, another new feature in Outlook 2010, the pane includes information from social networks including LinkedIn and Facebook. The People pane can be resized, rolled down or made invisible.

The View toolbar. The new View toolbar at the bottom right of the screen lets you choose between a variety of views, which are different according to whether you’re looking at mail, the calendar, contacts or tasks. There’s also a slider that lets you zoom in or out.

Learn to love the Ribbon

At first, the Ribbon may be off-putting. But the truth is, once you learn how to use it, you’ll find that it’s far easier to use than the old Outlook interface. It puts features you might forget about within easy reach while cleaning up the interface. It does take some getting used to, though.

By default, the Ribbon that you see in Outlook 2010’s main window is divided into five tabs, with an optional sixth one (Developer). Each tab is organized into a series of groups that contain related commands for getting something done, such as sending and receiving mail. Inside each group is a set of what Microsoft calls command buttons, which carry out commands, display menus and so on.

There’s also a small diagonal arrow in the bottom right corner of some groups that Microsoft calls a dialog box launcher. Click it to display more options related to the group.

In Outlook, the Ribbon’s default tabs are context-sensitive, so that the options available on each of them vary according to whether you’re in Mail, Calendar, Contacts or Tasks. Here’s a rundown of the tabs and what each one does:

File (also known as Backstage): As you’ll see later in the story, here’s where you perform a variety of tasks such as managing your email accounts, printing, cleaning up your mailbox, customizing the Ribbon and more. No matter which view you’re in, when you head to Backstage, it always looks the same.

Home: This contains commonly used Outlook tasks. So when you’re in Mail, for example, here’s where you compose emails, manage junk mail, reply and forward mail, mark mail for follow-up and create mail-managing rules, among other tasks.

In Calendar, the Home tab is where you create new appointments and meetings, change your calendar view (day, week, etc.), share your calendar with others and so on. In Contacts, you create new contacts and groups, delete contacts and other similar tasks. In Tasks, you create new tasks, delete tasks, and flag and prioritize tasks, for example.

Send/Receive: This is the place to turn for all actions having to do with sending and receiving mail, calendar items, contacts and tasks, depending on which application you’re in.

Folder: In Mail, this tab controls creating new mail folders, cleaning up folders by moving duplicate messages to the Deleted Items folder, running rules on folders to automatically manage mail (moving all messages from a person to a specific folder, for example), marking mail in the folder as read, changing folder properties, and similar actions. In Calendar, Contacts and Tasks, the feature set is much more limited, allowing you to create new folders, along with some context-sensitive tasks, such as sharing contacts, a calendar or tasks with others.

View: In all four apps, you can use this tab to control the display of the Navigation pane, To-Do bar, Reading pane and People pane. In Mail, the tab also lets you filter your mail display by account, sender and so on, change the way in which conversations display and a lot more. In Calendar, you’ll be able to change the view to daily, weekly and so on. Contacts has a limited feature set but includes filtering the view of contacts by category, phone number and other options. Tasks offers similar features, including arranging tasks by categories, start date and due date.

Developer: If you write code or create forms and applications for Outlook, this is your tab. It includes macro-handling, so power users might also want to visit here every once in a while.

The Developer tab is hidden by default. To display it, click the File tab and choose Options –> Customize Ribbon and then check the box next to Developer.

Additional context-sensitive tabs: The Ribbon has a few more tricks up its sleeve beyond its default tabs. Depending on what you’re doing, it sometimes adds more tabs and subtabs.

For example, if you highlight a task in the To-Do bar, a new tab called Task List appears. It lets you remove tasks from the list, mark them as complete, show categories of tasks, filter them by date and perform other task management actions. Similarly, when you highlight a Calendar item, a new tab called Calendar Tools appears, giving you features such as inviting people to an appointment, changing the recurrence of the appointment, marking its importance as high or low, and so on.

If you type a search term in the Quick Search box at the top of the content area (the area that shows all of the emails in a folder, your calendar and so on), a Search tab appears with a variety of search tools, such as ones that let you perform date-specific searches and search only among messages with attachments.

The Outlook 2010 Ribbon also changes when you create a new mail message, read an existing mail message, create a new appointment, view an existing appointment, create a new contact, view an existing contact, create a new task or view an existing task. You’ll find context-sensitive tabs, including a Message one when you read or compose an email message, that contain plenty of features you’ll need, from basics like replying and forwarding mail to advanced features such as translating a message. And when creating a new contact, you can add a photo, search your Address Book and so on using the Contact tab.

