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Recently, on Reddit forum, many Hotmail users complain that their e-mail account has been totally wiped clean of all saved messages, folders, contacts, etc… I advise you to read this immediately before that happens to you.

Hotmail launched in 1996 and quickly became the best free email service in the world. However, after Google launched and Yahoo continued to improve, Hotmail lost its number one position.

Outlook then came out and replaced Hotmail. Outlook has improved a lot compared to Hotmail, with a nice interface, neat. As a result, the number of messages displayed increases by 30%, and Microsoft also restricts advertisements to occupy more space.

At 10/6/2013, Microsoft changed its Hotmail account policy. There is one thing that needs special attention.

 

Microsoft recommends that users log into Outlook.com at least 270 days in advance, otherwise Microsoft will not guarantee that the data contained in their emails is stored or not.

Within 360 days, the unused Outlook.com account will be automatically deleted.

However, despite being 2018 however many Hotmail users did not read this and lost their data.

So, I recommend you log in Hotmail at least once a month. This helps you not forget your Hotmail password. And at the same time, you have not deleted your account.

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If one day you check your email, and oh, there are signs that your Hotmail email has been altered. And here are 11 things you should do immediately when you suspect your account has been hacked.

#1 You must change your password:

Go to www.hotmail.com and sign in Hotmail.

Next, change your password.

#2 Check Your Confidential Information

Check your account recovery email and phone number on the Security Settings page, https://account.live.com/Proofs/Manage, and verify that they are unchanged.

#3 Replace the Restore Code

Microsoft provides a recovery code for use in case your access to confidential information is lost (and they recommend that you print and store this code as a hardcover).

A hacker with access to your account may change your recovery code to simply regain control of your account after you’ve changed your password.

To replace the code, scroll down to the recovery code on the Security Settings page.

There, click Replace recovery code to get the new code. We recommend following Microsoft’s advice and printing it.

#4 Remove All Trusted Devices Combined With Your Microsoft / Hotmail Account

When you use a trusted device, you do not need to enter a password to access your account.

To ensure that hackers have not set up such a device, on the Privacy Settings page, scroll to Trusted devices and click Delete all trusted devices associated with my account.

#5 Change Alert Settings

We recommend verifying that alerts have been enabled by clicking Change alert options on the Privacy Settings page and making sure to select the checkbox next to your mobile phone number.

#6 Checking Sessions

Visit https://account.live.com/Activity to check which devices are currently signed in to your account. You may be asked to provide a one-time password, which will be sent to the mobile phone in a text message.

Microsoft will ask you to provide the last four digits of the phone number to prove that you know the phone number and the corresponding phone number is in your hands.

After entering your password, you may be asked whether you are interested in installing Microsoft’s mobile authentication application.

Click No, Thanks. (We recommend this setting, but it does not matter if you do this right now.) If you think your account is compromised, then fix that should your only focus.)

If you see any strange device signin to your account or an unfamiliar location, click it to notify Microsoft.

#7 Check Your Microsoft / Hotmail Account Activity

Access your Outlook account and check the Sent Items and Trash to make sure the hacker has not impersonated you and emailed to your contacts.

Pass through any other account taking advantage of your Microsoft account (such as Skype or Office Online) and ensure that nothing has been changed.

#8 Check Your Other Accounts

If you are using the same password for other websites, change it on these services right away.

Make sure you can still sign in to these services.

So Attackers often exploit reusable passwords (a bad idea, but actually) to gain access to additional accounts!

Consequently, Do not forget to check out the information expose in all your email accounts too! Safely do it for free with this tool.

#8 Run an Anti-Virus Program on Your Computer

Run an antivirus program to find any malicious software that may have been installed on your computer.

The attacker usually retrieves the victim’s password by installing a Trojan horse.

So If your computer is infected, changing your password will not be enough, as malware will take a new password and send it to the hacker.

