Outlook for Microsoft 365 cheat sheet

There are countless ways to communicate electronically, including texting, social media, chat apps, team task managers, and videoconferencing software. Given the myriad ways you can get in touch with others, you may well think email is dead.

Think again.

Email, the mainstay of workplace communications, is stronger than ever. An estimated  347.3 billion emails were sent every day in 2023, according to Statista — a figure that the market research firm expects to grow to 408.2 billion daily emails by 2027.

If you’re using an email client rather than a cloud-based email service, there’s a very good chance that it’s Microsoft Outlook, the most popular Windows-based email software. Although you may have been using Outlook for some time, you might be missing out on some of its worthwhile features.

Microsoft sells its Office productivity suite under two models: Individuals and businesses can pay for the software license up front and own it forever (what the company calls the “perpetual” version of the suite), or they can purchase a Microsoft 365 subscription, which means they have access to the software for only as long as they keep paying the subscription fee.

When you purchase a perpetual version of the suite — say, Office 2021 or Office 2024 — its applications will never get new features, whereas Office 365 apps are continually updated with new features. (For more details, see “How to choose between Microsoft 365 and Office 2024.”) Confusing matters even more, Microsoft has renamed almost all of its Office 365 subscriptions as Microsoft 365, which generally means the plan includes everything from the old Office 365 plans plus some additional features and apps.

This cheat sheet gets you up to speed on the major features that have been introduced in the Windows desktop client for Outlook in Microsoft 365 over the past few years. We’ll periodically update this story as new features roll out.

Classic Outlook, new Outlook

Note that Microsoft has two different Windows client versions of Outlook, as well as an online version. One Windows client version, which Microsoft calls “classic Outlook,” is the one that currently ships with Microsoft 365. The other, which Microsoft calls “new Outlook,” is a replacement for the Mail and Calendar apps that are built into Windows. Microsoft also plans to have new Outlook replace classic Outlook as part of the Microsoft 365 suite in the future, and new Outlook is available to M365 subscribers for testing now.

At the moment, though, new Outlook is missing a number of key business features, so most businesses will want to stick with classic Outlook for the time being. (Microsoft says it will support classic Outlook at least until 2029.) For that reason, we’ll cover classic Outlook in this story.

In the classic Outlook client, you may see a toggle that says “Try the new Outlook” at the top right. In my tests, though, the new Outlook wouldn’t work with Microsoft 365, with Outlook .pst files, or with POP servers, making it rather useless. To return to classic Outlook, turn the toggle back to Off. Be careful when doing that, though. On multiple occasions when I’ve moved the toggle to On and then tried return to classic Outlook, Outlook refused to work, and I had to close it and restart it.

Use the simplified (or classic) Ribbon

The Ribbon toolbar interface that you came to know and love (or perhaps hate) in earlier versions of Outlook has been replaced by a simplified Ribbon that only shows the most frequently used features. It’s for those who prefer simplicity to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink look of the old Ribbon, which offers the full panoply of what’s available to you in Outlook.

If a button on the Ribbon has small down arrow (also called a caret) on it, you can click it to see a drop-down menu with related tasks. There’s also a three-dot icon at the right end of the Ribbon; click it and a drop-down menu appears with several tasks you might want to do related to the Ribbon tab you’re currently on — for example, managing junk mail if you’re on the Home tab. Select the task you want to do, and you’re set.

If you prefer the old Ribbon (or “classic Ribbon,” as Microsoft calls it), you can easily switch to it. Click the caret in the lower right-hand corner of the Ribbon. From the screen that appears, select Classic Ribbon. To switch back to the simplified Ribbon, click the caret again and select Simplified Ribbon.

As in previous versions of Outlook, if you want the Ribbon commands to go away completely, press Ctrl-F1. (The tabs above the Ribbon stay visible.) To make them reappear, press Ctrl-F1 again. That works for both the simplified Ribbon and the classic one.

You’ve got other options for displaying the Ribbon as well, and these options also work with both the simplified and classic Ribbons. To get to them, click the caret at the far right of the Ribbon. When you do that, you can customize the Ribbon even more, in the Show Ribbon section. Select Show tabs only if you want to see the tabs on top of the Ribbon, but not the commands underneath them. (In this mode, you click a tab to see its commands.) Click Always show Ribbon to have the Ribbon always appear. And click Full-screen mode to hide both the Ribbon and the tabs.

If you select File > Options > Customize Ribbon, you can change the content of the Ribbon to suit your needs. You can add and remove tabs, and change the commands on tabs as well.

Use the Search bar for more than searching emails

The search bar at the top of Outlook is deceptively simple-looking. You likely assume you can use it for searching through your emails and that’s it.

But the search bar does double duty: in addition to searching through emails, it can also help you find any Outlook capability, no matter how hidden, even if you’ve never used it. (This hands-on help capability replaces the Tell Me feature found in Outlook 2016 and 2019.)

