Outlook 2010: Inserting Snapshot

 




              Outlook 2010 has provided a wide variety of features while sending a mail from inserting another mail message as an attachment to filtering the emails. This has increased the usability of Outlook and the features provide a way to users to enhance their mailing experience. 

Pictures give more explanation than the words, taking this in view Microsoft outlook 2010 has increased its feature bank with this new snapshot feature. 

Click on Insert Menu

Click on the empty writing area to highlight the snapshot option on the ribbon.

Click on Snapshot option on the ribbon to get the available snapshots. These are snapshots of the all the open browser windows.

Click on a open dropped down list of snapshots to get it added to the email that you wish to send.  

This is the newly added feature of Outlook 2010 version.

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Outlook: Knowing Mail box size

 

 

 

                    If you use Outlook and have a busy inbox you might want to periodically find out how much space everything is taking. Today we'll take a very quick look at the Mailbox Cleanup feature in Outlook, which will let you see the amount of space being wasted.

With Outlook open, go to Tools \ Mailbox Cleanup.

 

 

 

Now with the Mailbox Cleanup dialog box open click on View Mailbox Size. You can also use this same dialog to easily find old email, or items that are larger than a certain size, so you can delete them and reclaim some space.

 

 

 

In the Folder Size dialog will show the amount of space being taken up on your local machine by each folder. If you are on an Exchange Server just click on the Server Data tab to find out how much space is being taken up on the server.

 

 

 

 Depending on the size and your setup you might want to Easily Compact The Outlook Data File.

These steps can be followed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to make Outlook work faster

            If Microsoft Outlook loads slower than dirt and hangs every time you try to do anything, there’s a very good chance that your problem is an Outlook plug-in gone haywire—but we can easily disable them.

You’ll want to be careful not to disable an add-in that you actually need, but I’ve used this technique many times over the years to make Outlook run much faster. 

Open up the Trust Center by navigating to Tools –> Trust Center on the menu. 

On the left-hand pane, choose Add-ins, and then near the bottom of the window you’ll see a button that will let you manage your COM Add-ins. 

From this window, you can disable anything that you aren’t using. My recommendation would be to start off by only disabling non-Microsoft add-ins, restart Outlook and see if that solves your slowdown problems. 

You’ll notice that some of the add-ins in the list won’t let you remove them under Windows 7 or Vista—for instance, if you want to remove Microsoft Outlook Mobile Service, which lets you send text messages to cell phones—you will need to close Outlook and re-open it as administrator.

If you are using Windows 7 and have it pinned to your taskbar, you can close Outlook and then hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys while you click on the taskbar icon. Repeat the steps above, and you should be able to remove the other Add-ins without problems.

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Outlook 2007: Downloading complete IMAP Account

                      

                 How to make Outlook download the entire message instead of just the headers. You’ll have to navigate through a convoluted set of menus, but it’s really quite simple.

From the Tools menu choose Send/Receive, Send/Receive Settings, and then Define Send/Receive Groups. Or you could just hit the Ctrl+Alt+S shortcut key instead of navigating the ridiculous menus. 

This will bring up the Send/Receive Groups dialog, which has some interesting options that aren’t relevant here. Choose the Edit button instead.
 

Almost there…  now click on your IMAP account in the left-hand pane, and then under the Receive Mail Items section choose either to “Download complete items” or “Use the custom behavior ”.

Personally I’d recommend using the custom behavior and only downloading complete items for the Inbox folder. You’ll have to select “Download complete item including attachments” to flip the switch.

These steps can be followed for Outlook 2007 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to Email templates in Outlook 2003

 

               If you have an email you send out every day that contains the same information, or a form that requires users to dictate answers to the same questions – you can create a template in Outlook to help save you time.

 

The template mode will not be available if you have Word set as your email editor, so the first thing we’ll need to do is turn that option off.

Open Outlook Options by choosing Tools \ Options from the menu. Choose the Mail Format tab, and make sure to uncheck the boxes to use Word. 

Now to create our template. Just open a new mail message, choose the person(s) to send it to, a subject line, and a message body. Now you should be able to choose File \ Save As from the menu. 

