Here is a tool inside of Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Word 2007 that can save you a great deal of time. What this tool does is insert a paragraph of text, including formatting into your email or document in a matter of two or three clicks.
This feature is called “Quick Parts”. I don’t know about you, but I could have thought of at least 10 better names for the great little function.
It is located in the “Insert” sub menu in both Word and Outlook. I had always thought that Word would have this function, but I really like the idea of having this feature in Outlook. When typing emails on the same topic to a number of people, with a few changes in the email – it would be great to have something that just inserts the often used text. “Quick Parts” does just that.
To save the text to the system, highlight the text you want to store and click on the “Insert” submenu. Now click on the “Quick Parts” menu and select “Save selection to Quick Part gallery”. Fill in the fields to give you a better idea on what the text contains and click “OK”.
To retrieve the text in the body of the email message, click the submenu “Insert” and select “Quick Parts”, and select the content you want. It then pastes the text formatted into your email body. What a great time saver.
Two things I think would have been great, other than the very strange name:
• The text should be available to both Word and Outlook, at present each has it’s own gallery.
• There should be an option to allocate a “Quick Key” sequence, so that while typing you could use the quick key and insert the text.
This is a real time saver!
Contributed by:
Malcolm Pearson
www.tech4law.co.za
