Creating your own keyboard shortcuts in Outlook
Or, remapping keys for fun and profit.
I subscribe to a fair number of email lists, and use Exchange rules to filter them to individual folders. Since I read just a fraction of the new emails that arrive each day, I find myself doing “Mark All as Read” in Outlook 2003 a lot.
Enough to get aggravating, in fact. “Mouse over folder name, right click, mouse to Mark All as Read, left click” gets boring after a while. A little keyboard experimentation showed that a two-key combination is Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-Q (mark as read). But that's still one key too many. Now, here's a quiz - what search terms should you use in Outlook help or Google to find out how to do this? “Outlook keyboard remapping”? “Outlook keyboard shortcuts”? “Outlook mark all as read key”? Fail, fail, fail.
Thankfully, KC Lemson's blog came through - the other one to try for any Outlook question is Marc's Outlook on Productivity. In her post “Outlook 2003 tip o' the day”, KC explains in painful detail how to customize your toolbars to add a new clickable action. The trick here is that you can assign the action an Alt-shortcut key by putting an & at the appropriate place in its name. And the painful detail is because the customization of Office toolbars involves a big cognitive break from the usual modal interface - even though you have a “Customize” window in the foreground, the Office toolbars in the background are still active in a special “drag text or buttons onto me” mode!
So, following KC's instructions, I dragged the “Mark All as Read” action onto my standard toolbar and renamed it as “&Quickmark”. Now Alt-Q will mark all items in a folder as read. Why Q? Two reasons: I want to do all keyboard work with my left hand so that I can keep my right hand on the mouse, and Alt-Q was the first key I tried that didn't make Outlook do something else entirely.
Now, the next question is how to get this into office.microsoft.com…
Comments
Anonymous
May 01, 2004
I just always hold down Alt and hit E twice, which marks all as read in current folder. I do this a lot, for email-lists and news postings from newsgator.Anonymous
May 01, 2004
Which version of Outlook does that work for? In Outlook 2003, the first Alt-E takes me into the Edit menu, but then the second Alt-E beeps forlornly, since there's no command in that menu with an underlined "e".Anonymous
May 02, 2004
It's there in Outlook 2003 11.5608.5606 at least. Alt+EE is what I use too.Anonymous
May 02, 2004
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May 02, 2004
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May 02, 2004
I'm going to be interning this summer in the Outlook group so I will see if I can't find an answer. Its funny everyone I tell that I'm going to be interning in the Outlook group gives me a list of things that they don't like about Outlook. As if I'm going to be able to do much, but anyways I will see what I can do.Anonymous
May 20, 2004
Jonathan - &E on the edit menu is "Mark all as read". Is the option not there, or is the option there but _E is not the accelerator? You should be able to modify either with customizable toolbars.
I don't know how to do this just using customizable toolbars, but I blogged a macro option today: http://blogs.msdn.com/kclemson/archive/2004/05/20/136101.aspxAnonymous
May 20, 2004
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July 19, 2004
For me the long sought for combo trick has been figuring out how to add MULTIPLE senders to the JunkMail Senders Blocked list. For inevitably by the time I finally find the time to takle the overflowing contents of my various 'Certainly Spam, "Probably SPAM", and very possibly SPAM' folders, seeking out those at last rare instances of a new White Listable sender, or the even rarer eMail suggesting some new 'Light-Grey-List' rule for aiming the likely spam into a more frequently audited folder, when but the time I've handled that mind numbingly dull task, which nevertheless can ONLY be done effectively if one's careful NOT to become mind-numbed by same, the last thing I then want to be doing is sitting there holding down that Block'em key and listening to that noxious near rythym of bleeps and blorts as the system folds some hundreds or thousands of new SPAMs into the far smaller list of newly found Spammers to be added into the lists...
Yet I'm reluctant to automate the process lest it be too easily accidentally triggerable, for the list seems to be stored for efficiency in a purely alphabetical list, without any means for being regarded from the perspective of who was just now added, thereby preventing any hope of having a fall-back 'safety net' approach of being able to 'merely' have to skim through the most recently added few hundred addresses.
Thus if the task is left ignored for too long it becomes ever more tempting to then let it wait yet a bit longer still, and making the desire for such a block mode blocking mode function ever more desirable as the Hundreds of unprocessed SPAMs become THOUSANDS of unprocessed SPAMs...
My appolgies Wes for being like the oh so many others you'd spoken of, but I'm hoping it might be possible to hope that the notion of your passing along this thought might not be too unreasonable.
The only thing that's made this a less even a slightly objectionable process than in the past, if one can stretch to thinging of it as a 'saving grace', is that with the escallations in Mal-Ware propagation methodologies available having finally forced a begrudging acceptance of once and for all turning off the auto downloading of eMail graphics, at least I'm no longer also as likely as not to be accidentally also doing a this-address-is-live signalling to each and every SPAMMER whose message is so touch individually, due to that one at a time blocking rule, merely for forgetting to turn off the pictures downloader each time before undertaking that hated task.Anonymous
April 11, 2005
Cameron Reilly found my post on keyboard shortcuts in Outlook while trying to figure out a better way...Anonymous
May 18, 2005
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August 17, 2005
I have Outlook 2003 installed and I would like to know to turn off all keyboard shortcuts.
allen.oliver@cit.comAnonymous
March 23, 2006
Awesome macro - thanks!Anonymous
May 05, 2006
Would anyone know how to make outlook 2003 auto complete entries by hitting the enter key instead of using Ctil + K?
Or how to assign a function key to do the same thingAnonymous
June 26, 2006
Hey, thanks Jonathan! I didn't think to do it that way. I was trying to find the shortcut key for that command when I saw your site. Works elegantly.
Thanks again!Anonymous
September 05, 2006
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December 12, 2006
What I've been looking for all night is a way to define a keystroke that moves an item from my inbox to another predefined folder. For example, I move everything out of my inbox into an "archive" when I've processed it, and having to drag the emails from one to the other is tedious. I'd love a single button like "a" that moves an email to a new folder. Any ideas?Anonymous
June 28, 2007
The macro is a cool idea. But when I run the macro, it never stops and it seems to lock up the program. I'm using Outlook 2003. Has anybody else seen the problem?