12 Microsoft 365 Tips for Outlook, Word & OneDrive

By Katy Rumbelow | Published On: 6 August 2026 |

Following on from our very loved 12 Microsoft 365 Tips for PowerPoint, Teams & Excel, we thought we would look at the other three apps most of us have open all day: Outlook, Word and OneDrive.

None of these tips requires a new licence, a project or a training course.

They are just the small features that quietly remove friction, and most people simply have not come across them yet.

Pick one or two that match something you already do regularly.

Outlook

1. Schedule an email to send later

Writing an email at 9pm does not mean it needs to land at 9pm. Scheduling lets you write while the thought is fresh, then deliver it when your colleague is actually at their desk, which is particularly useful across time zones or when someone is on annual leave.

Write your email as normal.
Select the arrow next to Send.
Choose Schedule send and pick your date and time.

Write it now, send it when it will actually be read.

2. Use Sweep to clear out the clutter

Sweep is for the sender who emails you constantly and whose messages you never need to keep. Rather than deleting them one by one forever, Sweep clears what is there and can keep clearing automatically.

Select a message from the sender you want to tidy.
Go to Home, then select Sweep.
Choose whether to delete everything from that sender, keep only the latest, or delete anything older than ten days.

One click now, and a quieter inbox from here on.

3. Use @mentions and then filter by them

Typing @ followed by a colleague’s name highlights their name in the message and automatically adds them to the To line. The genuinely useful part is on the receiving end, where you can filter your inbox to show only the messages that mentioned you directly.

In the message body, type @ and start typing the person’s name.
Select them from the list.
To find messages where you were mentioned, use the Filter options and choose Mentioned mail.

Ideal when you have been added to a long thread and need to find the bit that actually involves you.

Bonus Tip: Use @mentions sparingly. If everything is a mention, nothing is.

4. Set up Quick Steps for repetitive actions

If you regularly do the same two or three things to an email, move it to a project folder, mark it read, forward it to the same colleague, a Quick Step turns that whole sequence into a single click.

Go to Home and find the Quick Steps gallery.
Select Create New.
Name your Quick Step, choose the actions you want it to perform, then select Finish.

Set it up once and reclaim a few seconds every single time.

Word

5. Navigate long documents with the Navigation Pane

Scrolling through a forty-page document to find one section is nobody’s idea of a good afternoon.

The Navigation Pane gives you a clickable outline down the side, and you can drag headings to move whole sections at once.

Go to the View tab.
Tick Navigation Pane.
Select any heading to jump straight to it or drag it to reorder that section.

Worth noting this only works if you have used proper heading styles, which brings us neatly to the next tip.

6. Use Styles so your contents page builds itself

Formatting headings manually with bold and a bigger font looks fine and helps Word not at all. Using built-in Styles means Word understands your document structure, which unlocks the Navigation Pane, accessibility support and an automatic contents page.

Select your heading text and choose Heading 1 or Heading 2 from the Styles gallery on the Home tab.
Place your cursor where you want the contents page.
Go to References, select Table of Contents, and choose a style.

When the document changes, right-click the table and select Update Field rather than retyping anything.

7. Compare two versions of a document

Someone returns your document with edits, no track changes, and a cheerful note saying they have “made a few tweaks”. Compare shows you exactly what moved.

Go to the Review tab.
Select Compare, then Compare again.
Choose your original document and the revised one, then select OK.

Word produces a new document showing every difference as a tracked change, so you can accept or reject each one.

8. Proofread with Read Aloud

Reading your own writing silently is how typos survive. Hearing it read back catches missing words, clumsy sentences and the paragraph you accidentally pasted twice.

Go to the Review tab.
Select Read Aloud.
Use the controls to adjust reading speed or change voice.

Bonus Tip: Immersive Reader, under the View tab, goes further with column width, page colour, line focus and syllable spacing. It is genuinely valuable for anyone who finds dense text hard going, and worth knowing about for your whole team rather than treating it as a niche setting.

OneDrive

9. Recover an earlier version of a file

Overwritten something? Accepted a change you should not have? Every file in OneDrive keeps its version history, so you very rarely need to start again.

Right-click the file in OneDrive or File Explorer.
Select Version history.
Choose the version you want and select Restore, or open it first to check.

Far less dramatic than rewriting the whole thing.

10. Restore your entire OneDrive to a point in time

This is the one most people do not know exists, and it is the tip worth remembering.

If a sync goes wrong, a folder gets mass-deleted, or something malicious happens, you can roll your whole OneDrive back to how it looked at a chosen moment in the last 30 days.

Go to OneDrive on the web and select the Settings gear.
Select Restore your OneDrive.
Choose a date from the dropdown, or use the activity chart to pick your own point in time.

Hopefully you never need it. Very reassuring to know it is there.

11. Share links that expire and cannot be downloaded

A sharing link sent once tends to live forever. When you are sharing something sensitive, or something that will be out of date next month, you can set the link to expire and stop recipients downloading their own copy.

Select Share on the file.
Select the settings icon or Link settings.
Set an expiry date, choose whether recipients can edit, and switch off Allow download if you only want it viewed.

Note that available options depend on how your organisation has configured sharing, so you may see more or fewer choices than a colleague elsewhere.

12. Add shortcuts to shared libraries instead of hunting for them

If you work regularly in a SharePoint or Teams document library, you do not need to navigate there every time. Adding a shortcut puts it directly in your OneDrive, on the web and on your desktop, without duplicating any files.

Open the SharePoint or Teams library you use often.
Select Add shortcut to My files.
It now appears in your OneDrive alongside your own folders.

Bonus Tip: Use Files On-Demand alongside this so those libraries take up no space on your device until you actually open something.

A Few Final Thoughts on These Microsoft 365 Tips…

The best tips are rarely the impressive ones. They are the small changes that remove something mildly annoying you do twenty times a week without ever stopping to question it.

Try one this week. If it sticks, come back for another. And if you would like your teams to get this kind of practical, day-to-day confidence across the whole suite, our Microsoft 365 Training catalogue covers over 180 courses across 35 applications.