CTRL + Shift + V to Move Emails in Outlook
By Tana M. Mann Easton, Lead Efficiency Engineer
I am so happy I was introduced to keyboard strokes early in my professional career. In order to perform functions in most computer programs, you can either use your mouse to make selections or you can press keys on your keyboard to make the same selections.
A coworker of mine heavily encouraged me to learn keyboard strokes because she swore it would save me time. She sat right next to me, and every time she was teaching me something new or just observing me, if I reached for my mouse and she caught me, she would lightly yell, “No!”
After a couple of weeks of forcing my mind to learn keyboard strokes, I noticed that the lessons had sunk in. And using the keyboard was so much faster! Using a mouse felt like it required conscious effort to perform a computer function. But if I used keyboard strokes, it was like I would think of the function I wanted to perform and then less than a second later my fingers unconsciously had already pushed the buttons to make the function happen. The phenomenon was akin to practicing typing on a keyboard for years and realizing after a certain amount of time that you no longer have to think of the letters and which finger has to move but instead your body relies on muscle memory and as soon as you think an entire word, your fingers have already typed it.
Well, one of the keyboard strokes I have used THE MOST in my career and has saved me SO MUCH time is CTRL + Shift + V to move emails in Outlook. If you’ve trained with me or met me, you know I keep my inbox at zero, which means I need to delete or move every email out of my inbox. And I’m the kind of person who has quite a few file folders in which to move my emails.
Most people that I’ve met will use their mouse to move emails over to their file folders. But if you’re like me and have many email file folders, it sometimes takes a bit of time to scroll with your mouse to find the right folder in which to move your email. A much, much, MUCH faster way to move emails is to use keyboard strokes.
Let’s say I have a newsletter that I’ve read, and I want to move it to my “Newsletters” email file folder in Outlook. I make sure that email is highlighted in my inbox and then I hit the keys CTRL and Shift and V at the same time. This will then bring up the Move items window that shows me my file folders. I can start typing the name of the file folder I want to move the email into and hit Enter once the folder is highlighted. And that’s it. My email will now be out of my inbox and in my file folder.
If you have sub-folders under your email file folders and can’t see those sub-folders right away when trying to move an email (for example, if your “Newsletters” folder is a sub-folder of your “Information” folder), then you just start typing in the name of the main folder (“Information” for this example), hit the right arrow key to open the sub-folders, and then start typing in the name of the sub-folder.
At a past job, I would show all new hires how quickly I could move emails to folders using keyboard strokes, and I don’t think there was ever a person whose jaw didn’t drop at how quickly my fingers could fly through a screen of emails. It really is remarkable how much faster your fingers can accomplish tasks than using your mouse. I would highly encourage people to give keyboard strokes a try and to start with using CTRL + Shift + V to move emails in Outlook. It will feel awkward and slow at first, but if you force yourself to stick with it and practice, your muscle memory will finish tasks before you even consciously know you want to do them.
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Sincerely Yours,
Focus to Evolve Team