Courtesy of lifehacker.com

Microsoft’s Office 2010 has rolled out to trusted testers, and among the screenshots coming back, nothing seems so promising as the Quick Steps buttons. They’re like high-powered Send & Archive buttons that can be tweaked to do any multi-step action.

Sure, Office 2010 includes automatic SkyDrive document synchronization, native PDF creation, advanced video editing in PowerPoint, and a lot of other tweaks—detailed, in screenshots and text, by the Digital Inspiration blog.

But what’s really exciting to our email-handling reptile brains is the ability to create Quick Step buttons for any kind of email. You can create your own Send & Archive, but have it archive into any Outlook folder. You can also have Send & Delete, or bulk-forward messages to somebody with a subject of “FYI.” Six or more of your custom Quick Steps appear in the Office 2010 ribbon, and they seem fairly open-ended in what they can accomplish, as described at the Office Outlook Team Blog.

After trying this feature out myself today, I can safely say that this is a great new feature. Before I had a clunky solution where I would add seperate emails to my Outlook 2007 jumplists in Windows 7. I would then launch these emails from the jumplists to open predefined functions in Outlook (like a standard email template). The “Quick Steps” offer a great new time-saving function to Outlook ath I would recommend everyone give a whirl.

Microsoft Office 2010 – A Visual Guide to New Features of Office 2010 [Digital Inspiration