Monday, February 7, 2011

A Time Saver, Quick Parts - Outlook 2007

How regularly do you use the same information to answer questions or reply  in your personal or professional email correspondences?
Quick Parts is available in both Outlook and Word 2007, re-use content easily, as many times as you like.  Like it's name, using Quick Parts can save you a lot of time when sending/replying email messages. In an attempt to keep control of your inbox, this tip may just be the one for you.

To Create/Save a Quick Part:

1.  From a new message, within the body of the message, select the text to be reused.







2.  From the Insert tab, within the Text group, from the Quick Parts drop down, select Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery.









3.  From the Create New Building Block dialog box, enter a name for the quick part and click on OK.











To use a Quick Part:

1.  Starting with a new message and within the body of the message. From the Insert tab, click on Quick Parts, a gallery/listing with all of your saved Quick Parts is displayed.  Click on the Quick Part and the content will be inserted at the existing cursor position.









  • Right-clicking on the desired Quick Part will display more advanced options for insertion.
  • Keyboard shortcut - enter/type the first three letters of the name of the quick part and press F3.
Give this a try, how many emails can you respond to in 2 minutes or less using Quick Parts? You will be surprised at how much time you save.

2 comments:

  1. This can be very helpful, but not quite the time-saver it ought to be. These instructions are also not quite complete. The F3 shortcut only works in Word, not in Outlook. It's also important to be aware that each application has its own galleries, which aren't shared, so if you want to use the same parts in both applications you'll have to create them twice.

    Why? That's the $64,000 question. In many ways Quick Parts are an advance over Office 2003's Auto-Text and Auto-Complete, but in other ways they've taken a step backward. In 2003 if you used Word as the e-mail editor you only had to define entries once to have them available in both applications and they were inserted the same way. Now, when Word is supposedly the way all e-mail is edited, we don't actually have all of its functionality for the purpose. Go figure.

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  2. Thank you for your comments, I don't use Quick Parts in Word but in Outlook 2010 I use them very often since email communication is how I support many users. As mentioned above, I type the first 3 letters on the Quick Part name and then Press F3 to insert the Quick Part. I tested my instructions and it works.

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