 Hi everybody. Welcome to Burn to Learn. This is Rod Davis. You know there was a time when you had to label or color code your files manually so you could find them at a later time. In this video we will show you how to do all of that in just a few clicks of the mouse using Outlook 2016. Are you ready? Let's begin. Open Outlook and click on the home tag and over to the right you will see the tag section. Now suppose you open an email but you don't really have time to read it because you're very busy. What can you do? Well let's see what the unread tag function really can do. Let's click on an email. Let's click on the one from Code Academy. Now remember we don't have time to read it right now so what can we do about it? First right click on that email and options appear. As you can see we can scroll down and just mark it as unread or and what I want to do is to return to the tags and click on the unread red tag and accomplishes the same thing. It preserves that email shows it as unread so that when I have time I can read it. Now we're going to show you how to use the categorize button. Let's go to the business file that we have. This is what we want to concentrate on for this section and as you can see we have several emails here. We have an email concerning quarterly sales, another one sent semi-annual purchases and monthly accounts receivable and monthly accounts payable. Let's work with sales. Let's click on sales and then scroll over and click on categorize. Now a color drop-down box appears and all we need to do is select a color so for sales let's let's choose red. Sales are hot. You know if you have different kinds of sales and you want to show each type you can add another color. Let's say that this is the sale of say houses. Let's click on categorize again and choose another color to show the sales of cars. Let's choose blue. As you can see now two color codes are indicated for quarterly sales blue and red. We can do as many colors as we want but that's enough for that one for the moment. Let's pick on another one of these files. Let's say semi-annual purchases. Click on it and then click on categorize again and we're going to choose another color. Since sales was red and blue let's choose purple for semi-annual purchases and again if you want to differentiate even further you could add more colors but let's leave it there at the moment. So now we have two of our files covered. Let's go now to the monthly accounts receivable file and click on categorize and choose another color. Let's call this yellow. Ah yes let's look at how this all categories works. Click on all categories. As you can see we have several colors to choose from here as well. Let's let's choose a yellow color for this one and as you can see over on the right you can do a lot with this. You can decide on a new one all together. You can rename it. You could delete it. You can also add a different color if you're not pleased with the one you have. For example just click on the down arrow for color and now you see additional colors if you should need them or want them. Let's close that for now and let's look at a very important feature called shortcut key. Let's hit the down arrow for that. As you can see there are several options you can control plus F2, 3, 4, etc. Let's decide to have a shortcut by choosing control plus F2. Now as you can see in the window the shortcut key is indicated for this category. This category being accounts receivable. So when we go into our outlook all now we need to do is click on control F2 and that file appears automatically. When you're comfortable with it you click OK and then it's done or you can rename it. Let's click on rename and show how to do that. So let's call it accounts receivable and then click on OK and we've renamed it. Okay let's now go to the monthly accounts payable file. Click on that and click on categorize for that one. Let's go to all categories again and now for accounts payable let's decide to give it another name. So click on new. Let's call it accounts payable. AP for short and choose a color. Let's change from what we did do and go to the color red. This is what is suitable for bills and let's give it a shortcut. Right now we have none. Let's give this one F5. That looks good. Click OK and click OK again and there we have now categorized every one of these files with a color code. Very simple to do. Just follow these steps. We've done ourselves a tremendous favor in organizing our files by categorizing them. Now when we open our inbox we'll see the colors of everything that we've categorized and that tells us how to find them. We can click on the color or click on the shortcut and what we're looking for automatically comes to you. So now let's show you how to use the follow-up function. Let's pick on accounts receivable. Let's click on it and click on the follow-up. Okay this is one way when we click on it it flags the email. So click on flag the message and there you see a flag appears. There's another way to do this. For any email you can slip simply hover over the flag and click on it and when you do it is ready for follow-up. It's kind of like a to-do list. Every time you see a flag you know it's an important item and you need to do something with it. When you have done the follow-up work you click on the flag again and a check mark appears indicating to you that you have done that work. Hope this video was helpful. Don't forget to leave a comment below to let us know what you think of this video. Also please help us by subscribing and if you would like to support Burn to Learn please visit our Patreon page by clicking the link below. In our next video we will show you how to find people and filter emails using Outlook 2016. Thanks for watching. See you next time.