The following articles were included in our Exchange Messaging Outlook (EMO) newsletter published on May 13, 2021.
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Today's Highlights:
- Suggested Text and Suggested Replies
- More on Bulk changes to Outlook items
- Change Availability for Holidays
- Autocomplete Bug Update
Suggested Text and Suggested Replies
A user had a complaint:
For the last week or so, when I’m typing an email, suggested text appears and tells me to hit the tab key if I want to accept the text. I don’t want this annoying feature. How do I permanently turn it off?
That is the new Text Predictions feature in Outlook 365. As you are typing, Outlook tries to predict what you are going to say and offers to finish it for you or you can just keep typing.
I thought it was annoying at first, but left it enabled. Now I ignore it and keep typing, usually forgetting to hit Tab to accept the text when Outlook correctly predicts what I’m going to say. It’s just easier to keep typing.
You can turn this off in Options. Look for it in File > Options > Mail. 'Show text predictions while typing' is in the Compose Messages section.
There is a another “helpful” text suggestion feature: Suggested replies. At the top of some messages, Outlook will make three suggestions, such as “Thanks”, ”Great, thank you”, and “Perfect, thank you” or “Glad it worked!”, “Let me check on it.”, and “I will find out.” Click the reply you want to start with instead of clicking on the Reply button. The reply opens with the chosen text and you can add more text before sending it.
If you don’t want to use this, turn it off in File > Options > Mail. ‘Show suggested replies’ is under Replies and forward section.
Like many new features, these are only in Outlook 365 (subscription) at this time.
More on Bulk changes to Outlook items
A couple of weeks ago, I told you how to remove categories in bulk. This week, two users asked how to make bulk changes. One user uses Outlook desktop and wanted to change the availability of holidays from free to out of office, the other user had flags set on almost all of the mail in her Inbox in Outlook on the web and wanted to remove them.
Although Outlook on the web doesn’t have many of the features that make bulk changes easy in Outlook desktop, you can make some bulk changes in mail folders and contacts, but not in the calendar. You can’t select multiple appointments or use a list view in the calendar.
The email folders don’t support customized views, but you can use the filter (or search). Outlook on the web is also fussy when it comes to selecting all (using the select all dot at the top of the folder); you need to select all but the last item (select all, scroll to the end, hold Shift and click the next to the last item.) Contacts may be limited to 50 at a time.
Outlook on the web supports many of Outlook’s shortcuts, including shift+click and control+click to select multiple messages or contacts. If you need to find unread or flagged messages. use the filter, then select all. Or use Search.
Once you make your selection, the commands you can use with selections are in the toolbar and the toolbar overflow (3 dots on the right) - Move (or Copy) to a folder, Categorize, Flag, Unflag, Pin, Unpin, Mark as read, Mark as unread, and Ignore. You can also delete the selected messages.
If the command is not available after you make the selection, you either selected all and need to deselect the last item, have a mix of items selected (meeting requests, read receipts, and mail) or the function only works on 50 items or fewer.
If you have Outlook desktop, adding the account to it and making the bulk changes there might be easier.
Change Availability for Holidays
As user asked:
Is it possible to change the availability of holidays without having to change them one by one? They are marked free by default and I would like to have them set to out of office.
Sure. You can bulk change the show time as field. Set the calendar to list view then group by location or another field that will put the desired holidays together. Then add the Show time as field to the view and group by it too.
You need to have at least one item in the Show time as Out of office group. Then select the free group, or click the first, hold Shift and click the last to select all. Drag the selected items to the Out of office group.
If you need to “pick and choose” appointments, hold Ctrl and click on individual events then drag to the desired group.
Autocomplete Bug Update
Last week I told you about the autocomplete bug. If all goes well, it will be fixed in an update next week.
To recap, the bug affects how the autocomplete list looks in Outlook 2016 and 2019. It may open upward, not downward, the autocomplete entries are large, and you cannot delete entries from the list using your mouse, only the Delete key. In Outlook 365, the registry key to restore the old, single line autocomplete field does not work
Let's hope we can go more than 2 weeks without another bug!
More information on the bug is in the article at Autocomplete is messed up in Outlook
Information about the registry key is at The (good) Autocomplete list is back
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