Create An Outlook Email Message From The Clipboard
Windows only: Tutorial weblog Tech-Recipes writes up an interesting and useful feature in Microsoft Outlook—you can use copy and paste to create new emails pre-populated with information.
Using the tip is simple—just copy some files or even text to the clipboard, switch to the Inbox and use the Ctrl+V key to create a new message. If you selected text it will be included in the message body, or files will be automatically attached. If using shortcut keys isn’t your thing, you can simply drag the files or text to the Inbox list view to create a message, or you can take it a step further by dragging them to the calendar to create new appointments with files attached—a very useful tip to save your valuable time.
Hit the link for the full walk-through, or check out our top 10 Outlook boosters for more useful tweaks. For even more time-saving keyboard goodness, be sure to check out how to add Gmail shortcuts to Outlook.
Outlook 2007: The Easy Way to Insert Attachments or Copied Text into a New Message
- Next Post: Crazedlist Is A Multi-City Craigslist Search Engine With Feeds »
- « Previous Post: Official Windows 7 Release Candidate Arrives May 5
Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
You can also drop files on the inbox node in the folder treeview. Advantage: this does not change the currently selected folder.
Bernard Vander Beken
This is awesome! How did I not know this?
patman
Comic Sans is the DEVIL.
This should more than DOUBLE my email output!!!!!
TheOtherHalf
Neat trick, although it has the effect of overwriting anything that is automatically put into the message, like signatures. Still, very cool.
Mike Loux
Works in Outlook 2003 as well.
downstairs
great feature. can i ask a slightly off topic question? using gmail imap on outlook, i get two saved "sent" messages. oddly enough, it does that on one computer and not on the other. tried to compare installations and can't figure it out. any tips?
pdfetc
Good tip! This will make my life much easier.. :)
How come it seems like, with every bad thing that happens now, Craigslist pops up as somehow responsible
salllygator
Wow. that is an amazing tip!! Of course, for some reason it doesn't seem to be working for me, when I'm using it on a VM containing Outlook 2007. Tried to disable key mappings for Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V just in case that was affecting anything, but still didn't succeed. Anyone used this in a VM? or maybe it's not VM related, but rather my outlook installation not working right perhaps?
This is a real "head slapper". It would never have occurred to me to try this. Thanks for a nice tip.
pkoutoul
Nice tip, thanks for sharing
nsxstorm
@liriel: Because this isn't about the standard windows clipboard functionality, but about a special, and cool feature of Outlook, that I bet a lot of people were not aware of.
Smukkekim
This would be a great time saver, except that I do not normally go to the inbox. I use "Search Folders" as they seem to be best for me ("this weeks email, this months email, tickets, "things marked as a to do later", etc). If I want to use this feature, I would have to click on the inbox, which just took ~15 seconds to load (because I do not go into the inbox. Subsequent switches to the inbox were <1 second), then hit ctrl-v. To click "new" (or ctrl-n) then 3x tab key + ctrl-v took ~3 seconds. Which is what I normally do if I am copying something to an email.
operator207
Rather than reporting this as an Outlook feature, why not just write an article to educate people on the Windows clipboard and hot keys? 1) Copying text in windows stores the text on the windows clipboard; 2) Many applications support Ctrl-V or RighClick->Paste to insert text from the windows keyboard. The article would have broader applicability this way.
liriel
This is a great time saver. I have used the drag and drop feature for a long time but I never knew about Ctrl+V.
largelager
I've know about this and showed people it for years.
billc124