#10 Two-Step Verification Activation

To make your account more secure, turn on two-step verification on your Microsoft account here: https://account.live.com/proofs/EnableTfa?mkt=en-gb

Whenever you log in, Microsoft will ask you to provide a unique code that will appear on your mobile device’s identity verification application.

This provides you with an additional important and effective security layer.

Sure, it will add 15 seconds to your login time, but it will save you thousands of seconds later if you get hacked!

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Hotmail is a type of personal email that we do not expect a second person to know. As recommended by the experts, you should change the Hotmail account password every 72 days. This helps you keep your personal information private. And hereafter, I will show you how to change your Hotmail password.

Change Hotmail password in hotmail.com

Now, to change your Hotmail password, you will have to open your ID Email.

First, Open your web browser and sign in Hotmail account at www.hotmail.com.

  • Type your email and password.

Click on the right top corner of your Hotmail screen and click your Hotmail avatar > View account.

This page will open, and then you’ll have to go to the password change option. Click on Change password.

Now, you login Hotmail account again.

When you click on change password, this box will open, select your alternate email and send the code:

Microsoft will ask the user to enter the Hotmail account email address to receive the security code.

Copy the code from email and paste on code require box.

Enter your email address in the box below and click Submit code. Or if you already have a security code, just click on the I have code to enter the code.

You insert your code that receives.

My code is 8485405. Fill code and click Confirm.

This page will open here, you can put your current password and then put a new password, and once again new password and click on Save.

The password change interface appears. And here you will see the name of your Microsoft account and the items to fill.

  • Current password: Enter the current password.
  • New password: Enter new password. Note, new password is at least 8 characters. You should put numbers and letters in order to increase security.
  • Reenter password: enter the new password correctly.

Underneath, you will be given the option to set my password change every 72 days. By checking this box, the system will inform you that you need to change your password after 72 days from the date of the new password.

Once you have filled out the information, click Save to proceed with the new password setup.

Then a new message board appears with the new password saved and the new password change date.

Now, you have completed the steps to change the new password for Hotmail with very simple steps and easy to implement. You can log out your Hotmail email and login with your new password.

Remember to change your email account password regularly for security reasons.

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After many improvements, Microsoft’s email service improved and became the second largest email service in the world after Gmail. Because there are many users so this service has a lot of language options to choose. It can be very common, when you login to our email, you will find another language. You need to configure it manually if you want to change it.

Sometimes, by default, they are configured in a language other than the user-managed language, which can occur due to a variety of factors, primarily due to the configuration in the computer or browser. But do not worry, changing the language of Hotmail email is a very straightforward process.

How to change the language when you sign in to our email from a mobile device

This is a very common problem among Android users and Apple devices, who are presented with this problem not only in Hotmail but also in other downloadable applications.

If we use the Mobile version of Hotmail, to change the language of a mobile application, we need to change the language of our device, as they are installed with the default language. Depending on the device we use, the procedure will change.

If our Smartphone or Tablet is Android:

We touch the Settings icon and then select “Language and input text.”

Click “Language”, the existing language will appear.

We choose and slide the language we want to put at the top of the list.

If our Smartphone or Tablet is from Apple:

We touch the Configuration icon, select “General” and then “Language & Region”.

Click on “iPad / iPhone Language” and select the language you want to configure.

We touch OK to save the change.

Once the process is complete, we can log in to our mail to verify that the configuration has been updated. In case, after a few minutes, the changes are not displayed, we can choose to restart the device or reinstall the Hotmail application.

How to change the language when you sign in to Hotmail email from webmail.

  1. We have to go to the browser and go to Hotmail.com.
  2. We proceed to login to Hotmail, enter your Hotmail email account address and password.
  3. You must select the Configuration icon, located in the menu at the top of your mailbox. And there, click on “Options”.

  1. Outlook Messages
  2. The menu of all settings in our account will appear on the left side of the screen.
  3. In the “General” tab, we have to select “Region and time zone”.

