Save Time and Typing with Outlook 2007's Quick Parts

Outlook users, if you find yourself entering the same things into email messages, you should take a look at the Quick Parts feature, which saves snippets of both text and images for easy reuse. While Gina briefly mentioned this feature in her guide to Tweaking Outlook to empty your inbox faster, let's take a closer look at how to use it.


Open up a new email and create the "Quick Part" that you want to save for later re-use, then find Quick Parts in the Text section, and choose "Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery".






Give it a name and a brief description so you can easily find it later.





Now, any time you want to enter that snippet of text, you can simply pick it from the drop-down button menu. Hovering your mouse over it will show you the description that you entered above.





If you want to edit your Quick Parts, you can right-click on any one of them, and choose "Organize and Delete" from the menu.



This will bring up the Building Blocks Organizer window, where you can preview, delete, insert, or get back to the Edit Properties dialog that you were shown when first saving it. Unfortunately you can't actually edit them from within this dialog.






If you want to edit from Outlook, you'll have to insert it, make your changes, and then save it with the same name, and you'll be prompted to "redefine" the building block. Why they couldn't just say "replace" I don't know.







For even quicker access, I'd recommend adding Quick Parts to your Quick Access Toolbar, which is very easy to do from the right-click menu we used above.



If you are more of a keyboard junkie you may already be using Lifehacker's own Texter, but for the mouse-oriented, this feature can be a time saver. What would you use it for?

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