Fixing Outlook Pet Peeves with Quick Steps

One of the new features in Outlook 2010 is Quick Steps.  Quick Steps let you chain multiple Outlook actions together into an easy-to-access action that shows up in the “Home” tab of the ribbon.  Kinda like macros, I suppose, but friendlier.

Outlook 2010 comes with a few handy Quick Steps by default, including one to forward an email to your manager, send an email to your team, or send an email to a folder.

It’s also super easy to create a new Quick Step.  I used one to solve one of my biggest pet-peeves about Outook: deleted items are not automatically marked as read.  By default, when you delete an email from your inbox without reading it, Outlook moves the message to your “Deleted Items” folder but is still marked as unread. 

This is crazy frustrating, because now I have a blue “1” in parentheses, meaning I have unread email.  Technically, this is true – I didn’t read it – but in practice, this drives me nuts, because the reason I deleted it is that I didn’t want to read it.

Quick Steps to the rescue …

Here I’ve defined a Quick Step that will mark a message and read and then delete it.  Even better, I can add a keyboard shortcut.  Nice!  No more unread email in my trash can.