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.