From the course: Modern Project Management in Microsoft 365

Create a template for future project emails - Microsoft 365 Tutorial

From the course: Modern Project Management in Microsoft 365

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Create a template for future project emails

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There are certain points in every project that you communicate key information. It might be a welcome message, request for an update, reporting on milestones, asking for feedback, or a project debrief. For these types of communications, an email template can help by populating most or all of the information instead of you copying the subject and copying the message body from that previous email to the next new one. Let's take a look at how you can set this up. You'll need to be working in the desktop Outlook app, such as the installed Microsoft 365 Outlook app that you see here. At the time of this recording, creating templates is only available in Classic Outlook. It's not available in what's known as New Outlook. How you can tell the difference is in the upper right corner. If you see this that says try the new outlook, make sure that is set to off. That way, you are in Classic Outlook. Now, I already have an email that I've started composing that I want to turn into a template. So let's go take a look at that. Let's make this full-screen. So what you'll want to do is you'll want to start with a new email message and populate what you want to have as a template for the subject and what you want to have as a template for the message body. Once you have that, go to the file tab and select Save as. It's going to take you here. What I want to point out first is notice here at the top that this says documents. We want to change this because we actually want this to be saved in the templates folder that already exists. So to do that, down here at the bottom, notice that we have file names. So you can update that to whatever makes sense. It's picking up the name that it finds within the subject to use. Here where it says save as type, it's Outlook message format Unicode. This is why we're seeing this documents folder. Once we change this. So let's click in this field, and we're going to change this to Outlook template. Once we do that, now notice the file path. It's in the roaming folder. And then within that, the Microsoft subfolder. And then within that, the template subfolder. That's where it needs to be saved in order for us to be able to go and find it and select it to use that template in the future. So let's save it. Okay, now that we have that saved, let's go ahead and minimize this message for now. Let's go back on out to Outlook. Let's start a new email. But we're not going to start it here because that would be a blank email. But we're going to start a new email from the template. We're going to go to this arrow on the right. Then we're going to go down here to more items. And in the pop-out, we're going to select Choose form. That takes us to this choose form pop-up. We're going to go to the look and field that says standard forms library. And from this drop-down, we're going to select user templates in file system. So user templates, these are all of the templates that you have created. You'll notice that I have two in here. The one that we want to use for this is the project kickoff, insert project name, that's the one we just set up. We'll select it and then select open. And here's our new email with everything pre-populated. Only thing I have to do is go ahead and change out some of these placeholders and fill those in as needed. That's how you can create a message template for future project emails.

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