Restore Office’s ability to send documents in the body of an e-mail

Here’s a tip from an anonymous person who left feedback on one of my Excel courses.

Older versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint had two ways of e-mailing the document you were editing, using Outlook for e-mail: either sending the document as an attachment or inserting it into the body of an e-mail.

For some reason, Microsoft removed the second option from Office 2007 and 2010. Here’s how to put it back — either on the Ribbon bar or on the Quick Access Toolbar. The technique is similar in both the 2007 and 2010 versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

1. In one of the 2010 programs, right-click the Ribbon bar and from the pop-up menu, choose either Customize the Ribbon or Customize Quick Access Toolbar.
   
2. OR: in either one of the 2007 or 2010 programs, click the down arrow on the end of the Quick Access Toolbar and select More Commands. (You can customize the Ribbon in 2010, but not in 2007.)
   
3. Click the drop-down list at the top and select Commands Not in the Ribbon.
   
4. Scroll down and choose Send to Mail Recipient.
   
5. Click the Add button to insert it on the QAT, or in 2010, you can also insert it into a custom group on the Ribbon. (You can add items to groups that you create, but not to any of the built-in groups. Watch my video on customizing the Ribbon.).
   
6. Click OK to close the dialog.
7. Now when you have a document open, click the button you just inserted.
   
8. The top of the document will get mail fields like To and Subject. This is not a separate Outlook message — you’re still in Word, Excel or PowerPoint.
   
9. If you click the button again, without sending, the mail fields disappear and the screen returns to normal.

Note that this works if you have Outlook. It will not work with web-based mail like Gmail.