Tips Tuesday: Quick Parts for Quick Drafting

Do you have a particular portion of an e-mail or an entire e-mail that you end up sending repeatedly? It could be something as simple as a reporting e-mail or an e-mail where you discuss your fees. It could also be a just a single paragraph that you use often or even just a sentence.

Let me introduce you to “Quick Parts”. Let’s say that I always use the same text for my annual return reports to my client and I didn’t want to keep typing that out over and over again.

You can go into the last e-mail that you sent that had the text you wanted to save (alternatively, you can open a new e-mail and type it out again). Click reply or forward so that you have an e-mail that you are able to edit the text in. Select the portion of that e-mail, or the entire e-mail, that you want to preserve for future use and then navigate to Insert > Quick Parts > Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery. A pop-up will appear asking you to give that Quick Part a name. Then click Ok. Now the entirety of the text that you selected is saved here.

This will also work if you’re in the process of drafting an e-mail and have one of those days where the words flow and you come up with the perfect wording for a particular issue or part of your practice, wording so eloquent that you want to ensure should the context arise, you could use it again. Follow the same steps as above and save that selection to your Quick Part Gallery before you send the e-mail for future use (or if you forget to save it before you send, use the above steps)!

To test it out, open up a new e-mail, navigate to Insert > Quick Parts and then in the drop-down menu that appears should be the Quick Parts that you have saved. Click on it and the text of that Quick Part will insert into your e-mail. You can insert Quick Parts anywhere in your e-mail and the Quick Part will insert where your cursor is placed.

If you need to edit or remove a Quick Part from the gallery, navigate to the drop-down menu, right click on any of the Quick Parts and click Organize and Delete.

-Charlene Scheffelmair (@cscheffy11)

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