Dropdown menus are great ways to navigate through software for things you do infrequently. For operations you do several times a day, keyboard shortcuts are faster, and you don’t have to remove a hand from the keyboard. Some of these we know by heart, like Esc to close a window, Ctrl+C to copy and Ctrl+V to paste. But we often don’t use keyboard shortcuts in Outlook, a tool we tend to spend entirely too much time using each day.

66 of the Most Useful Outlook Keyboard Shortcuts is brought to us from the Reader’s Digest website. This may be a good article to print and leave by your computer for a few days as you use Outlook. (I just used Ctrl+K to insert that hyperlink in that preceding sentence, and it was certainly faster.) If you often switch between Outlook mail, calendar and contacts, as you can see from the screen capture at left, it is as simple as 1,2 3 (or actually Ctrl+1, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+3.) I note those three because they are easy to memorize, and they will likely be used frequently enough to retain that knowledge.

There is a section on enabling shortcuts in the post. But that apparently only applies to the online version of Outlook.

But if you review this piece, you may find the shortcut for something you use very frequently. Because the most useful shortcuts are the ones you actually use to save a few seconds or a few minutes every day.