NEIL MALEK: Hey, everybody. Neil Malek with Knack Training here, bringing you another everyday office video. And in today's video, I'd like to show you three different ways that Outlook gives us to manage our folders a little bit better. So let me just expand out this inbox here, look at the different subfolders that are underneath the inbox and the subfolders that are inside those, and the subfolders that are inside those, et cetera. 

Now, the problem is that many of us have a folder system that looks like this for clients, and then subordinate projects for each of the clients or projects, and then the different facets of each project, et cetera. And when we're working with these, from time to time, one of these folders will become the most important folder, and the problem is it's just sort of stuck in a sea of folders here. So I'd like to talk about three different ways that we can use these folders more effectively. 

The first of those is something that not a lot of people know. It was that recently, Outlook gave us the ability to not use alphabetical order for our subfolders. So for example, if Subfolder 1 is a client that's no longer the most relevant client to me, now, Subfolder 2 is the most important client in my world, I can just take the Subfolder 2 here, click and drag it up here on top of Subfolder 1, and now, even though Subfolder 1 comes before Subfolder 2 in alphabetical order, it's now the second item. And here, under Subfolder 2, if Subfolder 2B is the most important subfolder within that, and then, if Subfolder 2b2 is the most important subfolder within that, we can restructure these. We can reorganize these very, very quickly. 

The second way that we have to manage our folders more quickly is to put any folder that's truly relevant to us, really important to us, into our favorites simply by grabbing something like Subfolder 2b2, for example, dragging that up into the Favorites panel up here at the top and letting go. You see here, it doesn't actually remove Subfolder 2b2 from the normal folder system. All it does is it puts it into an easier to reach spot. 

So if you're constantly dragging things into that subfolder, notice how much more quickly you can move here. Let's say this email from Hasan needs to go into Subfolder 2b2 and your inbox was collapsed. You would have to expand the inbox, then expand Subfolder 2, then expand Subfolder 2B to find Subfolder 2b2. 

Or if all of these were expanded simultaneously, you would have a real headache trying to find the relevant folder amongst the sea of items. By putting Subfolder 2b2 up here into the favorites area, you make it quicker to get access to it. You can now drag this email from Haason right in there, and even leave the inbox completely collapsed. 

And lastly, we have Quick Steps. Now Quick Steps up here at the top of the screen, I find very few people are making full use of this area. It can do 1,000 different things. It's really, really valuable to me. 

A Quick Step is a button that we can press-- and we can even assign a keyboard shortcut-- to do any sort of specific process within Outlook we have in mind. So by clicking on the Create New Link right here in the Quick Steps area, you'll see that you can name your Quick Step anything you want. 

So let's say it's Move to Subfolder 1b1. So 1b1 is the most important subfolder right now. I click on the Choose an Action dropdown menu, I choose Move to a Folder, and I specify the folder of 1b1 as the place I want that to move to. On top of having a button for move it to subfolder 1b1, I can actually even give it a keyboard shortcut, like Control Shift 1, for example, and then click Finish. And now, if that subfolder is the most important thing to me, if I click on this email from Eric and I use Control Shift 1, that email from Eric disappears and it's instantly inside of Subfolder 1b1 right there. 

So let's go back again. Click on anything, Control Shift 1, Control Shift 1. And in fact, it doesn't even have to be things that are in this inbox. It can be over here in this Subfolder 2b2. I can click on this entry, Control Shift 1, Control Shift 1, and now, all of these emails are in Subfolder 1b1. So being able to reorganize away from alphabetical order, being able to use favorites to split it out from your folder system, and then being able to create a Quick Step so there's even a keyboard shortcut associated with a specific folder are all very valuable ways of easing this transition from one folder to another. 

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