Mail Keyboard Shortcuts Make Outlook 2007 Better

Process Outlook Mail Faster & More Efficiently

Keyboard Shortcuts Make Life Easier

When you're working with lots of mail in Outlook, using the mouse can slow you down. You need to take your hand off the keyboard, grab the mouse, point at the command you want, click the mouse (and maybe point and click a few more times), then put your hand back on the right spot on the keyboard before you can start typing again. You can end up doing this hundreds of times a day.

Keyboard shortcuts allow you to execute many commands and actions while never taking your hands off the keyboard. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for the commands you use frequently and it will make a change for the better in the way you work with Outlook.

If you ever used earlier versions of Outlook, you may already know about keyboard shortcuts. But when Microsoft introduced Outlook 2007, they added the Ribbon, which led to many new keyboard shortcuts. These new shortcuts anywhere in Outlook where the Ribbon is visible. To start entering a new style shortcut, you press and release the Alt key on the keyboard.

From there, what you press next depends on what you are doing at the time. 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. Even so, this is a far more efficient way of getting things done than clicking your way through multiple levels of the Ribbon to find the command you are looking for.

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

• ALT, H, A, L - Align the selected paragraph with the left margin
• 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 you can see, there's a huge variety of things you can do with keyboard shortcuts. It's definitely worth memorizing a few key shortcuts that you will use many times each day. The time and energy savings may not appear to be great, 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 really add up. Now all you need is a good source of information on the best keyboard shortcuts to apply.

The Living With Outlook website contains a wide selection of the top Outlook keyboard shortcuts. To see the top Outlook mail shortcuts, including a cool procedure for sending mail without touching the mouse, go to

http://www.living-with-outlook.com/keyboard-shortcuts.html