  1. As a first choice, we will see the language we have defined before logging in to our mail and in which all the content appears.
  2. We just click on the down arrow, where a list of all available languages will be displayed. We can choose even the Spanish of our particular country, or, neutral Spain.
  3. Then, you can select Date, Time format, and current time zone.
  4. We just click on the down arrow, where a list of all time zone will be displayed.
  5. Then, we have to select “Save” to finish.

 

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Hey, what’s up everyone. I want to give a demonstration on how to send encrypted email.

For those that don’t know, regular email is actually not very secure at all. There have been several cases in the news lately where people’s emails have been hacked. So I’m going to give a demonstration using a tool called Mailvelope. It’s a free tool. It’s a great gift to the world.

Mailvelope leverages PGP another great gift to the world. PGP is an encryption method, it’s been around for a long time and it is very effective there’s no known way of breaking it directly so when used properly, you shouldn’t have much to worry about. So to get it going we’re going to make this so you can use it for your regular email like on Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, iCloud.

So we go to Mailvelope.com and you have to install an add-on.You can choose Chrome or Firefox.

Just click on that “allow” hit install, basic stuff now over on the right here, it’s going to say this lock appears it says Mailvelope. Great.

Click on “options” and now let’s say I’m trying to communicate with my buddy.

You actually never need to talk on the phone or meet in person, you can start via regular email and turn it into encrypted emails.

But what you first need to do is create a public and private key. So to do that you go to “generate key”.

It will ask for your name. You can put whatever you want here but other people will be able to see it. So you don’t want to put something offensive or something you’re embarrassed about.

Same thing with email although it’s a little easier if you put your real email because it synchronizes with other address books nicely. So it’s probably best to do that.

There we go, I put in somebody’s name who definitely could have used Mailvelope earlier this year.

For your settings, 4096 is definitely what you want to use. You could use lower ones but that just increases the highly unlikely chance that someone can break through and read your message so 4096 is safe.

You need a password, I’d recommend at least 20 characters a couple random words and maybe some numbers should probably be safe enough but the longer the better.

Now you will have to enter this somewhat frequently, so you don’t want it to be something that’s impossible to remember.

You can upload your public key to the Mailvelope server, that’s up to you — it just makes it easier for people to email you. We’re going to hit “generate”, this can take anywhere from 10 seconds to about two minutes depending on mostly just luck.

It has completed. If I scroll up and look at my display keys, this is kind of like a Rolodex of keys that you can communicate with.

Right now I only have the account that I created. But if I can dig in I’ll see it’s actually a set of two keys. There’s a public and private key.

I’m going to grab both these by clicking on export you grab one or the other or both I’m going to grab both by hitting ctrl+A ctrl+C paste them into two text files.

The public key is one that you can give to anybody it is there’s no risk in handing it out you have to give it to someone for them to encrypt a message directly to you, but there’s no harm in sending this out, putting it on an email signature pasting it on your doorway.

You’ll notice it’s shorter than your private key over here the private key, intuitively, you want to keep private. It says “private” up here this one says “public”. The private key is basically a direct method to decrypt all of your messages they would have to get through the password you set up but you probably don’t want to take that chance so protecting your private key is really critical to maintaining good privacy.

So I wouldn’t even save this in plain text, in the cloud. I’d encrypted somewhere else or hide it somewhere with it where you just don’t want to risk losing it.

But now we have a public key you want to share this with some with your buddy or I want to share this with my buddy so that he can send me encrypted messages.

I’m going to jump back over to Firefox and this conversation left off here I’m just going to write back in regular text saying, “hey I have a public key here it is” and I can just paste that in there.

I don’t care if everybody under the sun reads this, I’m just going to send it because all that allows someone to do is send me an encrypted message. They can’t read any of my messages.

I’m going to jump over to that other account here we go I’m going to hit “show” the message comes through. Mailvelope automatically recognizes any sort of PGP information so it’s that it recognizes “Begin PGP text” public key.

