Useful Hacks and tricks for MS Outlook

Sorting out gremlins when pasting from MS Word into Outlook

Setting up and using Outlook templates

Sorting out gremlins when pasting from MS Word into Outlook

Very often you may be sending finished comm created in Word via Outlook. To do this, first copy the whole document by first selecting all ‘Ctrl + A’ and then copying it i.e. ‘Ctrl +C’

Within the Outlook email you’re using, right click in blank space and select the ‘Keep Source Formatting’ paste option.

Due to quirks in how these programmes operate, you may find a couple of areas where it hasn’t copied correctly across. The below are typical examples.

In the screenshot below: The hyperlink colouring and underlining has extended past the actual hyperlink to include

‘(“the Plan”)’. You can correct this manually.

The space has disappeared between the first two bullet points. See after the screenshot for how to sort.

You can fix this issue by highlighting the bottom of the affect paragraph. Click the arrow at the bottom right of ‘Paragraph’ section under the ‘FORMAT TEXT’ tab. Within this menu, make sure the ‘Don’t add space between paragraphs of the same style’ is neither ticked nor filled out in blue. This should re-establish the space between the two points.

Setting up and using Outlook templates

Sometimes, you need to send a very similar email several times a week. Instead of having to write it fresh each time or dig through your inbox to find it so you can copy the text, Outlook allows you to set up versions you can use as a template.

Setting up a template

Open a new Outlook email and put your content together until it’s in the form you will want to use multiple times.

File Save As.

Change the ‘Save as type’ to ‘Outlook Template’

Click SaveAccessing a template you’ve already made

Within Outlook, click ‘New items’

In that menu More Items Choose Form

In the ‘Choose Form’ menu, select ‘User Templates in File System’.

You should find a list of templates you’ve saved previously in this folder. Click on the template you want to use and a fresh email with all your content will open.