How-To Guides

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.

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.

See how you can configure Outlook with a Live Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! or AOL account.

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

If you are in IT support or just are interested to find out which files Outlook uses and where it stores its settings; this is the guide for you.

Command line switches can control Outlook start-up behavior.

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

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

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.

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

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!

Migrating from Outlook Express, Windows Mail or Windows Live Mail to Microsoft Office Outlook is a relatively easy process but there are a few thing you should be aware of. In addition to mail, this guide will also discuss how you can migrate your contacts and calendar.

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?

Planning to upgrade to Outlook 2010? This guide contains a lot of preparation and other information to ensure a smooth transition.

Macros are often used to achieve a goal in Outlook more quickly. However, the option to execute a macro isn’t always easily accessible. Learn how to create a button for your macro to make the macro even more productive.

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

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!

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

If you don’t like the way Outlook looks like by default, you might want to find out how you can change the fonts types, sizes and colors in Outlook to suit your taste better.

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.

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

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.

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.

It doesn’t matter if you are sending real Christmas cards or electronic ones, Outlook can be useful to manage either. This guide includes some tips and references to help you prepare.

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

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

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.

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

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.

While this guide is mainly focused on separating mails received from different accounts, the techniques can be used to sort mail based on other criteria as well.

Learn how you can add a column which display’s the sender’s email addresses to your message list view so you will not only see the sender’s name.

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

Keep your Mailbox clean and up to speed!

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

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

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.

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

Learn how to send many personalized emails in one go by doing a mail merge.

You can send your current Office document (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) directly as an attachment of a new email. You can also choose to send it as a pdf-file. However, in some cases it is convenient to send both which is cumbersome to do. With this macro, we create a button that automates this task and creates a new mail message with the current document attached in both its orignal format and as pdf-file.

This code has been written for Word and Outlook 2007 and mimics the mail document in-line feature to allow you to use additional features in Outlook when sending a document in-line.

Are you in a corporate environment and want to control the signatures of the users or add a disclaimer to all outgoing emails? This guide discusses various Outlook and Exchange level solutions which you can use to standardize signatures and to use information stored in Active Directory to construct them.

Outlook offers several methods to work with message templates to be more productive in any situation. This guide discusses the various methods and some tips to get you started with.

Easily export all the contact information that you need to Excel without needing to go through the Export wizard and mapping columns. This method also allows you to export more than just the standard columns.

Learn how to customize the Map It function for Contacts. With these tweaks you can change the mapping from Bing Maps to Goolge Maps or any other mapping service. You can also modify it to have it act like a route planner and get driving directions to the contact as well.

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

This guide contains a macro for creating a Map It function for Appointment and Meetings similar to the Map It function for Contacts. With this macro the Location field is used to get directions in your favorite on-line route planner.