Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Trim redundant clicks from your most repetitive office tasks with this amazing trick!
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2016, 2019/365.
Quick reference
Drag and Drop
A clever and fast way to make appointments and contacts is to simply Drag and Drop the email to the calendar, people, and task panes on the bottom of the Navigation Pane.
When to use
Use this as often as possible when time is of the essence and to eliminate redundant typing errors.
Instructions
Click on any email…
Drag it to an existing folder to file it away.
Drag it to the Calendar icon to make a new Appointment.
Drag it to the People icon to make a new Contact.
Drag it to the Task icon to make a new Task.
Login to download- 00:05 One of my favorite lessons to teach right away in Outlook is the drag and drop and
- 00:09 mostly because I discovered it by accident and it is great.
- 00:13 So, let's take a look at the setup.
- 00:15 On my navigation pane, I have my inbox and I have a few folders already created.
- 00:20 On the very bottom left, this is my navigation pane, my mail, my calendar,
- 00:24 my people, and my tasks.
- 00:26 All right, so an email comes in, I'm going to go ahead and click on this email.
- 00:30 And I, one day was dragging this email to another folder.
- 00:34 You can just simply click and drag and drop any email on a folder.
- 00:38 Please notice the shape of my arrow.
- 00:40 It has a little square attached that little square is called the lasso.
- 00:44 If you see a lasso on your mouse, you better be paying attention because that
- 00:48 means you got something attached to the mouse and
- 00:50 when you let go, it's going to drop on whatever is highlighted.
- 00:53 I'm going to let go, there we go, I have that email now in my Class Folder.
- 00:59 I don't want it there, I'm going to move it back to inbox simply click, drag,
- 01:04 make sure inbox is highlighted and let go.
- 01:06 Here we go, let's go back to inbox.
- 01:08 Now, here's what happened to me.
- 01:09 One day, I was dragging one of my emails down to the bottom of my list of folders,
- 01:15 and I was going too fast and I zoomed past all my folders and
- 01:18 I landed on this calendar on the bottom left.
- 01:21 And didn't even realize that I'd gone too far and I let go and behold, before
- 01:27 my eyes was a calendar appointment of the email I just did a click and drag with.
- 01:32 I dragged and dropped an email to the calendar, ended up with an appointment.
- 01:36 This, folks, is wonderful information, because look what I don't have to retype.
- 01:42 I don't have to retype the title for the appointment,
- 01:45 I don't have to retype any of the text included in the appointment.
- 01:48 What if an address is in there?
- 01:50 I can copy the address and paste it on location.
- 01:53 The only thing I have to change is the date.
- 01:56 So I'm going to drop this on next week and I'm going to change the date and
- 02:00 time of the appointment very quickly and I'll hit Save and Close, click.
- 02:05 Here we go.
- 02:06 How about we take a look at the calendar, see if it landed out there.
- 02:09 Now, I can click on this calendar or I can Ctrl+2.
- 02:12 Ctrl+2 is my preferred way.
- 02:15 And, let's take a look at next week's appointments, and there it is, wonderful.
- 02:20 All right, let's get back to the email.
- 02:21 Ctrl+1 or click on the email on the bottom left, Ctrl+1.
- 02:26 Let's do this again.
- 02:27 Now notice, the email is still there.
- 02:29 I didn't move it to calendar, I simply made an appointment out of that email.
- 02:33 All right, click and drag, same email, drop it on to the people pane, let go.
- 02:38 Here we go, behold, we now have a contact made out of that email.
- 02:43 You only have to do this once per contact.
- 02:45 Don't do this every time we get the same email from the same person, all right.
- 02:50 The beauty about this is take a look at this.
- 02:52 I've got my name and I've got - look at this - my website already set up, I can just
- 02:56 copy and paste it into the sections of the contact, just from their signature.
- 03:03 People put their company address, or company name, or phone number.
- 03:06 Copy-paste, copy-paste, copy-paste, how much am I typing?
- 03:09 Nothing, I love this.
- 03:12 Anything that saves me typing saves me typos.
- 03:15 All right, I'm going to close this one.
- 03:17 I'm not going to save that change.
- 03:19 And, so I took an email, I dropped it into a folder, I dropped it onto calendar,
- 03:24 I dropped it onto people.
- 03:25 Do you think I can make a task out of this email?
- 03:28 You bet, I can make a task out of this email, let go.
- 03:32 And there is my task pane, all ready.
- 03:35 And I can, of course, use the wonderful Assign Task
- 03:39 to one of my co-workers who will complete this task for me.
- 03:43 I love this process, it's called the drag and drop.
- 03:45 Please practice it, it is wonderful.
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