Using the new Tap feature in Outlook

When you’re putting together an email, sometimes you need to pull content from a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file you’ve worked on. There’s a new feature in Outlook 2016 (and in Word 2016) called Tap. This will show you slides, images, charts, objects, or any other item you have in files stored in OneDrive, and make it easy for you to add it to your email or document. Here’s how…

In your email, place your cursor in the Body of the email (it can’t be in the To or the Subject field), and click on Insert > Document Item (Tap):

You’ll get a pane on the right side of your email allowing you to insert items from files. I can search for certain phrases in the Search bar to narrow down my file selection, or I can let Microsoft Graph present items that appear to be relevant to the work I’ve been doing. In this case, I want to Choose Content from a PowerPoint file I’ve been working on:

The pane changes to show me selectable items in that file. In this case I can choose from All (pictures, slides, charts, objects, etc), and I could insert the item by clicking the Insert link under the item:

But if I only want to see complete slides, I can filter to only show slides instead of individual pictures, and use the Insert link under the slide to add it to my email:

And here’s my email with that slide inserted:

This is a new feature, and it seems like it still has some room to grow. It doesn’t appear you can actually put a SharePoint site in there to scan for files, so OneDrive looks to be the primary source target right now. But still… if you generate a lot of emails or Word documents that rely on reusing images or objects in other files, this can save you a lot of time by keeping you focused in your new document/email without going elsewhere to search for stuff.