Microsoft Outlook has a great feature that allows senders of emails to you to be notified when you're out of the office or away from your desk for an extended period of time. This feature is known as the out of office assistant, or automatic replies. In this section, you're going to learn how to create two types of automatic replies. The first type is a basic, which you turn on and off or schedule. The second is more advanced, and in this one, we're going to set up some rules to go along with the out of office. Let's start by setting up our basic out of office.

The out of office assistant is in the backstage so we're going to click on the File tab. We'll click the automatic replies button. And this is going to open up the automatic replies dialog box. From here we set up our out of office assistant or automatic replies. At this time, mine is set to do not send automatic replies because it's turned off So we're going to go ahead and turn it on Send automatic replies. Now from here, you need to determine how you want to use it, are you going to turn it on when you leave?

Or are you going to set it up for a scheduled time period. For this example, we're going to use the scheduled time period. So we'll say send only during this time range. Once I click the button is going to give me the ability to set my time for starting and ending. So let's go ahead and set our start time. I'm set up for Friday the 22nd.

And I'm leaving the office at five o'clock. So after five o'clock, I want people to get my notification. And I'm going to be out until Monday, August 1, I'll be back in after three o'clock. So now that I've set my start time and my time end dates, I need to go in and set up the message that I want to go out to people. You have two tabs inside my organization and outside my organization. So I'll set my interest Side organization.

Now you can set them up to be exactly the same or you can have different ones. For my inside my organization, I'm a little bit more casual. So I'll leave my message the way it is, except I need to change the date I'm returning. Now I'm going to click on outside my organization. And you'll notice it says on. If you do not want to send messages outside your organization, uncheck the auto reply to people outside my organization, and it'll turn it off.

I also have the option to send to my contacts only or anyone outside my organization. I'll leave it set to anyone outside my organization. And I'll set up my message. Again, it's Monday. Once I've got it set the way I want. I'm going to click OK. And now my rule is set.

And as soon as that date and time happens, my automatic reply will be turned on. Let's go back in and I want to show you exactly what it looks like when it's on So let's go back to our automatic replies. And just for this example, let's go ahead and set it to yesterday. So you can see what it looks like when it's on, we'll say, OK, and you'll notice that since it's now during that timeframe, my automatic replies is highlighted. And if I go back to my Outlook, I've got a runner across my screen telling me automatic replies are being sent for this account. So when I come back into the office, if I came in early, and I wanted to turn it off, I could click here and just turn it off from here.

Or I can go back to backstage and turn it off from there as well. So that's our first example of a basic one. You just go in and turn it on when you're ready to go are set the date and time and set up your messages. Now we're going to get a little bit more detailed. And there's specific things I want to happen to messages that come in from a specific person while I'm out. So I'm going to go back to backstage, go to my automatic replies, and I'm going to show you how to set up some rules within there.

So if there's something that you want to do Specifically for messages that are coming in while you're gone, you can do that. And like I said, For this example, I'm going to take messages from a specific person and set up a rule for them. So I'm going to come in and send automatic replies on. I'm going to have it happen as soon as I click OK, so I'm leaving the office as soon as I'm done with this. So I'm not going to set a date and time range. And when I come back, I'm going to turn it off.

So I'll come to my inside my organization. And even though I'm just telling it to turn on when I leave, I can still tell it within my messages, date and time if I wanted to. So I'm going to come to my outside. And at this point, I'm going to come down to the lower left corner, and I'm going to click on rules. Once I do this, it's going to open up the automatic reply rules dialog box, and here's where I create the rules that will run during my out of office time. So the first thing I need to do is click Add rules.

It's going to bring up the Edit rule dialog box. From here, I choose how the rule is going to be set up. Specifically what I want to happen when a certain conditions are met. So I'm going to say when a message is sent from, I can pick somebody from my address book, or I can type in a name. So I'm going to go ahead and type in an external source. And click OK.

I'm going to say if it's sent directly to me, not if I'm CC, but if this person sends me specifically an email message, I want something to happen with it. I'm going to forward it to a group. And I want to forward it as an attachment. So what will happen is if this person sends me a message, or I'm in the to area, it's going to forward a copy of that message as an attachment to my training group. So I'll go ahead and say OK, and click OK. And that's how you set up a rule for messages coming in. If you wanted to add additional rules for other people, you can do that as well.

Click on rules. You can add another rule, we can also edit rules from here. So if I decided not only did I want to forward it on, but I wanted to move it into a folder, I could edit this rule. So I've got my forward. And I also want to move it to a folder. So I checked the box, move to and click folder.

And I choose the folder I want to move it to. Now if I wanted to, I could create a new folder from here as well. So I'm going to set up a new folder under my mailbox. Click New Folder and say OK, click OK. And now it's added that folder. So now I'll go ahead and say OK, click OK. and say OK, now my rule is on and we'll see what happens when I get a message from this person. Now you'll see I received a message it was from that sender.

And if I come over and look my messages while out folder has a copy of That message. So my rule with the out of office has run to setting up rules with your out of offices a great way to keep things organized if you have a lot of messages coming in, or if you've got a project going on and you want somebody else to monitor those emails, you could give somebody rights to one of your folders, and they could take a look at it for you. Don't go ahead and turn it off. Just remember, go to backstage. Automatic replies, it'll bring up your automatic replies dialog box. And this is where you set up your automatic reply and your rules for them.

Always remember, when you're setting up your automatic replies, you have two areas inside and outside my organization. So when you're setting it up to run, make sure you change your reply for both of them. coming in and changing it for inside my organization will not update outside my organization. Once you set up your replies, click rules to set up any rules that you want to go with them. Click OK and click To turn it on. Always remember if you set it up manually to come in and turn it off when you're done.

And that's how you work with the out of office.