Yes, that’s right. I said threaten Outlook.
I’m not a violent person, but I can become rather … colorful … when my drag-and-drop functionality stops working. And when that happens, I know how to threaten Microsoft Outlook to restore it.
Let me back up for a second and ask: have you ever been clicking away inside of Outlook, reading messages, cutting through email and discovered that drag-and-drop functionality had stopped working? If you’re like me, I receive tons of email each day. I count on being able to use drag-and-drop to move things out of my inbox and into designated folders so that I can retain what little sanity I have left.
My typical email triage routine entails me reading new messages in my inbox, determining if I can address or somehow close out whatever is being asked of me within the email, and then shuttling the email to a folder for future reference. That “shuttling” part, for me, depends on drag-and-drop functionality.
Microsoft Outlook normally works fine for me (we’re buddies), but every now and then something happens and drag-and-drop stops working. For instance, I’m trying to drag an email message into a folder and Outlook simply doesn’t comply with my orders. Maybe the mouse cursor changes to let me think I’m dragging-and-dropping, but in reality the message movement never happens. The email remains in my inbox, and I’m left without an expedient way to organize messages.
I discovered, quite by accident, that there was a way to fix the problem – to restore drag-and-drop capability to Outlook. What is the way, you ask?
Well, I say give it the three-finger salute. Yes, that’s right: <CTRL><ALT><DEL>!
I don’t exactly understand the mechanic myself, but the <CTRL><ALT><DEL> sequence seems to do something to get drag-and-drop back to a functional state.
I thought I was crazy when I encountered this and that the usefulness of this information might be limited to just me, but my wife convinced me otherwise. She was banging her head against the same drag-and-drop problem I had, and simply hitting <CTRL><ALT><DEL> fixed it for her, as well.
I want to be clear here: I’m not advocating for a <CTRL><ALT><DEL> to reboot your system, or anything like that. I jokingly say that we’re threatening to reboot. Simply press the three keys, and then cancel out of the screen that appears. No logging out, and no launching into Task Manager required.
If you depend on drag-and-drop in Outlook like I do, and you find this trick works for you, please leave me a comment or let me know. I’d like to get an idea of how widespread this problem is so that I can give some feedback to Microsoft.
Good luck!