So it’s got the option to add in this public key. I’m just going to click this plus right here and it says “success”. You’ll notice that if I go to the bottom here it uses the name and the address that I gave it before.

So when I said be careful about putting in some name that you’d be ashamed of, this is an example of where it would be exposed. I mean it’s part of the software so just put in something you expect other people to see.

So now my friend can write back to me an encrypted message. The way he does that or both of us would be to hit “reply” and again we’re in regular Hotmail here.

I’m in Chrome but the other wasn’t in Firefox works the same you click on this little “compose” button and then you can start typing away.

It recognizes my address because I’m in the keyring and I can start typing. All right I put in some sensitive information that I’m going to send back to myself and I’ve also included the public key for this account down so both accounts will have each other’s public key so they can send messages freely to each other.

So I’m going to hit “encrypt”, now by hitting encrypt it actually knows to paste this encrypted method into the message over here. So it takes this window and paste it into here.

If you get caught in between you might want to be careful that you don’t accidentally close the window because then you can lose you message, but I hit “encrypt” and it sends this long completely eligible message back to my PG code Rider account. So I’m going to hit “Send.”

Jumping back over to Firefox.

There it is and I’m going to open up that message now again Mmailvelope recognizes this as a PGP message so says gives me this kind of glow around the message which the message itself again is completely illegible that Google’s trying to translate it as Danish.

I don’t know how I’d feel about that if I was Danish, but I want to click on the envelope, and because I entered my password previously it saves it for 30 minutes but it will decipher this encrypted message it has all of the key information.

So if you wanted to send all of this sensitive information you could password Social Security numbers Mailveope allows you to do that. Now I also sent the public key as an encrypted method which it didn’t need to be encrypted but easy enough.

I’m going to copy this here and I’m going to go back to my Mailvelope here we go and I’m going to hit “import keys” not “generate key” like I did before.

So I’m just going to paste this one in there and I hit “import” and it says down below “success” public key blah blah blah and “Emperor Trump” that was a goofy name I made for this account as well.

If I go back to my display keys list, I now have two entries. I’ve got the original one I generated and I have the second one I just copied and pasted in.

You’ll notice the second one only has one key here while my original one has two. And as I’m sure you can guess, that’s because this one has a public and private key, while this Emperor Trump one only has a public key.

My friend and I do not share each other’s private keys with each other. Only our public keys.

So now we can send encrypted messages back and forth with each other. A couple other the random notes, if you lose your password or your private key, you’re out of luck.

Mailvelope doesn’t know your information so you have to protect that on your own.

If you have more than one person on an email thread, let’s say I had wanted to reply to a bunch of people, you can actually encrypt it with everyone’s key so that everyone can read the message in fact when you compose a message.

Mailvelope will encrypt with your public key as well allowing you to read your own message. So if you’re looking at your sent mail and you want to read it, you can see what you sent to somebody else which is nice in previous versions you couldn’t do that.

Disadvantages are obviously you can’t search like you would a normal Hotmail message but that’s a small price to pay to have a secure messaging.

So again big thanks to Mailveope for making a great product and I hope you find this useful and just think you know a lot of a lot of campaigns a lot of important people could have really saved themselves some aggravation just using the simple tool.

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If you have Skype for Business installed on your computer but in Outlook the New Skype Meeting button disappeared, I’ll show you how to restore it.

In order to restore the New Skype Meeting button, you have to go into Outlook as an administrator.

To do that bring up Outlook 2016 or whatever version you have. Right-click. Go to More and run it as administrator.

You’ll notice here in the calendar I don’t have the New Skype Meeting button. Go to File, Options, Addin and down at the bottom here it has COM Add-ins.

Hit go and it brings up a list of all the add-ins listed on your computer. You’ll notice here this Skype meeting add-in for Microsoft Office is not checked. Check that. Hit OK and now the New Skype Meeting button has been restored now.

