Outlook Conditional Formatting (for BCC emails)

I've received a few emails in the past month where I was BCC'd into them and didn't realize. This can be embarrassing when you start talking about one of those emails to the person it was sent to, as they won't realize you were in on it too!

Outlook View Settings

Outlook View Settings is a powerful way to setup your Outlook to work for you. In the View tab in the Outlook ribbon, click "View Settings" to open this dialog box below:

Note I have don this from my inbox, so will be formatting how my inbox looks. Today we want to highlight emails where I'm only in the BCC, so click the 'Conditional Formatting' button. This will pull up a window of all the different formatting changes Outlook makes for us automatically, such as highlighting unread emails.

Click the 'Add' button to create a new conditional formatting rule. Name it 'BCC' and click the 'Font' button to choose a format. I've chosen a slightly lighter font to indicate that these emails may be FYI or less urgent, and probably don't require an action on my part.

Now click the 'Condition' button. This will pull up yet another dialog box. Here we have three tabs - click the 'Advanced' tab. At the bottom of this window you'll see a 'Field' button.

Click 'Field' and select 'All Mail Fields' and find and click the 'To' field.

For the condition, select 'doesn't contain' and type your name (as it appears in your inbox) in the 'Value' box:

Click the 'Add to list' button to add this to the top window.

Repeat the same steps for the 'CC' field, 

then click 'Add to List'. 

You should now have two criteria in the box on top. Click 'Ok' three times (on the Filter window, the conditional formatting window, and the Advanced View Settings window). 

Send yourself a test email where your name is in the BCC box and see what happens - it should have the formatting you selected.

Setup Outlook Rules to Reduce Spam in your Inbox

 This post is inspired by an email I got last week that turned into over a spam dozen emails simply because the sender of the email did not change the 'Reply To' field.

Most of my students are fairly good about using the 'Reply All' option sparingly in Outlook. However, with the increased use of Microsoft Teams and Office 365 Groups, I'm seeing a lot more email trails sent to large distribution groups. A simple 'Reply' will send an email to everyone in the group - same damage as hitting 'Reply All'. 

So how can we avoid getting spam from distribution lists?

Sender Action: Change Reply To in Email Options

If you're the owner of a distribution list, whenever you send an email from that mailbox, ensure you set the 'Reply to' value to an individual email rather than the entire distribution list.

This can be changed under Email Options when you 'Pop out' the email in Outlook;

Select 'Direct Replies To' in the ribbon:

Then type your email in the 'Have replies sent to' box:

This will automatically update the 'Reply' behavior to put any email(s) you put in that box into the Reply field of an email when recipients hit 'Reply'. If they're observant enough they'll notice. So don't worry, you're not doing anything dodgy.

Recipient Action: Setup Outlook Rules

Unfortunately, we can't always just ask the recipient to setup 'Direct Replies To', so we need to take control of our own Inbox and filter out those junk replies.

Outlook Rules can help manage this:

In the Home tab in the ribbon, select Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts. 

Click New Rule > Create Rule on Messages I receive. 

Click Next.

Tick 'To specific people or Group'.

In the bottom pane, click the blue hyperlink to add the email, and type the email for the distribution list.

Click Next to define the action.

Tick 'Stop processing more rules' and 'move it to the specified folder'.

In the bottom pane, click the blue 'specified folder' hyperlink to select a folder. You can move directly to Deleted Items if you're feeling confident, or select / create another folder to store them in.

Click 'Next' again to add exceptions: 

Tick 'except if from people or public group'.

Type the SAME EMAIL as the distribution group you typed in the first screen.

Your rule should look something like this when completed:

Basically, this will ensure that you receive the original email sent from the distribution list, but all replies to it will be deleted/moved.

Note: This will also delete any emails sent to the distribution list in the first instance, so may not work for all scenarios. 

MS Ignite Updates

Microsoft Ignite Announcements

Microsoft Ignite is on now and there are so many fabulous sessions to choose from. I'm co-hosting a Power BI table talk in a few hours and enjoying all the other presentations in the meantime. 

Check out the Ignite Book of News for the latest announcements. 

Teams

Teams Presenter controls and flexibility are improving, giving you options for how to view video and attendees, and making it possible to see the presenter view of PowerPoint while sharing on Teams - all with just one screen! Yay!

As someone who does a lot of webinars, I'm really keen to see how the attendee registration will work - this could make a few of my flows in Power Automate redundant!

