How To's


General

Installing

Configuring

E-mail Management

E-mail Composing

Contacts



General

Backup and Restore

This guide is all about backing up and restoring your Outlook Data. It describes various methods and explains which method is best to be used in which scenarios.


Clear the Most Recently Used lists

For certain actions Outlook holds a list of recently used items so you have quicker access to them. In some case you want to clear this list.


Delete a stuck Read Receipt

Seeing messages being send without something in the Outbox? This could be a stuck read receipt.


How to use command line switches

Command line switches can control Outlook start-up behavior.


Remove the Outlook icon from your desktop

Get your Desktop clean by removing the Outlook icon from you Desktop.


Restore Deleted Items from an Outlook PST-file

Deleted a message and even cleared you’re Deleted Items folder? See how you can still try to get your message back.


Setting Permissions on a Mailbox

Make sure your colleagues only get the permissions you want them to have and delegate your mail properly for when you are out of the office.


Signing your own macros with SelfCert.exe

Sign your own macros with SelfCert.exe so there is no more need to lower your security settings.


What Do The Icons Mean?

You probably already know the closed envelope, the open envelop, marked as forwarded, marked as replied and if you are in an Exchange organization the Out of Office icon probably looks familiar as well but do you know the rest? See the full overview of Outlook icons!



Installing

Outlook 2003: Reverting back to /Being compatible with a previous version of Microsoft Office Outlook

Planning to downgrade to a previous version of Outlook or want to be able to open your pst-file in a previous version of Outlook?



Configuring

Create your own fully customized Toolbar

Place all your favourite options on a Toolbar and sort them the way you want it for easy access.


Creating a Permanent New Mail Desktop Alert in Outlook 2003

Like the New Mail Alert but hate the fact that it only stay for up to 30 seconds? With a small modification you can make it stay up to 50 days!


Enabling/Disabling Cached Exchange Mode through the Registry

Check or change the status of Cached Exchange Mode by changing a registry key.


Navigation Pane Tips & Tricks

With the enhancements of the Navigation Pane also came quite a lot of options but not all of them are really easy to notice or to work with right from the start.


Open link from Outlook in new window

Make sure that when you click a hyperlink it gets opened in a new Internet Explorer window.


Setting Outlook Group Policies

When you are in an Active Directory network environment you can set Outlook policies to enforce settings on your users. If you are a home user you might want to set policies on what your children can and cannot do in Outlook.



E-mail Management

Allow Automatic Forwarding/Replying to the Internet

In an Exchange environment you might encounter that your automatic forward/reply rules and Out of Office Assistant aren’t working. They probably are working but are forwarded/replying to a message from the Internet. This is disabled as a secure default on the Exchange server. This article explains how Exchange Administrators can change this behaviour.


Color Code Your E-mails

Organize your mail by color coding them automatically when a message arrives.


Color Code Your E-mails Advanced

Already master the basics of color coding? Get even more organized by color coding based on specific message properties.


Open Message in Internet Browser

Outlook 2007 uses Word as the HTML rendering engine which could end up in a malformed display of the email message. Use a simple script to render the message in an Internet browser of your choice by a click of a button.


Save Embedded Pictures in Their Original Format

Do you only have the option to save an included picture or animation as a bmp-file?


Schedule a Recurring E-mail

If you are sending the same e-mails on a recurring basis like daily, weekly, monthly etc… to send for instance a reminder or an update report as attachment you may want to automate that. Outlook doesn’t natively have this feature but with some code or add-in it can be done.


Sorting Outgoing E-mails

Sort your outgoing e-mails into folders without creating duplicates.


Tips For Cleaning Up Your Mailbox

Keep your Mailbox clean and up to speed!



E-mail Composing

Adding Sound and Scrolling Text (workaround)

Workaround for adding sound and scrolling text to your messages after applying Windows XP SP2.


Adding Sound to Your E-mail

Making Birthday or Holiday cards? Find out how you can add sound or moving text or a video or…


Creating Signatures

Creating the signature you want with for example a company logo in it can be quite of a hassle. Learn both the basics and advanced examples on creating a signature in Outlook.


Edit the HTML Source Code while composing a Message

Editing the HTML source code has been made very easy in Outlook Express but not in Microsoft Office Outlook.


Send Word Document As Email

This code has been written for Word and Outlook 2007 and mimics the mail document in-line feature which was available in previous versions of Office but dropped in Office 2007.



Contacts

Export Contacts to Excel

Although the Import and Export allows you to export to an Excel spreadsheet I think that the Wizard isn’t much of a help in getting it exported the way you want it. Also mapping and choosing fields to export isn’t much fun in the wizard either. Fortunately there is another, more graphical (WYSIWYG), way to do this as well.


Update general info for multiple contacts

Use views to easily update general info for multiple contacts like the Business Address for when a company relocates.



Can't find what you are looking for?
More Outlook tips can be found at MSOutlook.info .

 



Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003 Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
My book written with
Sue Mosher