Find your way around Backstage

Backstage is an all-in-one stop for doing common tasks such as changing your email account settings, cleaning up your mailbox and printing. It brings together a variety of functions that were found in multiple locations in previous versions of Outlook.

When you click the File tab on the Ribbon, you’re sent to Backstage. The Ribbon disappears and is replaced by a series of items down the left-hand side of the screen. Some options, such as Print and Help, are self-explanatory. Here’s what you need to know about the rest.

Save / Save As / Save Attachments / Save Calendar

The Save-related options at the top of the list may be grayed out or available depending on what you’re doing when you click the File tab. If you’re viewing an email, for example, all the options will be available and you can save the individual email in Outlook Message Format (.msg), HTML (.htm), plain text (.txt) or MHTML (.mht) format. You can also save any attachments.

Similarly, if you’re viewing an appointment on your calendar, you can save it in iCalendar (.ics), vCalendar (.vcs) and other formats; you can open the file later to view just that appointment. If you’re looking at your calendar but haven’t opened an appointment, you can save the entire calendar in .ics format so it can be viewed or imported into another calendar app.

When viewing a contact, you can save it in the vCard (.vcf) format, which can then be opened or imported into another contact manager. Tasks can be saved in the same .msg format as emails.

Info

Click Info on the left to bring up a screen where you can manage all of your mail accounts. Click Add Account to add a new one, or dig into the Account Settings area to edit any of your existing accounts.

The Cleanup Tools button in the Mailbox Cleanup area lets you archive old emails. It also gives you tools to identify mail that you may no longer need so you can delete it — for example, it can show you items older than a certain date or larger than a certain size.

Info is also where you set up out-of-office replies, and down at the bottom of the screen, Manage Rules & Alerts helps you organize incoming mail by automating actions to be taken. You can have mail from certain senders or with certain subject lines to be routed to specific folders, for example, or automatically flag certain messages for follow-up.

Open

This screen lets you open a calendar that’s in either .ics or .vcs format, open an Outlook .pst file (the file that contains all your Outlook email data), or import a variety of file types and information into Outlook, among other tasks.

Options

Here’s where you can customize the way Outlook looks and works, such as the format you compose emails in by default (HTML, rich text or plain text); the hours that the Calendar should consider work hours; in what order Contacts should be displayed (by last name or first name, for example); options for setting appointment reminders, including text messages sent to a mobile phone; and what buttons appear in the Quick Access toolbar.

You can also customize the Ribbon from here. After you click Options, click Customize Ribbon in the left pane, and you can choose what you want shown on each of the Ribbon’s tabs.

Work the People pane and Outlook Social Connector

As social networks become an increasingly important way for people to communicate with one another, email is losing its place as the center of electronic communications. The Outlook Social Connector built into Outlook 2010 is an attempt to meld the power of social networks with email.

The Outlook Social Connector presents its information via the People Pane, which is new to Outlook 2010. The People Pane is normally minimized; to expand it, click the expand arrow at its right edge or else drag up the top of the minimized pane to whatever size you want. (You can also turn off the People pane via Outlook’s View menu.)

The pane serves as a central point for all of your communications with anyone in Outlook. Highlight an email in any folder and you’ll see a list of all the recent communications between you and the sender or receiver of that email, including emails, meetings, attachments and more.

You can filter to see just one type of communication — for example, only emails or only status updates — by clicking on icons on the left side of the pane. To view details about any communication, click the item and it will open in a separate Outlook window.

The Outlook Social Connector enhances the People pane by pulling in your connections’ LinkedIn and Facebook information so that you can easily keep track of their activities without having to go to those sites. You’ll have to log in to those social networking services from the Outlook Social Connector first, of course.

The Social Connector also adds a new Contacts folder composed only of your LinkedIn contacts, even if you haven’t added them to your normal Outlook contact list. (It doesn’t do this for Facebook.) Double-click a contact to see all of his or her LinkedIn status updates and messages. To visit the LinkedIn page of any contact, click the Web Page address.

As useful as the Outlook Social Connector is, though, it’s only half a solution, because it doesn’t allow for two-way communications — you can’t update your status on social networks from inside Outlook. It pulls information in but can’t push information out.

Follow the conversation with Conversation View

Previous versions of Outlook included a feature called Conversation View that grouped together messages in an email thread. The idea was to make it easy to follow continuing email conversations with one or multiple people, but it was so awkwardly designed that it was of little use.

