Small productivity tip for Outlook
I often find myself sending attachments in email, and I very rarely choose the method in which you click on the “Add Attachment” button in Outlook simply because I find it too slow to find attachments through the browse dialog box that pops up – usually I already have the files that I plan to send open in some Explorer already.
There are two things that I do, depending on whether I have already started typing the email to which I have to attach the documents, or if I haven’t yet started. If I already have started typing this email, then I simply select the files that I need to attach to the email (by select, I mean select them in Explorer) and drag them to the Outlook message window that I am typing my email in (and drop them). This of course adds them to the message as attachments.
If I haven’t yet started typing out the email, I can do two things. I can select the files I want to attach into the email message and right click them and choose “Send to”, and then “Mail Recipient” from the context menu. This opens up a new message window with the files as added as attachments. This, however, has the undesirable (perhaps not) side effect of text being added to the new message window (see picture below):
Another drawback of this method is that the new message window that opens is modal (for some reason). This means that till I close this Window, I can’t access Outlook anymore. This makes it not very usable for me. Since I am often doing multiple things at a give time.
So another method in this scenario is to select the files in your Explorer view, and then simply drag and drop them on the main Outlook window. What this does is that it creates a new message, and attaches the files to this message. This message doesn’t have any additional text, nor does it open a modal window, so you can access Outlook without closing the new message window.
Small tip, but it saves seconds several times a day.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 18th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Why not use the ‘send to’ option of the file? It directly opens a new mail with the file as an attachment.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:26 pm
As I mentioned above, that option has the undesirable side effects of a modal dialog as well as adding auto generated text to the email.
Sure, it will work, and you can use it in a lot of cases. For me, it rarely is suitable.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
Interesting. I always thought that dragging files into Outlook will add them into the folder. After reading your blog, I realized that the files get added into the folder only if you are dragging and dropping them into a folder within a PST, not the main Inbox.
Having said that, I don’t imagine I would be using this much though.
January 19th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Hmm… right, I didn’t know that part. It is strange though. What would I need to add files to Outlook folders for? Need to investigate and find out.
March 5th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
or the simplest things is copy the files using ctrl + c, click in message body and press ctrl + v
Images if in 72 DPI are inserted in message and rest of the stuff is attached.
March 5th, 2010 at 9:50 pm
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. Thanks