Outlook Low Vision: Email Move and Copy

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll learn how to move an email in Microsoft Outlook. We'll also explore how to copy an email. This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

You know, once we start using email, we find it's fun to have our back and forth conversations with lots of different people. The only downside is that our inbox quickly fills with lots of email, not unlike a mailbox filled with letters. It makes it tough to find that special one we're looking for. That's why it's great to know we can quickly organize our emails into folders. In another workshop in this series we learned how to create a new folder.

Today we'll learn how to move an email from our inbox to a folder for easy access. We'll also learn how to copy an email for those times when we want to store them in several places at once. Let's start off by locating an email in our inbox. We'll use our email from Jane here at the top of our inbox.

We actually have two ways to move our email to the desired folder and for today's demonstration we'll use the recipes folder. The first one involves clicking and dragging our email to the recipes folder in the navigation pane. Let's try it out. I'll place my mouse pointer on Jane's email, then click and hold the left button on my mouse. While it's pressed, I drag the pointer to the recipes folder and release the left button. This moves Jane's email from the inbox to the recipes folder. We can verify this by opening our recipes folder and here it is, just where we wanted.

As promised, there is another way to move emails. We can use the tools in our ribbon bar to move emails in a snap. Let's select this email from my friend Ricky. Now under the home tab in our ribbon, let's navigate to the move section. Here we find the move icon. Let's click on it and then select move once again. When we select move with our mouse pointer, a dialog box appears. It contains a list of recently opened folders. If we don't see our desired folder in the list, we select other folders with our mouse pointer. This opens the move items dialog box.

We see all the folders listed in our navigation pane including our recipes folder. Since that's the folder we want, let's select it with our mouse pointer and then select the okay button to finalize the move. We see that our email is no longer in the item list. When we open our recipes folder, we see our emails have been moved right where we want them. Sometimes we wish to move an email to a folder and keep a copy in our inbox as a reminder to respond to it. Easy enough. All we have to do is make a copy of that email and then we have one to keep and one as a handy reminder.

Let's go through the process of copying an email. We'll use Jane's email as an example. The first method is similar to the technique we learned when moving an email, click and drag with our mouse pointer. We right click on the email we wish to copy. While holding down right click, we drag our mouse pointer to the desired folder. When on top of the desired folder, we release the right mouse button. We then select copy in our context menu by clicking the left mouse button. This drops a copy of the email into our books folder. When we check our books folder, we see our copy safely tucked away. Now we have a copy of the email in our books folder and the original email in our inbox as a reminder to respond to Jane.

Just like moving emails, copying emails can be done using our ribbon tools. Let's use Kitty's email as an example. We'll focus on her email and then select the move tool in our ribbon. We select move once again and in our dropdown menu we select copy to folder. This brings up a copy items dialog box. We choose the desired folder in the list. In our case we'll choose books. To finalize the action we press the enter key or select the okay button. We see the copy of Kitty's email is stored in the books folder and the original waits for us in our inbox.

Today we learned about moving and copying an email in Microsoft Outlook. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Microsoft Outlook.