Oftentimes this doesn’t work or it doesn’t save that setting permanently and there’s another trick you can do to solve that problem.

Go back to the same location. File, Options, Add-ins. Go to the Skype meeting add-in for Microsoft Office 2016. Click remove and then hit OK.

At this point make sure you close Outlook and reopen it again as administrator.

Go back to the same add-ins location one more time. Click on Go. Click Add. Browse to the C:, Program Files (x86 ), Microsoft Office, Root, and then either office 15 or 16.

Just pick the newest one and locate the UCAddin.DLL file. Select it and hit OK.

Close Outlook and then reopen it as a normal user and you’ll see that your New Skype Meeting button has returned.

Hey, if you want to read more like this one please bookmark and if you’ve enjoyed this post be sure to click the thumbs up and leave a comment.

If you need more support, send me a Hotmail email. I really do appreciate your support!

 

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#3 Preview docs and reply in-line

The next step is a new feature that was in Outlook 2013. If I want to respond to this Hotmail email to Zrinka, instead of popping up a new box, it just replies right here inline. It doesn’t pop out a new box for me. And I can respond here. I can respond inline.

Now, the ribbon is gone, but most of the time with Office, if you right click on your mouse, you get a menu that pops up for that particular area. So if I wanted to turn this red, I just double-click it, and I have that part of the menu here. That right-click menu is terrific because it’s more specifically the area you’re in.

So if I right click on the message where I’m writing, I get these commands, “Font,” “Paragraph,” all my formatting features. If I click over here in the Inbox, I get a different set of commands when I right click that is for the Inbox. “Categorizing,” “Following-Up,” “Quick Steps,” things like that. So if you have the ribbon temporarily disappear, you don’t have to bring it back, you can just simply right click and get many of those commands at your fingertips.

Now I can always pop this out if I want to. There’s a command here at the top if I want the full ribbon, I can click on that. And now I have a full page. I have the ribbon at the top. I have the full thing here in front of me.

So here’s Zrinka’s message again. Now she also has a couple documents she’s inserted. If I single click these, they actually open up in Outlook. So I’m going to look at this Excel spreadsheet, and there’s also a nice chart here. And I can see it in Outlook. I don’t have to open up Excel.

Now it’s just a few seconds to open up Excel, but a lot of these shortcuts you save a few moments an hour. That adds up to many seconds, or even a few minutes every day. And that’s one of those productivity things that you can help work faster without really thinking that you’re working that much faster. So that’s a really nice thing. It doesn’t have to open up Excel.

The same thing, I’m going to open up this Word document, and I can read the Word document in the preview here, in Outlook. I don’t have to open up Word. If I double-click, it will open up Word automatically. This also works for PDFs. So if people send a lot of PDFs around, you can view them right in Outlook.

In fact, this copy of this Word document is actually in Review mode, so I can actually go over here and click on it, and read the comments of this Word document, while I’m in Outlook. So that’s another way of kind of simplifying is inline documents and inline response.

Doug Thomas: I’m going to bring back the full ribbon here, just to keep on showing things around here. As we go into the next one. So that’s basically the layout of Outlook, of how to clean that all up and get– if you just want a big reading and writing pane, you can use that.

#4 Conversation View

The next thing we’re going to talk about, let’s concentrate on the Inbox a little bit and look at a few features. One of them is Conversation View. That came around, I want to say with Outlook 2013. And if you go up to View, you can find it. Now, let’s look at some of the emails here. Some of these emails from Sara here, she just mailed a whole bunch about the same thing, maybe had some new information each time.

There’s this big email chain, an important one, with Tailspin Toys. And there are several emails. Here’s one. Here’s one. I have to go down a little farther, find another one down here. I mean, you’ve seen this happen when you are dealing with an important email chain, and you come back from a break of a couple hours, and they’re sprinkled throughout and you’re trying to read the conversation.

