If you’ve recently switched from Classic Outlook, you may have noticed that some of your favourite productivity features seem to have disappeared. You’re not imagining it – New Outlook removed drag and drop options that were tie-savers in many peoples’ daily workflows.
New Outlook Removed Some Drag and Drop Options
In Classic Outlook, creating contacts and tasks from emails was incredibly straightforward. You could simply drag an email to your Contacts folder to create a new contact, or drag it to Tasks to generate a to-do item. This intuitive functionality was a massive time-saver for everyone.
Unfortunately, New Outlook changed the options, it kept the most useful one – creating calendar events – but removed all the others. When you attempt to drag emails to the Contacts or Tasks sections, you’ll encounter a frustrating “no entry” symbol instead of the experience you once enjoyed.
This change has left many people searching for alternative options that will work in this new version.
The good news is that there are other ways, although not always as straight-forward as we were used to.
Creating Contacts from Emails – Alternative Method
Fortunately, there’s still a reliable way to create contacts from Outlook emails, though it requires a few more steps:
Step-by-Step Process:
- Open the email (reading pane or separate window) containing the contact information you want to save
- Hover your mouse over the sender’s email address, in either the from, to or cc section
- Wait for the contact card to appear – this shows basic information about the sender
- Click the three dots (more options) on the contact card
- Select “Add to contacts” from the dropdown menu (you’ll see “Edit contact” if they’re already saved)
- Review and modify the contact details in the created contact card
- Click Save to add them to your contacts list
This method works regardless of which email account you’re using and automatically captures the sender’s name and email address, making it reasonably easy despite the extra steps required.
Yes, this is an option in Classic Outlook as well.
The biggest difference in this option, is that the email content isn’t added into the Contact’s notes section. You’ll need to manually copy and paste that if it’s important.
Creating Tasks from Emails (With Major Limitations)
Creating tasks from emails in New Outlook is where things become significantly more complicated, and the limitations depend on your account setup.
The Account Type Issue
Here’s where understanding primary versus secondary accounts becomes relevant. Your primary account is whichever email account you connected to New Outlook first. Any additional accounts are considered secondary accounts, and this distinction affects task creation functionality.
For Primary Accounts:
- Hover over the email you want to convert to a task
- Click the flag icon – this familiar feature still exists
- Navigate to your To Do list to find the flagged email under the “Flagged email” section
- Edit the task to add additional details and due dates
- The task maintains a link back to the original email for easy reference
For Secondary Accounts:
This is where Microsoft’s changes become particularly frustrating. Whilst you can still flag emails in secondary accounts, these flagged items won’t appear in your task list. Microsoft has removed easy task creation from secondary email accounts.
Workaround Solutions for Task Creation
If you need to create tasks from emails in secondary accounts, your options are limited:
Option 1: Manual Copy and Paste Method
- Keep the relevant email open in one window or tab
- Navigate to your To Do list and click “Add a task”
- Copy and paste relevant information from the email into the task details
- Add due dates and priorities manually
Option 2: Use Classic Outlook (Temporary Solution)
Classic Outlook still supports the full drag-and-drop functionality. However, this is only a temporary solution as Microsoft plans to discontinue Classic Outlook around 2029.
The Impact on Email Productivity
These changes represent a significant step backwards for email productivity in Microsoft 365. Many of us frequently used the quick conversion of emails to actionable items, and the current limitations force users to adapt to less efficient processes.
Looking Forward: What This Means for Outlook Users
As someone who regularly teaches Outlook productivity techniques, I understand how frustrating these limitations can be. The removal of intuitive drag-and-drop functionality forces users to remember and use alternative processes, ultimately slowing down daily workflows.
If email-to-contact and email-to-task conversion are crucial to your productivity, consider which email account you designate as your primary account when setting up New Outlook. Using Outlook’s settings you can change which account is your primary email fairly easily, but consider the potential impact that this might cause. Based on your needs this change might not have any impact 😄.
We can hope that Microsoft will return this functionality in future updates, knowing these alternative methods will help you continue to be productive with the current New Outlook options.
Written with the help of Claude AI from an original transcription.
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