Cool Outlook Updates

I'm so excited that Outlook is getting a face lift. I feel like Outlook has been neglected in feature updates over the past many years. Why fix what isn't broken? Well, modern work is changing and we need to be more dynamic, flexible and agile in our work approach. 

The new Outlook board view experience will make it easier for you to keep exactly what you need at your fingertips and customize your Outlook Productivity Platform to meet your needs. 

Power Platform

Power Fx

The Power Automate language, Power Fx, is being rolled out across the Power Platform. You may have heard this previously called 'Excel Speak' because many of the functions are based on or borrowed from Excel. It is designed as a low code coding language and making that transition from Excel to Power Fx is easy if you start with the basic, similar functions. 

I am so excited to have some consistency across the Power Platform and can't wait to see how Power Fx evolves now that it's open source.

Power BI Premium Per User

Woohoo! It's finally here - a Power BI Premium that's accessible to small companies. 

Power BI Premium Per User is really well priced at only $20 USD per month per user and comes packed with all the greatest features that you didn't have with pro, including:

• Paginated reports
• Improved email subscription functionality
• Machine learning and AI integration

Register for MS Ignite 2021

It's not too late to register for MS Ignite - many of the sessions are available on demand and there's lots of good networking opportunities too. See you there!

Create Free Automated Registration Forms with Microsoft 365

I have been doing a few webinars and experimenting with different platforms for registrations, but have found that Microsoft 365 has all the tools I need to seamlessly automate the registration process for attendees and myself. 

Rather than keep this knowledge to myself, I thought I'd share it with you all here. 

Step 1: Use Teams to Create Live Event webinar

Teams Live Events are a great way to reach a wide audience. They enable you to broadcast a variety of content in a webinar style format live. Okay, actually there's a 20-30 second delay, but who's counting?

Create live event

From your Microsoft Teams app, click the Calendar on the far left. 

Once in your calendar, click the down arrow next to New meeting, and select 'Live event'. 

This will open a new window where you can populate all the Live event details. Make sure to select the correct Date, give it a title that you want Attendees to see (this does not update later for attendees if you change it, so get it right now), and provide a description for yourself or other presenters (such as agenda).

Click Next.

Live event permissions

Choose who can view the live event. This is the audience. If you cannot select 'Public', you need to talk to your admin about setting up a Public Live Event Policy. 

How will you produce your live event?

It works really well using Teams to produce your live event - no fancy studio or recording equipment required. 

Tick the boxes to configure your settings. 

Note that audience members cannot speak or present or interact with each other during a live event, so I like to turn on Q&A, as this gives them the opportunity to type questions and interact with the presenter. I also tick the Recording available to attendees as this enables people to watch after the fact if they couldn't join live. You can always turn this off a week or two after the event, and then the link will no longer give them access to the recording. Captions are great for accessibility, so think about your audience.

Click Schedule.

Get attendee link

To share your event with your audience, you'll need to send them the attendee link. 

Simply open the Live Event and click the 'Get attendee link' link to copy the attendee link. Save this somewhere safe, we'll need it later.

Step 2: Use Microsoft Forms to Create Registration Form

There are many ways to create a Form in Microsoft 365, it integrates so well with Office 365 apps such as Teams and Excel. If you're the only one who needs to see registration and attendee information, then you can use any method to create the form, but chances are you might enlist some help at some stage of the process and want to share this form with others. In that case, my favourite way to create a Form is to start in Microsoft Teams and use Forms for Excel. 

Create registration form

Choose the Team where you want the form responses to live. This team should relate to the webinar or topic, and everyone in this team will have Edit access to the registration form. 

Note: This is NOT the team of people you will invite to the webinar, they only need View access. 

Choose the Channel within the Team where you want the Excel file of responses to be stored. Again, this will probably relate to the webinar topic.

Click the Files tab, and select New > Forms for Excel. 

This should open a new browser with Microsoft Forms. 

Format the theme, title, details and questions of the form as you see fit for your webinar. You can ask as many or as few questions as you like.

For this example I recommend you create at least two questions as we will use these in the flow later: 

Add New > Text > Name

Add New > Text > Email

Make both of these questions required. 

Get form ID

In order to use this form in Power Automate, we need the form ID. You can grab this from the URL of the form editing screen. 

Look for the part of the URL that says 

#FormId=

and copy all the letters and numbers after the equal sign. Save this for reference later. 

