Tip: Select Text to Reply in Gmail

Do you consider yourself a person who likes to get down to the point? If this is your personality, then you likely have little patience replying to every e-mail in your inbox. To help speed things up, we have a Gmail tip that allows you to quickly reply to a specific point so that you can better make your point.

The ability to reply to an e-mail with the click of a button is great, but it can be slightly irritating to have to wade through a lengthy message just to remind yourself about the one detail that you are replying to. Gmail has a handy feature that will allow you to select and reply to one specific line of text; this makes it so that only this one important line will show up in your reply message, instead of your friend's entire distortion.

In Gmail, you will first need to enable this feature. Click on the gear icon on the upper right hand corner and then go to Settings. You will want to click on Labs, which is located on the right side of the menu bar. You will now see a dozen or two Lab features listed in alphabetical order, scroll down until you see the feature entitled Quote Selected Text. By default, this feature is disabled. To enable this feature, simply select the circle next to Enable and then scroll to the bottom of the list until you see the Save Changes text box--select this and you will be set.

While you are in the Gmail Labs section, it may be worth your time to check out all the other features that Google has made available to you. If you see anything that you like, then go ahead and enable it; don't forget to save your changes in the same way that you just enabled Quote Selected Text.

With this new feature enabled, you will now be able to reply to a specific section of text in the body of an e-mail. All you have to do is select the text that you want to reply to, and then hit Reply just like you would normally reply to a message. A new reply message will appear containing only the highlighted text in the body (as opposed to containing the entire message).

This is simple step will save you a few clicks along with the time it takes to locate a point in the body of a long message. It is worth mentioning that several other e-mail applications have this same feature. Checking to see if your other e-mail applications have this feature is as simple as selecting a section of text, hitting reply, and then seeing if only the selected text shows up in the reply message.

Be sure to check back here for more software productivity tips that will help you to better make your point.