To use it, click in the search box, and then type in what task you’d like to do. (Those who prefer keyboard shortcuts can instead press Alt-Q to get to the search box.)

For example, if you want to filter your mail to see only messages with attachments, type in filter email. In this instance, the top result is a Filter Email listing with an arrow to its right, indicating that it has many options. Hover your mouse over it, and you see multiple options for filtering your mail, including Unread, Has Attachments, Important, and others. Choose the option you want, and the task will be performed instantly.

For the most common basic tasks, you won’t need this capability. But for more complex ones, it’s worth using, because it’s much more efficient than hunting through the Ribbon to find a command. It also remembers the features you’ve previously clicked on in the search results, so when you click in the box, you first see a list of previous tasks you’ve searched for. That makes sure that the tasks you frequently perform are always within easy reach, while at the same time making tasks you rarely do easily accessible.

Do online research from right inside Outlook

Sometimes emails are just quick notes that don’t require much research, and you can toss them off with little or no thought. Other times, though, you’ll want to include relevant information before sending them off. Those are the times you’ll appreciate being able to do online research from right within Outlook. You can do this while you’re writing an email, so you won’t have to fire up your browser, search the web, and then copy the information or pictures to your message.

To do it, highlight a word or group of words in an email — it can be a new draft, a message you’ve received, or one you’ve already sent — and select Search from the menu that appears. Outlook then uses Bing to do a web search on the word or words, displaying definitions, related Wikipedia entries, pictures and other results from the web in the Search pane that appears on the right.

To use online research in Outlook or any other Office app, you might first need to enable Microsoft’s intelligent services feature, which collects your search terms and some content from your documents and other files. (If you’re concerned about privacy, you’ll need decide whether the privacy hit is worth the convenience of doing research from right within the app.) If you haven’t enabled it, you’ll see a screen when you click Search asking you to turn it on. Once you do so, it will be turned on across all your Office applications.

[ See more Microsoft 365 cheat sheets ]

Get a more focused inbox

If you’re like the rest of the world, you suffer from email overload. Your most important messages are mixed in with the dross of everyday email life — retailing come-ons, groups begging for donations, pointless newsletters and more.

Focused Inbox helps solve the problem. Using artificial intelligence, it determines which messages are most important to you and puts them into a Focused tab, while putting everything else into an Other tab. That way you can spend most of your time handling important messages in the Focused tab, only occasionally checking the Other tab.  

To turn on Focused Inbox, select the View tab from the Ribbon, then click the Show Focused Inbox icon. From now on, you’ll have two tabs in your Inbox, Focused and Other. The Focused tab should have the most important messages, and the Other tab should have less important messages. If that’s not the case, you can manually move messages from one folder to the other and tell Focused Inbox to automatically filter them in that way in the future.

To move a message from one tab to another, right-click the message you want to move, then select Move to Other or Move to Focused, depending on where you want the message moved. That will move the message just this once. If you want to permanently route all messages from that sender to the other tab, choose either Always Move to Other or Always Move to Focused.

Focused Inbox isn’t for everybody. If you find that Focused Inbox hinders more than it helps, you can toggle it back off by selecting View > Show Focused Inbox.

Keep email messages out of the way but handy with the Archive folder

Outlook has long offered email message archiving — that is, the option to move messages out of your Outlook mailbox and into a separate PST file as a space-saving measure. Corporate versions of Office, such as Microsoft 365 Enterprise, offer their own archiving features that automatically archive users’ older messages, again to save space. These methods remove the messages from the user’s Outlook mailbox. You can still get them back, but it takes some doing.

There’s another option in Outlook for Microsoft 365: You can move specific pieces of mail out of your inbox or other folders and into the Archive folder. That way, when looking for a message, you can browse or search the Archive folder and find the message more quickly.

Using the Archive folder doesn’t reduce the size of your mailbox; it simply helps tidy up your inbox while keeping older messages instantly accessible. Microsoft recommends that you use the Archive folder to store messages that you’ve already responded to or acted on.

If you already have a system of folders and subfolders in Outlook, you might not need the Archive folder, but it can be a boon for those of us who tend to leave everything in the inbox. And even if you do have a folder system, you might find that not all of your email fits neatly into your folders and subfolders; you can move these messages to the Archive folder to keep your inbox clean.

To move messages to the Archive folder, first select one or more that you want to archive. (Select multiple messages by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking each one you want to select.) With the message or messages selected, go to the Ribbon’s Home tab and click Archive in the Delete group, right-click the message or group of messages and select Archive, or simply drag the selected message(s) to the Archive folder. You can also move an individual email to the Archive folder by pressing the Backspace key when the message is highlighted or when you’re reading it.

Now when you need to find a message, you can browse the Archive folder or else go to the Archive folder and launch a search.

To move a message out of the Archive folder to a different folder, simply drag it to its destination.

Find attachments more easily — and share ‘cloud attachments’

We’ve all been there: We want to attach a file we were recently working on, but don’t remember its precise location — or sometimes even its name — and spend far too much time navigating and searching for it.

