Outlook Low Vision: Email Organize

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll learn to create and access folders in Microsoft Outlook. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop. If there's on thing we discover quickly when using email, it's that they pile up in a hurry just like with regular mail. If we don't have a system for organizing our emails, they start to accumulate and can quickly get out of control. This makes it frustrating when we're searching for that one email we need today.

Thankfully Outlook provides us with a simple way to organize our emails. With folders we can save emails into neat categories and later when we're looking for that special email with the recipe for French silk pie, there it is right in the recipe folder where we placed it last month.

Let's dive right in to our inbox to explore our folders. On the left side of our screen we find a pane called the navigation pane. At the bottom of the pane we see icons for the various functions in Outlook such as mail, calendar and others. Above these icons we find our folders list. It's set up in an easy to scroll window which allows us to quickly review the names of our folders. Now your list will look different from mine because I've already added lots of folders, but we all have some basic features that we'll examine. At the top of our folder list we see the name of our Outlook account and directly below it we find our inbox. The focus is currently on our inbox and all of the items in our item list and reading pane show emails that are currently in our inbox.

Below the we see drafts. This folder contains emails that we've started writing, but have not yet completed or sent. Outlook automatically saves these emails until we're ready to send them. We can simply select an email in the draft folder to complete it and send it on its way. Next in our list is the sent folder. This folder holds a copy of all the emails we've sent just in case we need to review a previously sent message. Outlook automatically places them in the sent folder for us. This can be really handy when we need to review an email we've sent in the past.

Our next folder is the deleted folder. If you've ever tossed something in the trash only to have second thoughts about whether you might need it again, then you know that sometimes we need to retrieve things we've discarded. That's the idea behind Outlook's deleted folder. It allows us to retrieve any email that we've deleted in the past. Okay, we've gone through the folders that we all find in Outlook.

I created the rest of the folders in my list. Now it's your chance to create a folder. We have a couple of ways to accomplish our task. The first uses the right mouse button which can bring up a popup menu, also called a context menu. To create a new folder in our inbox we right click on the inbox in our folders list. We navigate to new folder in our dropdown menu and left click with our mouse pointer. Now we see a new edit field directly below the inbox. We're ready to name our new folder. Let's name it recipes and press the enter key. Our new recipe folder is now a subfolder in the inbox and it's ready to store emails. Now let's go through the other method for creating a new folder. This method uses a tool in our ribbon at the top of our window.

The first thing we'll do is navigate to the folder tab. We can select the folder tab with our mouse pointer or use the keyboard command of alt and the letter O to focus on the tab. I'll use my mouse pointer to open the folder tab. Our next step is to select the new folder icon in our ribbon. When we hover over the icon, we see the keyboard shortcut of control plus shift plus E to create a new folder. Let's try the keyboard shortcut. I'll hold down the right control and shift keys with my right hand and tap and release the E key with my left hand. We see a dialog box called create new folder. Our focus is in the name edit field. Let's say we wish to create a folder for book recommendations. Let's type in books in the name edit field. We also want to be aware of where we're placing our new folder. We see in our list that inbox is highlighted. This tells us that our new book folder will be placed within our inbox folder. It will be close to the top of our list for easy access.

This is a great place for frequently used folders. Our last step in creating a new folder is to select the okay button with our mouse pointer. We now see our new books folder in our navigation pane on the left side. If you're interested in learning how to move emails to folders, be sure to check out the workshop in this series that covers moving and copying folders.

There is one more important task that we'll cover today. When we find we no longer need a folder, there's a simple technique for deleting them. Let's use our recipe folder as an example. While we're still on our folder tab, I will select the recipe folder in our navigation pane. Then we use our mouse pointer to select the delete folder icon in the ribbon. Just to be sure, Outlook ask us if we want to move our recipe folder to our deleted folders. Let's use our mouse pointer to select yes.

Today we explored working with folders in Microsoft Outlook. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series called Microsoft Outlook.