Keyboard Shortcuts Basics

A keyboard shortcut is a keystroke or a combination of two or more keystrokes that you can use to execute a command in a computer program more quickly than you could by clicking with a mouse. This guide covers all of the keyboard shortcuts in Outlook 2007—most of the shortcuts covered here also apply to earlier versions of Outlook.

Though it’s possible to create your own keyboard shortcuts easily in other Office 2007 programs, such as Word and Excel, to customize Outlook’s keyboard shortcuts you must use Visual Basic, a computer programming language.

If you know how to write Visual Basic code, you can create your own keyboard shortcuts in Outlook by using macros—press Alt+F8 to open the Macro dialog box, name your macro, and click Create. A new window will open in which you can write and save the Visual Basic code for your macro. The more user-friendly “Record Macro” feature found in other Office 2007 programs—in which you step through the actions for which you’d like to create a keyboard shortcut and then save that shortcut as a macro—is not available in Outlook 2007.