You have 22 e-mail messages from customers and your manager wants you to assemble those messages in a single document. What do you do?

Open each message individually and copy and paste the text? Nope. Fire up the Import/Export wizard? Think again. Here’s a quick and easy tip for putting those messages directly into a text file.

It’s “Save As” to the rescue
I’ll demonstrate this tip using Outlook 98. Here’s how it works. Pick any folder and start selecting the messages you want to save in a file. If all of the messages are in a row, you can hold down the [Shift] key while you press [Down Arrow] to select the messages. If the messages aren’t all in a row, hold down the [Ctrl] key while you click on the messages you want to process. When you’ve selected your messages, your Outlook folder will look like the one in Figure A.

Figure A
The first step is to select the messages you want to save in a file.

Next, open the File menu and choose the Save As option. When you do, the Save As dialog box will open and prompt you to enter a filename. There’s only one option for the file type (.txt). Click Save, and Outlook saves the messages you’d selected in a text file. Use Word (or any other text editor) to open that file, and you’ll see results like those shown in Figure B.

Figure B
Here’s what the messages look like when you open the text file.

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