Outlook 2010 top 11 cool things – #8 Using drag and drop to create tasks
Alright the title is a little misleading and this one definitely goes in the category of “I just found this out but it could well have been there in Office 2007 and maybe even 2003!”, but I hope you’ll forgive the inclusion, it’s new for me in 2010 and I think it’s really useful.
It’s a quick way of using tasks rather than your Inbox as your task list.
How many times have you heard lawyers (or even people in Legal IT depts) say they use their Inbox as a to-do list? (I’ve even heard of some people using their deleted items folder as a task list but let’s not go there!). This tip is a quick way to use drag and drop to quickly create a task using the information within the email.
The scenario:
- You get an email that requires an action.
- You want to keep the information on the email with the task.
- You could (as I used to) create a task with – refer to email from Jason 02/08/2011. But you can’t clear that email out until the task has been actioned.
OR
- You can drag and drop your email to the Tasks navigation button in the bottom left, when you let go of the mouse button a task is created with the Subject as the title of that email and with the content of the email in the task body. Set your due date and then you can delete the email. Job done!
This also works for calendar items. So if you want to pull a meeting together where the email would be useful pasting into the meeting request, just use the same process and drag and drop into the Calendar navigation button.
