Say that you get a rambling e-mail from an associate that has contact information peppered throughout, and that you want to turn that information into an Outlook contact. The fastest way I’ve found to do that is to use the memo field as a staging area.

1. Highlight as much of the e-mail as you need to that encompasses all of the contact information, and copy it to the clipboard (Ctrl+C).
2. Start a new contact entry.
3. Paste the e-mail clipping into the memo area of the contact (Ctrl+V). (Don’t worry if extraneous formatting gets pasted and with the text, it won’t stay there long.)
4. Now, one at a time, highlight an individual element of contact information within the memo field, and drag it to the field for which it pertains. (For addresses, be sure to edit the information after it has been dragged into place, so that the street address and the city/state/zip on separate lines.)
5. After everything is where it belongs, merely delete the “trimmings” from the memo field.

Note: If you make a mistake, Undo works here (Ctrl+Z), but keep in mind that each field has its own undo-sequence. So, in order to undo a drag operation, it takes two steps: first click inside the destination field and undo that, then click inside the memo field and undo that.

Read more: Windows, Productivity