Outlook solves the problem neatly. When you attach a file by clicking the Include icon, a list of the 12 most recent files you’ve been using pops up. The list includes all the files you’ve been using on any device, as long as you’re signed in to your Microsoft account. So if you were working on a file on your desktop, then later in the day took your laptop to work outside your office, Outlook would show you the files you had opened on both devices.

When you click Include, you have the choice of sending the file itself or a link to it. Whichever you choose, the list of the most recent files appears. If the file you want isn’t in the list, click Browse this PC to browse your local hard disk, or Browse Web Locations to browse OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint. When you attach a file from OneDrive or SharePoint, you’ll have the option of sending them as links or attaching the files themselves. Click the file you want to attach.

Use Microsoft 365 Copilot with Outlook

For an additional subscription fee, business users of Outlook can use Microsoft’s genAI add-in, Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can have Copilot draft new emails, draft replies, summarize email threads, offer recommendations on writing emails, and more. If you have a Microsoft 365 Personal or Family subscription, many of those features are now bundled with your core subscription.

For details about how to use Copilot in Outlook, see our guide to using Copilot for writing tasks in Word, Outlook, and OneNote.  

Work in Microsoft 365 Groups

If you work in an office that uses Microsoft 365 Groups, you can now join groups, create new groups, schedule meetings on a group calendar and more, all from within Outlook.

Microsoft 365 Groups, available for most Microsoft 365 business and enterprise plans, make it easy to collaborate with others by designating a set of people with whom to share resources, such as a document library, shared calendar, and/or shared email account. Groups can be for departments, project teams, and so on, and when a group is created, all the appropriate permissions are automatically granted for everybody in the group.

Creating a new group from inside Outlook is simple. Select the Home tab in the Ribbon, and in the New section, select New Items > Group. Then fill in information for the group, including its name, description, whether it’s private or public within your organization, and so on.

Note that your IT department needs to set up provisioning for Microsoft 365 Groups, so check with IT for more details about creating and using groups. Also, in order to use Microsoft 365 Groups in Outlook, you need to use Outlook in Cached Exchange Mode. See this Microsoft support page for details.

Other features to check out

Outlook for Microsoft 365 has several more useful features. Although they’re not as significant as the other features we’ve covered here, they’re worth knowing about.

Message encryption: In older versions of Outlook, there’s a Permissions button that lets you set permission levels for an email — for example, “Confidential,” “Internal,” and “Do Not Forward.” In Outlook for Microsoft 365, that button has been replaced with an Encrypt button that lets you encrypt the message with S/MIME or Microsoft 365 Message Encryption.

For details, see Microsoft’s “Encrypt email messages” help page.

Quick Actions: If you hover your cursor over any email in your message list, tiny Quick Action icons appear. These let you perform tasks such as deleting, flagging, or archiving the message with a single click. By default, the two icons that appear are Flag/Clear Flag and Delete, but you can customize that by right-clicking on any message in the list and selecting Set Quick Actions from the pop-up menu. You can designate only two Quick Action icons — your options are Archive, Delete, Move, Flag/Clear Flag, and Mark as Read/Unread — but Delete appears even if you don’t select it.

Note that Quick Actions does not replace Outlook’s more complex Quick Steps feature, which lets you apply multiple actions to a message at the same time. Quick Actions simply provides a quick way to do a few frequently performed actions.

Built-in translation: You no longer have to use a translation add-in for other languages — it’s now built directly into Outlook for Microsoft 365/Office 365. Right-click words, phrases, or the entire message and select Translate from the menu that pops up.

Turn grammar suggestions on and off: Outlook offers grammar suggestions — you’ll know they’re there when you see underlined text, which marks the text as having an error. If you’d prefer not to see them, you can turn them off. To do it, create a new email, and with it open, go to File > Options > Mail, and in the “Compose messages” section, click Editor Options. On the screen that appears, select Proofing, and under “When correcting spelling in Outlook,” uncheck the Mark grammar errors as you type box. You can still check grammar at any time by pressing F7.

Dictate messages: Look, ma, no hands! With Microsoft 365, you can dictate messages. Once you’ve created an email, select Message > Dictate from the Ribbon and start talking.

Use the same Outlook settings on all your devices: If you use Outlook on more than one machine, you can store your settings for features such as Automatic Replies, Focused Inbox, and Privacy in the cloud, and they’ll automatically be applied to all your Windows PCs. To turn it on, go to File > Options > General. Under “Cloud storage options,” check the box next to Store my Outlook settings in the cloud.

Regardless of whether you do that, any signatures you create in Outlook will be automatically stored in the cloud so that they’ll be available on all your devices.

Use keyboard shortcuts

If you’re a fan of keyboard shortcuts, you’ll be pleased to know that Outlook has them. They provide a great way to get tasks accomplished quickly. See our story “Handy Outlook keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac” for the most useful ones.

[ See more Microsoft 365 cheat sheets ]

This article was originally published in August 2021 and most recently updated in January 2025.