Threatening Outlook to Restore Drag-and-Drop Functionality

Have you ever experienced a loss of drag-and-drop functionality with the Microsoft Outlook client? If so, I might have a solution …

Yes, that’s right. I said threaten Outlook.

Angry Woman
Don’t make me come over there, 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.

DragAndDrop

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!

The Day Outlook Became My Secretary

In this post, I share a brief bit of magic that Outlook exhibited for me recently. I don’t know where it came from or if it is even is an indication of things to come … but I liked what I saw!

typewriterI feel that I’ve been tricked. Okay, maybe “tricked” is a harsh word, but let’s put it this way: I’ve seen a bit of the future, I like it, and I’m not sure if and when it’s coming back.

I recently returned from SPTechCon. While I was in San Francisco, I delivered a few sessions (including a new advanced PowerShell session) and managed to make it to Muir Woods to visit the Redwoods once again. The entire time I was in San Francisco, I was riding around in a rental car from Enterprise. I usually get my rental cars from Enterprise, but something weird happened when I was getting this rental car.

Outlook did me a favor.

When I booked the rental car with Enterprise, I received the following email:

Enterprise Pickup

Do you see the part stating “This event was automatically added to your calendar from email by Outlook?” That caught my attention. Outlook had never taken any action on my behalf prior to this trip, and I can’t say that I’ve seen it do anything since. But for some strange reason, this one car reservation got Outlook to do something new and cool.

I checked my calendar, and sure enough, there were events for both pickup and drop off.

Calendar View

I’ll be honest: I don’t know how these events got onto my calendar, and I don’t even know who wrote the code to make the magic happen. But in this one single instance, I feel like I’ve had a taste of what’s to come … and I really like it.

I did a little digging as I was writing this post to see if I could figure out where Outlook got its smarts from. I didn’t find a whole lot, but I did find this one post on Microsoft’s acquisition of Genee to accelerate intelligent experiences in Office 365. Maybe that had something to do with what I was seeing?

I like the idea of Outlook getting some intelligence and being able to look at my email to ascertain when things will happen. Maybe Delta will send me a trip confirmation and my flight times will end up on my calendar. Or maybe Mark will send me an email about a great Baconfest that’s happening in Harrison, Arkansas, and that event will get parsed and entered into my records so that I’ll know when I need to leave my house to make it there on-time.

I see a lot of potential for this sort of processing and assistance, but I think I’d like to understand it all a bit better before things move on. Heck, right now I’m not even sure if what happened to me is something that’s going to roll out more broadly … or if it was just a blip/test. As I indicated, I haven’t seen anything appear on my calendar since the car reservation, so I’m not even sure that it’s something that “someone” is rolling out.

But I like this. If it’s done right, it has the potential to simplify a lot of things we manually push ourselves to do today.

I’m okay with Outlook becoming my secretary. How about you?

ADDENDUM: 12/12/2016

My friend Tom Resing reached out via Facebook after I shared this blog post, and he opened the door to a world of settings I was simply unaware of. He pointed me to a link titled Automatically add travel and package delivery events to your calendar. It discusses how to control the behavior with Outlook online, and it’s definitely worth checking out. I’m always happy to discover new knobs and levers!

References and Resources

  1. Event: SPTechCon San Francisco
  2. Resources: Tapping the Power in PowerShell (slides)
  3. Resources: Tapping the Power in PowerShell (scripts)
  4. Location: Muir Woods
  5. Microsoft Blog: Microsoft acquisition of Genee to accelerate intelligent experiences in Office 365
  6. Blog: Mark Rackley
  7. Blog: Tom Resing
  8. Office Support: Automatically add travel and package delivery events to your calendar
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