Outlook Low Vision: Email Send

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll learn how to send an email in Microsoft Outlook. 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. Let's jump right in by opening Outlook. We use our mouse pointer to double-click the Outlook icon on our desktop. In another workshop in this series, we learned about the Home tab in Outlook's ribbon bar. It's chock-full of useful tools and we're going to make use of one today. It's organized into groups to help us locate desired tools more easily.

The very first item on our Home ribbon is New Email. By using our mouse pointer and clicking on this icon, we bring up the New Email window. Okay, now that we have our blank email ready, our next step is to type our recipient's address much like we would do with a letter. We type the address in, you guessed it, the address field right here at the top of our window. Let's say you wish to send an email to me at Hadley. My email address is [email protected]. With email addresses, we must follow an exact format to make sure it's delivered. So for my email address, the format is my first name followed by the @ sign followed by the email provider which in this case is Hadley.

There are many email providers out there so yours might be Gmail or Yahoo or Comcast. Next comes a period followed by the last part which is called the domain name. Domain names often give us a hint as to the nature of the organization. In the case of Hadley, it's edu which tells us it's an educational organization. Government agencies like the IRS use G-O-V or gov. Many businesses and email providers use com, C-O-M. These days, we can even customize our own domain name to reflect our personality or business. The next line is Cc which stands for carbon copy. This is where we type the name of other recipients who we'd like to send this email to. Cc is a handy way to send the same email to different people. For example, if we wanted to share the title of this month's book selection with the member's of our book club, we just type their email addresses here in the Cc line.

Our next line is the subject line. This is where we type in a short comment about, well, the subject of our email. In another workshop in this series, we learned how when viewing our inbox the color of the subject line lets us know if an email has been read. Because the subject line gives us an idea of the nature of the email, it's a great way to skim through our items list and note the topic and status of each email without having to open it. That's pretty handy, isn't it? Let's say you wish to contact me about Hadley's latest instructional video. We'll type current instructional video in our subject line.

The final portion of our email is where we actually write the body of our email. Let's make a quick request for information and we'll be ready to send. Just one more step to go. We use our mouse pointer to click on the Send button located to the left of our address and subject lines. Voila, our email is on its way. Congratulations and welcome to the exciting world of email.

Today we discussed techniques for sending 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.