Outlook 2010’s updated Conversation View greatly improves the experience. To turn it on, check the “Show as Conversations” box on the View tab of the Ribbon. Now every email that has more than one message in a thread has a small triangle to the left in the Inbox or any folder list. Click the triangle to see a reverse-chronological list of every message in the conversation; click any message to jump to it.

Each conversation thread in Outlook 2010 includes messages you’ve sent as well as those you’ve received, making it simple to follow entire conversations. You’ll no longer have to hunt through your Sent Items folder in addition to your Inbox or another folder to follow a single conversation.

To hide all the messages in a conversation again, just click the triangle at its top left. And you can customize how Conversation View works by clicking the Conversation Settings button on the Ribbon’s View tab. In the drop-down menu that appears, you can change how conversations are displayed — for example, by always opening each conversation with all its messages expanded.

Making Outlook 2010’s Conversation View even more useful are a couple of new features for managing your conversations. The Clean Up feature sweeps through a conversation and deletes any messages that are redundant. Having fewer messages per conversation, with every message being relevant, is a big time-saver.

To use Clean Up, highlight a conversation and click the Clean Up button on the Ribbon’s Home tab. From the drop-down list that appears, you can choose to clean up the conversation, the entire folder or the folder and all of its subfolders.

The Ignore feature is also useful, but it needs to be used with care. Highlight a conversation and click the Ignore button on the Home tab, and the entire conversation will be deleted. Additionally, all future messages in that conversation will automatically be routed to the Deleted Items folder.

As in Outlook 2007, you can easily assign a category to an entire conversation. To do it, right-click the small triangle that expands or contracts a conversation; in the menu that appears, choose Categorize and select the category to which you want to assign the conversation. When future messages in the same conversation arrive, they’ll be assigned the same category automatically.

There is one anomaly about Conversation View that may take some getting used to: It groups together all messages with the same subject line, and so at times puts unrelated messages in the same conversation. For example, if you’ve used the subject line “Long time, no speak” with several different people, it will group all of those messages from separate conversations into a single conversation.

More new features in Outlook 2010

Outlook includes several other useful features, most notably Quick Steps, which speed email handling by letting you apply several tasks to a message at once. You can create a Quick Step, for example, to move an email sent by your boss into a specific folder, flag it as important and assign it to the “Boss” category, all with a single click. We’ll provide instructions for working with Quick Steps — including how to create your own — later in the story.

The enhanced search function makes it easier to narrow your search by factors such as sender, words in the subject line, messages with attachments, and more. Just type a query into the Quick Search box, and use the features in the Search tab that appears.

As in Outlook 2007, when you create a meeting request for multiple people in the Calendar, it looks at everyone’s availability and suggests potential meeting times. But Outlook 2010 adds a new Schedule View on the View tab; when you schedule a meeting in a shared calendar, this view shows you other people’s appointments in a horizontal view so you can quickly see when they’re free.

Spell-checking now works in more locations in Outlook than previously, including the subject lines of messages, tasks and meeting requests.

Five tips for working with Outlook 2010

Now that you’ve got the basics of Outlook 2010 down, here are a few tips and tricks for working with it.

1. Add commands to the Quick Access toolbar

Outlook 2010’s Quick Access toolbar offers one-click access to a handful of commands, such as Send/Receive, Save and Undo. The command buttons that appear by default vary depending on whether you’re looking at, say, the home Mail screen or an individual email message. But you don’t need to be satisfied with what’s already there. You can put your most frequently used commands there so that they’re always available no matter which Ribbon tab is showing.

As mentioned earlier in the story, you can do this via Backstage’s Options screen, but a quicker way is to click the small down arrow to the right of the Quick Access toolbar. In the menu that appears, you can either select a command or choose More Commands.

From the left-hand side of the screen that appears, choose a command that you want to add to the toolbar and click Add. You can change the order of the buttons by highlighting a command on the right side of the screen and using the up and down arrows to move it.

The list of commands you see on the left may seem somewhat limited at first. That’s because Outlook is showing you only the most popular commands. Click the drop-down menu under “Choose commands from” at the top of the screen, and you’ll see other lists of commands — All Commands, Commands Not in the Ribbon, and so on. Select any option, and there will be plenty of commands you can add.

Finally, there’s an even easier way to add a command. Right-click any object on the Ribbon and choose “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.” You can add not only individual commands in this way, but also entire groups — for example, the Quick Steps group.

2. Hide the Ribbon

Not a fan of the Ribbon? No problem — you can make it disappear. To hide the Ribbon, either press Ctrl-F1 (and press Ctrl-F1 again to make it reappear) or just right-click anywhere in the Ribbon and select “Minimize the Ribbon.”