Step 3: Use Outlook to Create Calendar Reminder

I find it challenging to manage all the webinars I sign up for, especially now that many of them are being offered internationally and I need to calculate time zone differences. If you don't want people to miss your webinar, it's a good idea to give them a calendar invite with the correct time and joining information already populated for them. 

This does add a bit more complexity to the registration setup, but in my opinion it's well worth the time.

Create Calendar Appointment in Outlook

Create a calendar appointment in your own Outlook calendar with all the information you want to share with attendees. Make sure you get the date and time right (include time zone). This is probably a good place to include the attendee link that we saved in Step 1. 

Save .ics file

Save the calendar appointment as a .ics file. You can do this from the File tab in the ribbon when you have the calendar appointment open: Click File > Save As > 

Save this file into SharePoint (I put it in the same Team as the registration form). Choose iCalendar Format for the Save As Type.

(Optional) Get Direct Download Link

In order to make it easy for attendees to open the calendar invite, you should share a link that will automatically start download of the calendar invite. To do this, go to the SharePoint location where you saved the file.

Share this file and grant access so that 'Anyone with the link can view'.

Now click the three dots next to the file, and select 'Details'. This will open a pane on the right hand side. Scroll down to find the 'Path' section and click the icon to copy the filepath: 

You will end up with a link that looks something like this (note this is a sample link I have edited so won't work): 

https://companyname.sharepoint.com/sites/Webinars/Documents/Calendar%20Links/Power%20BI%20webinar%20-%20Survey%20Says.ics

To ensure that it downloads automatically, just add 

?download=1

to the end of the link. It should now look something like this:

https://companyname.sharepoint.com/sites/Webinars/Documents/Calendar%20Links/Power%20BI%20webinar%20-%20Survey%20Says.ics?download=1

You can test it out in a web browser, but save this link somewhere handy so you can use it in your flow.

Step 4: Use Power Automate to Create Flow to send confirmation emails

Open up Power Automate in your Office 365 (or type flow.microsoft.com into the URL of your favourite web browser). 

When you're done, your flow might look something like this: 

I have designed this flow with ease of reuse in mind, so I have created a few variables to enable me to quickly update the flow for my next webinar. Let's start at the beginning though and work through each step: 

Trigger: When a new response is submitted

From Power Automate home screen, click Create and search the templates for 'Forms'. 

The 'Send an email from shared mailbox on Microsoft Form submission' is pretty close to what we're trying to do, so choose that template: 

Now that you're in the form editing screen, we're going to make a few changes:

1. Rename the flow in the top left. I called mine 'Webinar Confirmation Emails' but you may want to be more specific to which webinar. 
2. Fill in the Form Id in both the first and second steps. This is the long code we copied from the URL in step 2.
3. Delete the 'Send an email from a shared mailbox' step. You can use it if you'd like, but I prefer the personal touch of sending the email from me.

Initialize and set variables

Sometimes variables are crucial in the success of running a flow, but in this case I have just added them to make it easier to update the flow for my next webinar. It also makes it easier to show someone else how to maintain the flow, without needing to teach them everything about Power Automate. 

In my flow I have created three simple variables, all of them Type = String. 

• Webinar Name
• Webinar Date (in my local time zone)
• Attendee Time Zone

Note my Attendee Time Zone has a comment - click the three dots at the top of this step and 'Add comment'. This is another way to make it easier to update later; if you're the one updating you don't have to recall what you did, if someone else is helping to update you don't have to teach them the entire flow.

Power Automate (and most things in Microsoft 365) work with UTC time, so we need to convert the time of the webinar so that my confirmation emails go out when I want them to. 

 

Note I have used the dynamic content of my variable, so when I am ready to copy this flow to the next webinar I only need to change the Webinar Date variable and everything will update.

Send Confirmation Email with .ics attachment

Now we need to grab that .ics iCalendar appointment we saved to SharePoint in step 3. There are two ways to share this file, as a link or as an attachment. To share it as an attachment, you need to add a step "Get file content using path".

Browse to the correct Team site and file location in the action.

Then add a step for "Send an email (V2)" for Office 365. Click the three dots and rename this to 'Send confirmation email'. Expand the 'Advanced options' and put the dynamic content of the File Content from the "Get file content using path" step. Note I rename my steps as I go so that they are more meaningful to me.

The trick here is to give the attachment a proper name, including file type. Since it's a .ics file, we need to add .ics to the end of the Attachments name:

Use the dynamic content to fill in the other information in the email. This is where those required Registration Form questions will come into play - it's great to add a personal touch to the confirmation email and address each attendee by name. 

