Microsoft has been busy improving its webmail service. Daniel Booth reveals the five best new tools
If you use Outlook.com, you’ll soon notice some exciting new tools in your inbox. These features have been in the ‘preview’ version of the webmail service since May 2015, which has been available to selected users. Microsoft announced in February that the revamped Outlook.com will soon be available to everyone, starting – predictably – with people based in North America.
You don’t need to do anything to get these new tools – Microsoft will eventually upgrade you (hopefully by the end of March, if not sooner). Your email address will stay the same. If you don’t use Outlook.com and want to try these features, create a new account at www.snipca.com/19713. Below we pick five useful new things you can do in Outlook, but there’s a lot more to discover, as Microsoft explains on its blog: www.snipca.com/19821.
Edit Word docs alongside emails
We’ll start with the most useful new tool – side-by-side editing. Now, when you receive an Office file – such as a Word document, PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet – you can open, view and edit it alongside the email it was attached to. Do this by clicking the file icon in the email, then ‘View online’ and ‘Edit and Reply’ in the blue button at the top. Any changes you make to the file are automatically saved, and attached to your response.
‘Pin’ important emails to the top
Helping you to avoid what it calls “email overload”, Microsoft has added ‘pins’ to Outlook.com. These let you highlight important emails in yellow, and place them at the top of your inbox. To do this, right-click an email, then click Pin in the menu that appears.
Add people to emails quickly
Let’s say you’re organising a party, and you need to send an email to lots of people to remind them what to bring. A new tool in Outlook helps you to direct certain requests to each person, so they don’t have to read the entire email. As you’re writing, type the ‘@’ symbol to launch Outlook’s Mentions option. This shows you a list of people to add to the email. Select one, and their email address will appear in the ‘To’ field, and their name in the body of the email. It’s a simple way for multiple recipients of an email to jump straight to the info relevant to them. Read more on the Outlook blog: www.snipca.com/19831.
Don’t forget to include ‘Bob’
Do you know someone called Bob? Doesn’t matter if you don’t. But we bet you have a group of people you regularly email, and that you sometimes forget to include one person – with potentially disastrous consequences, for example: ‘Meet down the pub at 9pm? But you didn’t email me!’
Microsoft has the solution by suggesting that you include the person you appear to have accidentally omitted. This has the potential to get annoying, so Microsoft assures us that Outlook will only nudge you when it’s “highly confident” you’ve forgotten someone. It’s good to see this feature arrive in Outlook - finally. Gmail introduced it way back in 2011 (www.snipca.com/19834)!
Never misspell your friend’s name
It would be hard to misspell ‘Bob’, but what about Catherine? Perhaps it’s Kathryn? Or maybe Stephen is in fact Steven? Previously, you had to get the recipient’s name spot on for them to appear as an option in the ‘To’ field. Now, Outlook will suggest all the Kathryns you know if it thinks you’ve typed ‘Catherine’ by mistake – and likewise for other names with more than spelling.
GIVE YOUR OUTLOOK FEEDBACK
As part of its slightly cringey mission to “make email awesome”, Microsoft encourages you to give feedback in its Outlook UserVoice forums (https://outlook.uservoice.com). Launched last year, it’s an online ‘suggestion box’ where you can recommend tweaks for every version of Outlook, including the Android and iOS apps. If you like someone else’s idea, click the ‘Vote’ button to make sure Microsoft notices.