The Ribbon will still be available when you want it — all you need to do is click on the appropriate tab (Home, Send/Receive, Folder, etc.) and it appears. It then discreetly goes away when you are no longer using it.

3. Create your own Quick Steps

As explained earlier in this article, Quick Steps can automate email handling by having several tasks applied to messages at once. Outlook 2010 comes with several prebuilt Quick Steps, including one called Reply & Delete, which does just what you’d expect: It starts a reply to a message and deletes the original.

Quick Steps reside in a group in the center of Mail’s Home tab. To use a Quick Step, all you have to do is select one or more emails in your message list and click the Quick Step you want to apply.

You’re not limited to built-in Quick Steps; it’s easy to create your own. Here’s how to route incoming email to a specific folder, flag it for follow-up and mark it with a specific category:

1. On the Home tab, click the dialog box launcher arrow at the bottom of the Quick Steps group. From the Manage Quick Steps dialog box that appears, click the New button and select the action you want to perform.

In our instance, we’ll select Flag and Move.

2. A screen titled First Time Setup appears. It will look different depending on the type of Quick Step you’ve chosen to create, but it will always have a Name field. Type in a name for it, then fill in the rest of the screen. In our example, you would choose the kind of flag you want to apply to messages with this Quick Step — Today, Tomorrow, This Week, etc. Then select the folder to which you want the messages moved.

3. That only takes care of flagging a message and moving it to a specific folder. We also want to add another action to the Quick Step, assigning a category to the message. Click the Options button at the bottom of the screen, and on the Edit Quick Step screen that appears, click the Add Action button.

4. When you do that, a “Choose an Action” box appears. Click the arrow, and a drop-down list will appear with a long list of actions, including “Set importance,” “Categorize message,” “Create a task with attachment” and many others. Select the action you want performed. In our example, it will be “Categorize message.”

5. The “Choose an Action” box now changes to reflect the action you’ve chosen — in our example, “Categorize message.” An input or drop-down box appears beneath it to let you complete the action. In this case, the new box is titled “Choose category.” Click the drop-down box and choose the category you want applied. You can keep adding more actions this way.

6. If you want to designate a shortcut key combination to apply a Quick Step to messages, click the “Choose a shortcut” drop-down from the bottom of the screen and select the key combo you want.

7. When you’re done, click Save and then OK. You’ve just created the Quick Step.

Note: Another way to start a new Quick Step is to simply click the Create New button in the Quick Steps group on the Home tab. Doing so brings up a blank Edit Quick Step screen. (If the “Create New” button isn’t visible, click the scroll bar in the group to scroll to it.) You’ll still need to name your Quick Step, and then you can choose actions from a drop-down list and keep adding more actions as in steps 4 and 5 above. Although slightly simpler, this method is a little slower because you aren’t piggybacking on pregrouped commands.

What if the new Quick Step you just created isn’t visible in the Quick Steps group? You can scroll to it in order to select it. But if you’d like to make sure it’s always visible in the box, you can easily rearrange the order in which the Quick Steps are displayed. Click the dialog box launcher at the bottom of the Quick Steps group, highlight the Quick Step you want to move, and then use the up and down arrows below the list to move it higher or lower in the list. Click OK when you’re done.

4. Find your old friends

The full integration of the Ribbon in Outlook 2010 means that you might have a hard time locating many of your favorite commands from earlier versions of Outlook. Use our quick reference charts for an extensive list of where to find your old friends in the newest version of Outlook.

5. Use keyboard shortcuts

If you’re a keyboard-centric kind of person who prefers typing to clicking, there are plenty of keyboard shortcuts for you in Outlook 2010. We’ve included several of the most useful at the bottom of the page.

You can also use a clever set of keyboard shortcuts for working with the Ribbon. Press the Alt key and a tiny letter or number icon will appear on the menu for each tab — for example, the letter H for the Home tab. Now press that letter on your keyboard, and you’ll display that tab or menu item.

Once you’ve started to learn these shortcuts, you’ll naturally begin using key combinations. So instead of pressing Alt then H to display the Home tab, you can press Alt-H together.

The screenshot to the right shows the most useful Alt key combinations in Outlook 2010.

For more nifty keyboard shortcuts, see the table below. And even more shortcuts are listed on Microsoft’s Office 2010 site.

Next: Outlook 2010 quick reference charts

Preston Gralla is a contributing editor for Computerworld.com and the author of more than 35 books, including How the Internet Works (Que, 2006). See more by Preston Gralla on Computerworld.com.