How to Create a Signature Line in Microsoft Outlook 2013
Email Signatures are an additional element of emails in Outlook 2013, containing information such as Phone Number, Company Name and Address. Signatures can be created and added through the Insert Tab, by clicking on Signature and selecting New. Outlook allows for specific Signatures to be set as default and particular Signatures to be associated with email accounts. Creating a new Signature involves assigning it a Name, which then appears in the drop-down Signature dialog. Signatures can be added to emails manually or automatically, and also can be edited. Attachments can be added to email through Attach File and Outlook Items.
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Video transcripts:
Welcome back to our course on Outlook 2013. In the previous section, we created this email and there was just one thing left to do. Well, in fact, there are two things left to do but there’s really one new thing left to do and that is to look at putting a signature on an email. This is pretty straightforward. Obviously your signature will be particular to you and you may need more than one. If I click on Insert, one of the options on the Insert tab is that one, Insert Signature. There’s a little drop down next to it which would let me choose from my signatures when I’ve got a number setup. I haven’t got any setup at all at the moment though I’m going to set one up for Toby Work. So click on Signatures and I can create a new signature.
Now on the right I can choose my default signature and I can associate a signature with a particular email account. So let’s start with New, type a name for this signature. I’m going to call this signature Toby Work and now in the main body down here, I can actually enter the details of the signature. Now typically the sort of thing I’d put in a signature would be a phone number, maybe a company name, maybe a mobile phone or cell phone number. So let me put in here. These are not, of course, real phone numbers, as you’ll realize. And then I could maybe put my company name. I may even choose to put my address in there as well. When I finish with that, that’s my signature, click on OK, and I’ve created a signature.
Now at any time that I want to, I can go back into edit that signature. So if I click on the drop down again and select Signatures, Toby Work, I can edit that. See it’s selected down here. I’ve just realized that I forgot to put my email address in there so let me just type that in. Now I’m happy with that signature as it stands at the moment. Now I can associate it with one or more of my email accounts.
Now for the toby.a account which is my default account at the moment, I don’t want to use that signature so I’m going to stick with none for that. But for my Toby Work account, I want to make this the default signature. Now apart from including it as the default signature with this particular account, so Toby Work will get the Toby Work signature, I can also specify that the signature should be used when I reply to or forward an email. So here under replies and forwards, I can also say that that signature should automatically be included. Now on this occasion, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to decide on the occasion whether I want to include a signature or not. But this setup he will ensure that for all new emails for my Toby Work account, the Toby Work signature will be used. So click on OK and now because I’d already created this particular email and it is an email from Toby Work account the signature won’t be automatically included. It would be on a new message for that account. So I need to manually insert that signature. So all I need to do is to go to the end of the email and then just click on the Signatures button in the drop down and choose Toby Work. That signature is now included as part of the email.
Now just to show that this works okay, I’ve got my draft email still in progress. You can see the one in the drafts folder. I’ve just minimized it for the moment. But if I click on New Email note that if it’s from Toby Work, I get the signature automatically included. Whereas if I switch to my toby.a account and click on New Email, new email appears from toby.a but there’s no signature. I could, of course, create a signature to use with that account and then when I created a new email for that account, I’d get that signature.
So just more thing to do now in relation to this email to Don; I want to attach this presentation. It’s pretty much the same as we’ve done attachments already. I could insert Outlook items if I was sending this email to people who all used Outlook or I can do Attach file. In this case, on my desktop I’ve put the presentation that I want to send, double click on that, and it’s now an attachment to this email.
What happens when I click the Send button will depend on my Send and Receive settings. But with my current Send and Receive settings where Outlook 2013 will send immediately, then as soon as I click Send, the message goes from Drafts into Outbox, it is sent, and once it’s sent the message moves to Sent Items. If I don’t have send immediately set as my option, then send puts the message into the Outbox and whenever the next send does occur, which could be on a timer or it could be a manual send or a manual send as part of a send and receive, then the message will move to the Sent Items folder.
So that’s it on signatures, attachments, and sending emails. In the next section, we’re going to look at receiving emails and in particular checking out what’s in the Inbox. So please join me for that.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
