Autofill, Importance, and Email Format

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About this lesson

Learn the office protocol for marking emails as important, using Plain vs HTML text, and how Autofill addresses really work.

Lesson versions

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2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

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Autofill, Importance, and Email Format.docx
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Quick reference

AutoFill, Importance, Email format

These three topics are small but important to understand when working in a new email message.

When to use

Autofill appears on the To: line; Importance suggests your message is serious; Email format is sometimes determined by the corporation you work for.

Instructions

AutoFill:

  • When any letter is typed into the To: line, a list of previously typed email addresses will appear.
  • This is not connected in any way to the Contacts or People data. It is simply a list of email addresses.
  • To delete one, click the “X” beside it to keep this list cleaned up.

Importance:

  • Use the “High Importance” button sparingly and only when your message is very important. If it is used on all of your messages, no one will take you seriously when you need their attention on an email.
  • Low importance is the exact opposite. If you don’t think it is important, then nobody else will. Use this sparingly as well.
  • When used and the email arrives in the recipient’s inbox, it will include either of these symbols at the left side.

Message Format:


  • In a new email message, click the “Format Text” ribbon.
  • You are able to change the format of the email to HTML (optimum for font formatting and can be read by most e-readers), Plain Text (no formatting but can be read by all email services), or to Rich Text which can contain formatting, but designed specifically for MS Outlook and MS Exchange.
  • Unless your employer instructs otherwise, typically HTML is the chosen format for emails.
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  • 00:04 Hello, in this lesson, I'd like to talk to you about three separate items,
  • 00:09 autofill addresses, high versus low importance, and email formatting.
  • 00:14 First of all, when I come up here onto a brand new email.
  • 00:18 I have an address book and a check names.
  • 00:19 When I click my address book,
  • 00:21 it's basically looking at my contacts and I only have one contact in there.
  • 00:26 When I come to the first line, a to line, and I start typing a letter.
  • 00:31 Up comes what we call autofill email addresses.
  • 00:33 Now you just saw a moment ago that I only have one contact in there and
  • 00:38 yet I have two names on this list.
  • 00:41 When I backspace and type in different letter, up comes different names.
  • 00:45 You see this autofill email address is remembering what I typed.
  • 00:49 It is not linked to my contacts.
  • 00:51 It is not linked to my address book.
  • 00:53 If there is an item on there, for instance this top one is the wrong address,
  • 00:58 the only thing I have to do is just hit this little X,
  • 01:00 the delete on the right hand side, to keep that list nice, tidy, just like that.
  • 01:06 I just wanted to point that out to you.
  • 01:07 The second thing I wanna show you is a high versus low importance and
  • 01:11 that is right over here.
  • 01:12 The high importance will mark this email with a red exclamation point when it
  • 01:17 lands in the inbox of whoever you're sending it to.
  • 01:20 Means it's very important.
  • 01:22 Don't abuse that because people will quit taking you seriously if you
  • 01:26 mark all of your emails with high importance.
  • 01:29 The exact opposite comes with a low importance,
  • 01:32 if you don't think it's important enough to just leave as a regular email,
  • 01:36 well don't mark it as low importance, no one will ever read it, in
  • 01:41 fact I never use the low importance, and I rarely, rarely use the high importance.
  • 01:46 Last thing I wanna talk to you about is the email formatting, HTML, plain text,
  • 01:51 or rich text.
  • 01:52 Now HTML means Hypertext Markup Language.
  • 01:55 In fact I'm gonna come right over here to my Format Text and
  • 01:58 show you where they're at HTML plaintext richtext.
  • 02:00 Now HTML simply means I can format it with all kinds of colors for the internet.
  • 02:06 When I click down here on my GoSkills.com website and I hit enter,
  • 02:10 it activates a hyperlink so the receiver can just click on the link.
  • 02:15 I can format any of these things that I want to, but
  • 02:18 watch what happens to that hyperlink and these buttons when I choose plain text.
  • 02:23 Everything absolutely vanishes and just goes to basically typewriter on paper.
  • 02:28 That's all it is.
  • 02:30 That is to protect corporations from rogue viruses and
  • 02:33 that is exactly why most corporations will
  • 02:36 only allow their users to send out plain text and receive plain text.
  • 02:40 The final option is rich text.
  • 02:42 Now rich text is very much like HTML except notice I have an attachment on here
  • 02:47 look what happens to that attachment when I hit rich text.
  • 02:51 It becomes an icon within the document.
  • 02:54 Now, it will still travel with the email, but when that receivers gets it,
  • 02:58 they might have to actually reformat to HTML to get that to open up.
  • 03:03 Okay, the actual link, when I hit enter and I'm on rich text,
  • 03:08 it will turn into a hyperlink, but attachments just travel differently.
  • 03:12 That's the only difference there.
  • 03:14 All right, I just wanted to point out those three items.
  • 03:16 They're small topics, but they're all very important so
  • 03:19 we just put them in one video for you.
  • 03:21 Okay I'll see you in the next video, thank you.

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