Add links to confirmation email

To add links to the email, just use the action link icon to create the link. If you look closely in my screenshots above, you will see I used the 'compose' action as a step to hold information and called it 'Instructions for Email Links'. I have just discovered the compose box and it's fantastic. You can put anything in here, and here I'm just using it as a holding block for comments and helpful information. In this example, you can copy the attendee link and iCalendar download link for reference: 

Note that this compose box serves no purpose in the flow. You still need to paste these links into the send email action, but it helps store information you plan to use multiple times throughout the flow (dynamic content isn't available in email links yet).

Configure run after to send failure notification email to webinar owner

Since Microsoft Forms free doesn't offer any email validation, we need to build that into our flow. If someone misspells their email or provides a fake email address, the flow will fail when it attempts the 'Send Confirmation Email' step. To make it easier for the webinar owner (they don't want to check the flow details each time that happens), we'll configure run after and send them a custom email.

Add a new step for "Send an email (V2)" for Office 365. Click the three dots and rename this to 'Send invalid email to Webinar Owner'. 

Click the three dots on 'Send invalid email to Webinar Owner' and choose 'Configure run after'. Tick 'has failed' and untick all other boxes, then click Done: 

This will ensure that your webinar owner only gets notified if the confirmation email failed, if it succeeds, then the flow will skip this step and carry on as normal. 

To carry on with the rest of the flow, the subsequent step should have a 'configure run after' that allows it to run when the failure notification is skipped: 

Add subsequent actions

Add any other actions you wish for your flow. In my example, I have one reminder email going out before the webinar. I have used the 'Delay until' action to get this working and 'Subtract from time' to specify how far before the start of the webinar to send this reminder. Note: You must use UTC time for this step. 

Note that Power Automate integrates with hundreds of connectors, not just Microsoft products. For example, you could link it to your Mailchimp account to help with marketing and follow up after the webinar: 

Once you're happy with your flow, save it. 

Test your flow by filling in the registration form. 

Step 5: Share your Registration Form Link

Now you're ready to share live. All you need to do to take registrations is share that Forms link with potential attendees. I'll leave it up to you to decide how best to promote this (email, website, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc).

How to finally sort out your emails by using the Four Ds

ACE were approached by a reporter from the NZ Herald network for comment on an article about sorting out your emails, and I was chosen as the resident Outlook expert and ACE spokeswoman. I teach a variety of Outlook courses, including one on Time Management using Outlook, where I follow up with clients in a one on one coaching environment to see how they are getting on with applying the techniques and tips I showed them.  

If you subscribe to the Rotorua Daily Post you may see my comments or photo in your local paper soon, but for those of you who don't I thought I would share some thoughts with my loyal readers as well.

‘Little and often’ is a great motto for handling your inbox. Try to empty your inbox after each visit. A simple yet effective way to do that is to process your messages by using the Four Ds (Do it now, Date activate it, Delegate it, Delete it) principle.  

Humans have a tendency to hoard things, but you shouldn’t be afraid to delete emails. I find it helps some clients to create a ‘bin’ folder instead of sending the emails directly to deleted items. Psychologically this can be easier than a permanent delete. While you’re at it, why not create a ‘Good News’ folder to file all those emails that make you feel good or tell you thanks. You can also setup some basic Outlook Rules to automatically file or delete messages you don’t need to read immediately.

No-one is immune to the odd moment or two of procrastination. But many of those emails in your inbox can probably be actioned in 5 minutes or less. If that’s the case, do it now. This will save you 5 minutes having to skim or scroll through the same email over and over. Plus it’s so satisfying to tick them off your ‘to do’ list. Setting up some Outlook Quick Steps can help make this easier and faster.
Don’t be afraid to ask for help. I often find clients are storing emails in their inbox simply because they don’t know what to do, or they’re waiting for a meeting to catch up with someone about it. It doesn’t do anyone any good just sitting in your inbox. Take positive action and forward/delegate the email as appropriate or ask for clarification as soon as you receive it.

Any email that doesn’t fit into those three categories (Do it now, Delegate it, Delete it) is important work for you to schedule for later (Date activate it). Did you know you can use your RIGHT mouse button to drag the email into Outlook tasks? Outlook magic! Plus you can use Outlook Categories, Search, and Search Folders to help organise your emails rather than waste time trying to maintain a complex, multilevel folder structure. In short, Outlook is full of features to help you better manage your email and help you move your to do list into Tasks you can action.