Outlook 2013 Shortcuts: Creating Contacts and Tasks

Outlook 2013 features some handy shortcuts. Previously, we talked about the ability to quickly create appointments by dragging an email to the calendar along the Navigation Pane. It shouldn’t surprise you that you can drag an email to the Contacts area within Outlook and the email will be used to create a contact for your address book. The name of the sender and their email address will populate automatically. Similar to how the appointment shortcut functioned, Outlook will also take the body of the email and put that into the Notes area of the new contact. This might prove useful if you are trying to remember how you first came into contact with the person. If the sender of the email included a signature in their email, that will also have carried over to the Notes tab as part of the email. You can then use the information from the signature to pull over phone numbers, addresses, or whatever else you’d like to include in your contact.
When working with contacts in Outlook, you can also drag a contact (or contacts) to the Mail button on the Navigation Pane and Outlook will launch an email to the individuals you’ve selected.

What about tasks? Many emails contain action items that you need to track and complete. You can now drag an email message to the Tasks folder and a new task item will be created for you.

The new drag and drop functionality within Outlook makes the program even more useful than it already was. What I like about these shortcuts is that they’re intuitive. If you master one of them, you’ve mastered them all.