WORKSHEET 11

WORKSHEET 11
EMAIL (v)

DRAFTS,
THE OUTLOOK EXPRESS FIND TOOL,
PASTING TEXT BETWEEN EMAIL AND WORD,
OUTLOOK EXPRESS HELP
AND
DIFFERENT TYPES OF EMAIL ACCOUNTS

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INTRODUCTION TO WORKSHEET

This worksheet covers the following topics:

Using the Drafts folder
Introduction to the Find tool
How to find email messages
Using the Find Message tool
Opening a message you have found
How to find people in your Address Book
Pasting text from email into Word (and vice versa)
Using Outlook Express Help
Different types of email accounts

A note about email programs

This worksheet is based on the use of Microsoft Outlook Express 5.0. (See the note about email programs at the beginning of Worksheet 3 if you do not have Outlook Express installed on your computer).

Mouse instructions

"Click", as used here, always means click once with the left mouse button.
"Double click", as used here, always means double click with the left mouse button
"Right click", as used here, always means click once with the right mouse button

Instructions

All instructions which you should carry out on your own computer look like this example:

Open a new Word document

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USING THE DRAFTS FOLDER

Imagine the situation - you start writing an important email, get interrupted and need to save your work without sending it. What do you do? The answer is - save your email in the drafts folder. This is how you do it.

Open your email program
Open a new message
Fill in the To box (addressee), a subject and enter a line of text in the text box.

So far so good. Now you want to save your work in the Drafts folder:

Click on the X in the top right hand corner of the new message window as if you were going to close the message.

This will bring up the following dialogue box:

If you select "No", you will lose what you lose your new message and everything you have entered.
If you select "Cancel", you will be returned to the new message.
If you select "Yes", your work will be stored in the Drafts folder.

You can now return to this message when you next have time by opening the Drafts folder and double clicking on your message. You can then either complete it and send it, or save it again in Drafts.

INTRODUCTION TO THE FIND TOOL

In a Worksheet 9 (Windows v - Using Find and Help), you learnt how to use the Find tool to find files stored on your computer's hard disk. The Find tool in Outlook Express is very similar. We are going to look at two ways of using the Outlook Express Find tool:

How to find email messages
How to find people in your Address Book

1. HOW TO FIND EMAIL MESSAGES

USING THE FIND MESSAGE TOOL

Open Outlook Express
Click on the Edit menu
Run your mouse over Find and click on Message, like this:

This will open the following dialogue box:

This is where you tell Find what to look for and where to look for it. As you can see, there are many ways to look for a message:

If you are looking for a message from a certain person, then fill in their name in the From box.
If you are looking for a message to a certain person, then fill in their name in the To box.

You can also search for a message by specifying

its subject (Subject box)
part of the text in the message (Message box)
when it was received (Received before and Received after boxes)
whether the message has an attachment
whether the message is flagged

Here is an example:

In this example I am looking for a message which I know Simon (I can't remember his surname) sent me. I know it had the word "events" in the title and I received it sometime after the beginning of March.

After filling in this information, it is important to check that Find will look in the right place for the message. As you can see above, at the moment Find is going to look in the Deleted Items folder. However, I want Find to look in all my folders, not just the Deleted Items folder, so the next thing I have to do is change the contents of the Look in box by clicking on the Browse button. This will bring up the following dialogue box:

To search all my folders, I need to click on "Local Folders" (you may need to use the scroll bar to reveal Local Folders) and then click on OK. This makes "Local Folders appear in the Look in box, like this:

Finally, I click on the Find Now button, Find looks for the file and displays the results of this search underneath the dialogue box, like this:

As you can see, Find has found a message sent to me by Simon Field on 14 March with the title "Your Events and Teachers' Associations". If I want to see which folder this message is in, I must use the scroll bar (or maximise the Find window):

Here it can be seen that the message I am looking for is in a folder called "ELTECS-AME-L".

OPENING A MESSAGE YOU HAVE FOUND

To open the message I have found I can either simply double click on the message in the results box above, or I can go to the "ELTECS-AME-L" folder and open the message from there.

2. HOW TO FIND PEOPLE IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK

As was mentioned above, Find can be used to search for people in your Address Book as well as email messages. To do this:

Open Outlook Express
Click on the Edit menu
Run your mouse over Find and click on People, like this:

This will open the following dialogue box:

As when searching for email messages, you can look for people in your address book by inserting text in any of the search boxes. For example, if I type the word "britishcouncil" in the Email box, and click Find Now, Find will find all the people in my Address Book whose email address contains the word "britishcouncil", like this:

According to the results, there are 60 people in my Address Book whose email address contains the word "britishcouncil".

To see more details about the person you were looking for, simply double click on the person's entry in the results box (or highlight the person's name and click on the Properties button to the right of the results box).

PASTING TEXT FROM EMAIL INTO WORD (AND VICE VERSA)

It is very straightforward to copy and paste text from an email into a Word document, or from a Word document into an email. This is how to do it:

Open the email message which contains the text you wish to copy.
Highlight the text and click on Edit and then Copy (or right click in the highlighted area and click on Copy)

(This copies the text you have selected into the computer's short term memory, ready for pasting into any other document you choose.)

Now open the Word document into which you want to paste this text
Place your cursor in the place in the document where you want the text to be pasted and click on Edit and then Paste (or right click and click on Paste).

To paste text from a Word document into an email message, simply reverse this process.

USING OUTLOOK EXPRESS HELP

In Worksheet 9 (Windows v - Using Find and Help), you learnt how to use Help for Windows. As was explained in Worksheet 9, all Microsoft applications have a Help facility, but only Help for Windows is accessed through the Start button.

To open Help for Outlook Express:

Outlook Express (if it is not already open)
Click on Help which is on the Menu Bar at the top of the window.
Then click on Contents and Index.

This will open a new window, like the one below. Here it is possible to search for help on everything to do with using Outlook Express. As an example, I typed "addr" in the search box and then pressed Display in order to reveal Help topics connected with Address Book.

I could then double click on one of these topics to reveal the Help notes (or highlight the topic and click on Display again).

DIFFERENT TYPES OF EMAIL ACCOUNTS

To finish off this worksheet, I would like to say a few words about different types of email accounts.

School email accounts

If you are a teacher and have an email account which has been given to you by your school, it is usually only possible to access this email account at your school, unless you speak to your ICT administrator and ask him/her to enable you to access your account from a remote location, eg at home.

Webmail accounts

Many people use webmail accounts (Internet or Web email accounts) as it is possible to access these accounts from any computer connected to the Internet.

One disadvantage with such accounts is that you usually have to be on-line to access them. This does not matter when Internet access is free, but it does if you have to pay for the time you spend on the Internet. In this case, you might like to compose emails off-line (not connected to the Internet) in Word, then when your text is ready, go on-line and paste the text into a new email message ready for sending.

Similarly, you can paste text from an email into a Word document, go off-line and read the text without having to pay connection charges.

Another option is to open a Hotmail email account and use it off-line in conjunction with Outlook Express on your own computer, at home for example.

ISP accounts

In many countries, it is now possible to obtain a free email address from an ISP (Internet Service Provider). Examples in the Czech Republic include Volny and Quick.

These accounts have the advantage that you can use them off-line with Outlook Express, for example, but you can also access your latest email messages and reply to these from any computer connected to the Internet.

This type of email account is the best option if you often use email at home.

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That is the end of this worksheet. I hope you have been successful. If you have found any inaccuracies or found any of the instructions confusing, please contact me, Phil Brabbs, at brabbs@volny.cz

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