Outlook Low Vision: Email Signature

Hi, I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll explore how to create a signature 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.

You know, emails are like conversations. We each have our own voice, our own accent, our own style of expressing ourselves. Since emails are written communication, it's a little more challenging to make them sound warm and personal.

Adding a signature to an email is a method that many people use to let their personality shine through. Outlook provides us with tools to customize our signatures in various ways from the basics like selecting a favorite font style to including an inspiring thought, a mission statement, or a picture. We can make our emails our own by adding a signature.

Let's start off in a new email. In the ribbon at the top of our page, we begin in the Message tab. Here we find various customizing tools. Under the Include group, we find the Signature tool. When selected, a dropdown list appears. Here we click on signature with our mouse pointer. We've opened the signature editor, our one-stop shop for adding personal touches.

Let's start by selecting the New button. For demonstration, let's name this signature Work. Once we've typed the name of our signature, we select the OK button. We see our new signature listed and now we're ready to customize our signature. Our first control allows us to select our font style. When selected, we see a dropdown list of various fonts. It's a good idea to avoid unusual font styles because in order for the receiver to see our signature as we intended, they also need to have that font installed on their computer. Let's select Arial, a very common font.

The next control is font size. Let's select 18 point. Our next set of controls allows us to select various styles like bold, Italics, and underline. We select or unselect these styles by clicking with our mouse pointer. For today's demonstration, we'll leave them in the default setting with none of the styles selected. Next to styles we see the font color control. When selected, we see a palette with lots of color choices. For our Work signature, let's stick with black, the default color.

Our final control for today is the align control. This is the control that allows us to left align, center, or right align our signature. We'll leave it set to left alignment, the default setting. Now it's time to type in our personal information. We place our cursor in the edit field and type away. We can use a combination of fonts, sizes, and styles for emphasis. As you can see from my signature, I used a different font for my name to draw attention to certain elements.

One final step and we're done. Let's select the OK button. Now you might be asking, where is my signature? Well, Outlook doesn't add our new signature to the message that we initially opened. We have to add the signature manually to this one message. To do that, we go back to our Signature tool in our ribbon. We select our newly created signature from the dropdown list. Congratulations, you've just created your personalized signature.

Today we learned how to create a signature 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.