Today, more and more people are relying on email for communication. The obvious problem is that there’s no two way exchange unless they respond. So if they do not respond, you never really know if they read your email. Or if it was even delivered. Thankfully Outlook has built in features to allow you to know these things and even flag your email as very important. So if you’re only relying on email to contact someone and cannot call them via phone, you’ll have some idea of whether or not they received and read your email.
The first step is to create the email of course. After you have everything ready to send, look up at the top menu bar for a sections called “Tags”. In this box you can assign the level of importance and a reminder for you to follow up on this email later. The Follow Up will appear in your To-Do Bar with the respective time frame you gave it and assigning an Importance Tag puts a red exclamation point or a blue down arrow in front of the email for the recipient to see. For more options, click the little arrow at the bottom right corner. In this dialogue box you can check that you want to be notified that the email was delivered and that it was read. You also have a little more granularity on the Importance and Security of the message. The only problem with these features is that the recipient has the option to not respond to your requests. In which case you may have to pick up a phone. Otherwise, hopefully this will help you keep better track of your emails and the tasks that live in them.
I’ll go over delayed delivery next time.
Some of the more “seasoned” tech users may remember floppy disks, cassette tapes and VHS tapes. All of which we could record and store data on in the form of files, voice recordings and video. I remember these took up a LOT of physical space too. Even when CD’s came along we thought their storage capacity was amazing but it still required a suitcase to carry around your collection. As with all technology, portable memory has come a long way and Flash Memory has paved the way.
. You will use that cursor to click and drag to make your snip selection. This may take a little practice. If you mess up, just click “New” again and start over. As a more advanced option, play around with the other menu items in the Snipping Tool to learn to make notes and annotate your screenshot and save as a pic file.
, a Redo 
appears. Or if you really like what you did and want to do it again and again you can click Repeat 
. You can access these commands via several options in any Microsoft Office product. The keyboard commands are Ctrl+Z to Undo and Ctrl+Y to Redo and Repeat. Otherwise you can find them in the menu bars depending on your version of Office. I’ll leave a couple of examples below. Happy editing.
I’m sure we all know what a manila folder is right? I’ll even bet a few old school diehards still use them today. The word Manila actually refers to the manila hemp that they were originally made from. These days they also come in the form of strings of ones and zeros grouped together in a computer’s memory representing an image of what we have always known and recognized. By itself it does nothing more than hold a few papers which are likely related to a similar topic. But combine them with tabs, dividers, larger folders, drawers and file cabinets and you have what is the most common means of record storage of this century. If you don’t believe me go look in Accounting. The same can be done on your computer and even influenced the way computers are set up today.
and can be accessed via your start menu or your quick launch bar at the bottom of your screen. When it opens you will see a list of folders and drive letters on the left and other icons representing different locations on your hard drive. Pay attention to the one named “Documents”. This is the default location where all of your personal data is stored. By clicking on Documents, you should see the default folders created by Windows and possibly other folders you may have already created. On the Campus network, this folder is actually redirected to a server where this data can managed and backed up but that’s a whole other unnecessary level of understanding. To create a new folder in your documents you can either right click with your mouse and click New Folder or click New Folder from the menu at the top of the screen. The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+N. Once you have created your folder you need to give it a name. If you don’t and accidentally click off of it, it will still show up with the name “New Folder”. To rename it, right click on it and click Rename. Now to store things inside that folder simply double click it or hit Enter with it selected and it opens to see the contents. If you want to go back up one level, you can either click the Up Arrow at the top of the drive list on the left or use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Up. Now you can create subordinate folders here and continue until your heart’s desire. However, always keep in mind that simple is better. If you don’t really need to separate something then don’t. You don’t want to get confused by your own organizing efforts.