As an Executive Assistant being organized is ever so important. Rules & Alerts are one of the most useful tools in Office 2007. It helps increase email efficiency by managing incoming and outgoing messages. Here are some examples of what I do:
- Move messages from certain person or company to a specific folder
- Reroute messages based on subject line, key phrases and or catch words
- Have a sound play when an important message arrives
- Assign a category based on the content of a message
- Filter junk messages and send them to the junk or any other folder
Microsoft Office will apply the rule to the message as soon as it arrives in the Inbox. I worked on a very massive event sometime back, for which I sent out close to 2000 email invites. Yes, you read right! So, the subject line in the response was pretty much the same in all emails. I set a rule, any email that has “Re: Invitation to XYZ event” in the subject line, move to Event Response folder. This way, my Inbox was not flooded with these emails. The emails automatically moved to the assigned folder.
Alerts well… they alert you! J This is good for notification. Not everyone will sit and stare at the computer screen all day. But of course if you are secretly watching your favorite program on Hulu, that is an entirely different story. So, this comes in handy when you’d like some kind of sound to play as soon an email arrives in your Inbox from an assigned person, say your boss. My mailbox is very organized because of the Rules & Alerts feature.
Navigation Pane>Tools>Rules and Alerts
New Rule>Move Messages from someone to a Folder