What Conversation View does, instead of making your Inbox linear, your newest message on top, your oldest message on the bottom, it groups them in particular conversations. So I’m going to check that here.

And I’ll just do it for this folder. Any of these experiments, you usually can do a little or a lot. And if anything sounds interesting, I would turn it on. It’s Tuesday now, maybe for the rest of the week, try it for a couple days, and then when you come back in the office on Monday, see if you want to keep that up or go back to the old ways. But give it a few days.

So for this folder, I’m going to turn on Conversation View. And now this entire conversation about Tailspin Toys is wrapped up into this one message. I can expand it by the triangle. And I can see all the messages if I want to. And again, there’s quite a lot. There’s, oh, good messages or so. Many of them are repeats. But again, I can close all that, so I can get to my Inbox. My Inbox has currently Items– I can scroll down this much faster because it’s grouped several of those messages. Same thing here with the quarterly results. All of them are grouped here in one message.

So Conversation View is a great way to streamline your Inbox. And yeah, there are a couple little tricks to it. Like if you want to respond to, not the most current message, but the second current one, but again, it takes a little– you might want to, again, try it out for a couple days and see if you like it.

#5 Clean Up Tool

Our last step is taking this one step farther, and it’s one of my favorite things, and it’s the Clean Up Tool. The Clean Up Tool, basically, and I’m just going to mouse over it to tell you what it does. It removes redundant messages.

Let’s look at this Tailspin Toy message. There’s a lot of things that are just + , right? People are just agreeing to the last thing that was said. And everything is repeated from that message. So all the information is there except that top line. What Clean Up does is remove all the redundant messages. Okay?

So we’re going to experiment here. Again, we’re going to take baby steps. I’m going to go up to Clean Up, and I can just clean up this conversation. I don’t have to do the whole mailbox, or even the whole Inbox folder, I’m just going to hit, “For this conversation.” It’s going to give me a warning. And there, I’ve cleaned it up.

So I had messages, I now have one, two, three, four, five. Four. I have four messages. I can count. Four messages. I have the most current, and I have the first message, and I have two others ones. Because what Clean Up does is any information that is not repeated in those other messages, it keeps. So if someone goes off on a side track, and starts another conversation just with you, you don’t lose that message. It just clears up the messages that were redundant.

So, if I clear up that conversation, in fact, I’ve gone down to messages, so I went from to. If I clear up the whole folder, let’s see what I get down to. I get down to . Now, you can do this for folders. If you have that old project folder that you had at one point, that you’ve kept around. but you don’t really do anything with it, run the Clean Up tool, and you’ll be surprised how much mail that’s redundant.

Again, you can find all this stuff. It’s there, it’s searchable, but you just clear up those redundant messages. There’s someone in this room, and I’m not going to say who, who did this for her folders when they learned about it, and literally cleaned up thousands of messages. When I was at another company, I had thousands of messages in my Inbox. I now have changed my habits. But it’s a way to– if you’re hitting a limit from time to time, every couple of weeks, you get that limit about you need more room for Outlook, you can clean up your messages quickly this way with the Clean Up tool. Try it out on a conversation, try a folder. I use it for my entire email in Outlook.

So those are our five quick tips to cleaner up and simplify Outlook. Just review. Remove and change panes; Collapse the ribbon; Preview docs and reply inline– that’s only for Outlook you can do that; four is: Use Conversation View; and five is: Use the Clean Up tool.

We have those and a whole bunch of information training about Outlook. Our link to our previous webinar we did a couple weeks ago about “Eight Time-Saving Tips in Outlook”– none of which I just did, there are eight other tips– you can find that information at aka.ms/out . More information about the Office Webinar series in general, go to aka.ms/offweb. You can also leave us comments there.

Doug Thomas: Next week I will be talking about other timesaver tips for Office in general. We’ll give you “9 Tips to Save You Time.” It almost rhymes. Maybe it does. But for today’s webinar crew, thank you for joining today’s Office -Minute Webinar.

