We’ve looked at keyboard shortcuts before on IT Counts –notably an article on Excel shortcuts which attracted 25 comments and has so far been viewed over 11,000 times. Of course keyboard shortcuts can be equally useful in the other Office applications. I don’t know whether it’s just me, but where I use keyboards shortcuts all the time in Word and Excel, I’m much less likely to use them in Outlook which is a shame because there are some very useful ones available. Here's a short selection:
Navigation without the pane
CTRL + numbers 1 to 8 take you to the following navigation pane options:
- Mail
- Calendar
- Contacts
- Tasks
- Notes
- Folder List
- Shortcuts
- Journal
Thank you for the days…
If you are looking at any of day, week or month calendar views, then ALT+ numbers 1 to 0 will change the view to show that number of days. ALT+1 for a single day, ALT+2 for two days through to ALT+0 for 10 days.
New items
To create a new item you can use CTRL+SHIFT+ the following:
M - Message (for Office 2007, CTRL+N)
A - Appointment
C - Contact
N - Note
For a fuller list, just select File, New from the menu in Outlook 2007 and before and note the shortcut designations shown to the right of each item. Outlook 2010 is blessed with the new ribbon interface so you will need to click on the New Items button of the Home ribbon and hover over each item.
Reading emails
To scroll through your inbox when a message is open:
CTRL+. (full stop) to go back
CTRL+, (comma) to go forward
To see a list of the hundreds of shortcuts available, search Outlook help for Keyboard shortcut. As always, we'd be very grateful to hear which Outlook shortcuts you find most useful.