How to use Microsoft Outlook’s Quick Steps to quickly respond to emails

September 12, 2022 Abraham Smith

If you reply to many emails in the same way, use Microsoft Outlook’s Quick Steps feature to reply with a quick click.

Zoom Microsoft Outlook — Image: Aleksei/Adobe Stock

If you’re on the email frontline of your organization, chances are you’re getting a lot of messages that go nowhere. For example, you may frequently receive emails asking about employment opportunities. If your company isn’t hiring, it can quickly become tedious for you to answer every request manually.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just click a button and Outlook would reply with a generic reply and then delete the message?

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use Outlook’s QuickSteps feature to send an automatic reply and then delete the message you’re replying to. I’m using Microsoft 365 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use previous versions down to Outlook 2013. Outlook Mail (online) does not support Quick Steps.

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What is a quick step in Outlook?

With the QuickSteps feature, you can set up actions that Outlook performs when invoked. You can apply multiple actions to the same quick step. You can choose a template or create a custom quick step.

There are different types of QuickSteps templates:

Move to folder: Use this quick step to move the selected message to a specific folder.
Mark & Move: This quick step sets a specific flag and then moves the selected message to a specific folder.
New email to: Use this quick step to automate a message to the same person.
Forward onto: Use this quick step to forward the selected message to a specific person.
New meeting: This quick step lets you set up a generic meeting message that you can reuse.
Custom: Use this quick step if none of the above apply.

How to start a quick step in Outlook

To use one of the templates above, click the Home tab and then click the More button in the QuickSteps gallery in the QuickSteps group. In the resulting drop-down list, select New Quick Step and then select the appropriate template.

If you are creating a custom quick step, start a new quick step by clicking the Home tab and then clicking Create New (Figure A) in the QuickSteps gallery. As you add new steps, Outlook displays them in the same list. As the list grows, clicking the More button may be faster than scrolling through the step list.

Figure A

The Create New option is circled in the Quick Steps menu in Microsoft Outlook — Figure A: Start a new quick step.

How to define a quick step to reply to a message in Outlook

Now let’s create a quick step that will send a generic message to the sender of the selected message. After you click Create New, Outlook opens the dialog shown in Figure B.

Figure B

The Create New option is circled in the Quick Steps menu next to the Edit Quick Step dialog box in Microsoft Outlook — Figure B: The default quick step provides little information.

You can also select Custom from the template list. Give the quick step a meaningful name, e.g Answer and delete job requests. Then select Responses from the Actions drop-down menu. Click the Show options link to open more options and type the message in the text control (Figure C).

Figure C

Editing the text box in the Edit Quick Step dialog box in Microsoft Outlook — Figure C: Enter the generic reply message.

Only the generic text message is required for this quick step, since the Reply action will populate the To control with the sender’s email address. There’s no reason to change the subject text, but you can. You can also set a flag, enter cc and bcc addresses and delay the message by one minute. We don’t need to set any of these options for this example, but we’re not done yet.

We also want to delete the selected message after replying to it. To add this action, click Add action and select Delete message from the resulting drop-down list.

This takes care of the actual reply and delete task. But there are two more things you might want to do:

To set up a keyboard shortcut, select a combination from the Keyboard shortcut drop-down list.
Type a helpful message in the tooltip text control (Figure D).

Figure D

Edit Quick Menu dialog box in Microsoft Outlook — Figure D: You can create a keyboard shortcut and add a tooltip to the quickstep.

When everything is ready, click Finish.

How to use the new quick step in Outlook

Most likely, you don’t want to test this new quick step on a message that’s currently in your inbox. If so, send yourself a test message and work with it. In your inbox, click this test message and then click the Home tab. In the QuickSteps Gallery (Figure E), click the Respond to and Delete Job Ads Quick Step.

Figure E

Quick Steps menu option circled in Microsoft Outlook — Figure E: Click on the quick step.

Outlook opens the reply message shown in Figure F. You can add additional content at this point, but not in this case. Click Submit and that’s it. When you return to the inbox, the message is gone.

Figure F

Email in Microsoft Outlook — Figure F: Click Send to reply to and delete the selected message.

Outlook’s QuickSteps feature is an easy way to automate common email tasks. Although the quick step created in this article is simple, the feature has bigger things to offer. Spend some time exploring this feature so that you can take full advantage of this feature.

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