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You can do so many things with Outlook, and we’re not going to talk about those today. We’re going to show you how to simplify Outlook. Sometimes I just want to read my email, respond to it, glance at my calendar and get going. You can do so much with Outlook, but we’re just going to simplify it today, and we’re going to show you some ways to simplify the kind of layout of Outlook, and also your Inbox, to thin things out, to get to the important things without looking at all the gunk.

#1 Move + Change panes

Doug Thomas: So what you’re looking at here is going to be a typical Outlook. This is Outlook 2013. Now Outlook’s going to look different, depending upon how your admin sets it up, if you’re in business, or buttons you’ve pressed. We’re going to show some of that ways to do it, but I just want to kind of go over this look that we have here.

I see six kinds of areas I want to talk about.

  1. The top is the ribbon.
  2. And then I have four panels, or panes, in the middle here.
  3. I have a folder pane; then I have my current Inbox, which is usually your Inbox.
  4. I have my reading pane here, and this is a long message from Zrinka. Let’s just kind of see how long it is. She talks about several things.
  5.  Also, to the right now, I have the To-Do Bar, which is the Calendar.

At the bottom, there’s a small strip. This is called the Navigation Pane. And it’s kind of a key for some of the things we’re going to do to clean up.

Navigation Pane

Navigation Pane

  1. If you mouse over one of those words, You get a peek of the Calendar.
  2. Or a peek of People. You can put your put your favorite people here.
  3. And then you can instantly, you know, use Link, if you’re on Link, or you can message them, video chat with them.
  4. The people you do popular, and you can always search for folks here. And all your tasks are here also.

So that’s the peek system. And it’s fully functional. I mean, I can go on the Calendar here and open up a meeting if I wanted to. I can click on another day, and see what that calendar is like, if I want to see if I’m busy that day or not. You can do that with peeks in Outlook 2013.

Because of that, it really just- this Calendar just kind of really replicates what’s on the right-hand side. This To-Do Bar.

So I’m going to go over here to the far right-hand side, and I’m going to collapse that. I’m going to remove it. There’s a little X here in the upper right-hand corner that I can use that. And now I have a little more Reading Pane. In fact, I get down to that second subhead now.

You can do a lot of this stuff also in the View tab, depending upon what version of Outlook you have. Most of these commands will be on the View tab.

Let’s see what else I can clean up? This Navigation Pane, it can actually be smaller, too. I click on the “…”; “…” is kind of a shortcut for menus.

So I can get more options, and I can actually compact that navigation. So instead of words now, that’s gonna turn into little icons. And you know, everything is still right there. All my peeks still work and everything like that.

Now, for this email, I’m a fictitious person named KatieJ. Katie does not have a lot of folders. Some people, they have a ton of folders here. But if you don’t you can actually remove the Folder Pane here.

So I’m going to click on this arrow, and that kind of removes that whole left-hand side. And now I have a really big Reading Pane, which is nice.

In fact, but if I want to get back to those folders, I just click those words, “All Folders,” and they all appear right there. And I can go on and do other things, and that little pop-out will stay there until I go back over and click “All Folders” again.

Also, if you notice, the Navigation Pane is gone vertical instead of horizontal to save you even more room. On Zrinka’s message, I can read all the way through the second paragraph area.

But I can do even more. So that’s the first one. Collapsing panes and changing the panes that you can.

You can also do that with a manual drag. I’m just going to put my cursor here in between those two panels, and I can move it left or right, so I get even more room, if I want to, for the Reading Pane. So that’s one thing you can do is to work with your panes to get it set up the way you want to. Again I want to concentrate on reading and responding to email.

#2 Collapse the ribbon

Let’s look up at the ribbon. The ribbon’s been around since Office 2007. I’m a big ribbon fan. Dave, who works here, is a Shortcut fan. He uses Shortcuts more than the ribbon. But you can change and compact the ribbon if you want to. And this works for different versions of Office, but all programs. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you can do the same thing.

You can go to this little triangle here on the right-hand side. And that just takes the ribbon now, and I just have tabs.

So look at all the reading space now. I’m now down the third bold subhead here in that email from Zrinka. She sends me a Hotmail email login. And if I need to ribbon, I can just simply click “View” and there it is! And then when I click back, it disappears.

There are other options you can do with the ribbon. In the very upper right- hand corner, you see this little box called “Ribbon Display Options.”

There’s three of them. There’s “Show Tabs and Commands.” That’s the full ribbon, we saw that. Now I’m on “Show Tabs.” But I can also “Auto-hide the Ribbon.” So I’ll click that, and now even the Tabs go away. So now I can read almost this entire message from Zrinka, cause I really simplified that Outlook screen.

If I need the ribbon, I can just go back to the top here. It turns blue on my machine. I can click that, and the ribbon then appears. And I click away, and it disappears. So that’s hiding the ribbon.

 

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Today, we’re going to be adding buttons to our quick action ribbon in Outlook 2016. Maybe you have certain features in Outlook 2016 that you use all the time, but they’re buried in menus, mouse clicks, and buttons. Now, I’m going to show you how to enable your favorite features with the click of a button.

In our example, I will be adding a Choose Form button to our Home tab, enabling quick set-up of a form email. Let’s remedy that.

Open Outlook 2016, and this may work for Outlook 2016 as well.

Click on the file tab. On the blue sidebar, click Options.

Under the Outlook 2016 Options windows, click Customize Ribbon.

We want to put our new button right next to the New Email button. Under the customize ribbon Main Tabs window, highlight the Home (Mail) tab.

Click the New Group button beneath the window, and you’ll see the New Group (Custom) option appear.

To re-order where this option appears, left-click your mouse on the option, and drag it into position. I’ll put it right under the New options.

Let’s rename our option to something more descriptive. With the option highlighted, and remember to left-click your mouse on it to highlight, click the Rename button. Or You right click on New Group (custom), then click Rename.

Up comes a window of icons and a Display Name field to enter your new name. The icon won’t have room to show in this instance so, leave it at the default.

I’ll rename the option Form Emails. Click OK and you’ll see your option has been renamed. Now we need to add a command to our new button.

Under the Choose Commands from the drop-down menu, select All Commands from the drop-down menu.

We will be looking for the Choose Form command today. Scroll down until you find the Choose Form command. They are listed in alphabetical order for easy reference. Highlight the Choose Form command.

Ensure the custom button we created is highlighted. Now, click the Add button in the middle of the window. The Choose Form command appears under our New button.

Now, if you want to have a custom icon for your new command, open the Form Email item, click on the Choose Form option, and then click Rename. Highlight the icon you like, and click OK to close the window.

I chose the one that looks like a martini glass. Two olives, shaken, not stirred. Click OK again to close the Customize the Ribbon window and you’re back at your Outlook 2016 main window.

To see our customized button in action, click on it. Our Choose Form window opens We can select User Templates in File System highlight the form email we want to send, it can be Hotmail, Outlook, Gmail or Yahoo!mail, and select OK.

Up pops our template faster than an internet troll on a Yahoo news article, and that is it. You’ll save a couple seconds each time you use the button, which can add up over time. And with all of that extra time, you can spend it with your family or enjoy a delicious martini, as my custom button suggests.

Remember, always drink responsibly and only if you are of age.

If you are wondering why I didn’t make a button to go directly to User Templates in File System, it is not a listed command in our Customized Ribbon settings.

I encourage you to explore the Customize Ribbon settings to get Outlook 2016 set up exactly the way you like it.

Keep in mind that you can also customize the ribbon for other Microsoft Office products, such as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. There is also the Quick Access toolbar which you can customize with the same commands. As always, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time.