Choose Outlook Template (.oft) as the file type, and pick a folder and file name to save the template as. 

Now when you go to the location where you saved your template you will have an Outlook Template icon. Just double-click the icon, hit send and you are done! You could also open the template through the File \ New \ Choose Form \ User Templates option as well.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2003 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7. 

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Useful tips: Web browser in Outlook

                   Most of us spend our valuable time in Microsoft Outlook, reading emails from the our friends, Family, Personnel, Bank related etc. Since you're already in Outlook, why not browse the web a little without switching over to a web browser?

Enable Outlook's Web View

With Outlook open, click on View \ Toolbars and then check Web on the menu.

This will display the Web address bar which you can move to wherever you want in the toolbar area.

Now, just enter any Web address into the bar and the view pane will show the webpage within Outlook using the Internet Explorer engine.  If you’re just looking at the one page just click the Back button and it will return you to the Outlook view.  Or you can explore the entire site and / or surf the web.

These steps works for Outlook installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Useful tips for Outlook

 

 

 

 

                 After watching the Administrator at work scroll painfully through 10,000 messages in his inbox trying to find one from the right sender in Outlook, it occurred to me that a lot of people don’t realize how easily you can use the keyboard to find a message in a sorted list.

Almost any list control in Windows will let you type the first couple of letters in order to focus the selection on the item that matches in the current sorted column. It’s not exactly a new technique, but judging from today’s experience I felt it was worth sharing.

For instance, in Outlook you can sort by the “From” header by clicking on it.

 

 

And now you can start typing the first couple of letters of a name, for instance I wanted to find messages from Amazon.com so I typed in the first three letters quickly: a, m, a…

 

 

You’ll see that the selection went down to Amazon.com. Obviously this is a contrived example, but you can see the value in using this technique.

These steps can be followed in Outlook installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to Automatically Clean Trash Emails in Outlook 2010

    

              There are many activities you can do when managing email. You can reply the email, forward it, delete it, create new email, and other various activities.

When deleting an email, the electronic mail will be included into the Deleted items folder, not disposed directly. This folder function is similar as the Recycle Bin on the Windows desktop. All emails that are in the Deleted items will remain there as long as you do nothing on this folder. As a result, the hard disk will become overloaded because there is some disk space used by the trashed email.

To make Outlook 2010 to clean up its trash can automatically when the Outlook window is closed, please follow this steps:


    * Click the “File” tab, and then select “Options”.

    * In the Outlook Options window, select the “Advanced” menu on the left side of the window.

 
    * On the right side will be displayed the “Options for working with Outlook” menu. Find the “Start and exit Outlook” group.

 
    * Give a check mark in front of the option of  “Empty Deleted Items folder when exiting Outlook”.

 
    * Click “OK” to save the changes.

These steps can be followed in Outlook 2010 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7. 

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MailBrowserBackup utility

          Outlook 2010 is the next big desktop mail client from Microsoft. It has been vastly improved and is faster, more feature-rich than before. The basic design of Outlook profile is however the same when compared with Outlook 2007.

This basic infrastructure allows users to export Outlook 2007 profiles to Outlook 2010 easily. Another benefit is that you can make a backup of Outlook 2010 just like you can make backup of Outlook 2007 quickly using various tools.

 This is a  free utility that allows users to make backup of various desktop mail clients, such as, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Outlook 2003/2007.

What we discovered was that you can also make a backup of Outlook 2010 as well, by selecting Outlook 2003/2007 profile.

     To test it, we first saved a draft mail in our default Outlook 2010 profile and then used this tool to make a backup. Later we removed the draft and used this tool to restore the backup.  the draft was back in it’s full form. Go ahead and give it a try.

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How to backup Signatures in Outlook 2010

         


        You are moving from your old Windows XP computer to a new computer running Windows 7. you’ve already restored your pst-file but that didn’t include your signatures. How can you move these?

Your pst-file indeed doesn’t include signatures. The signatures are being kept as separate files in the Signatures folder. You can find this folder in the following location;

    * Windows XP
      C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures
    

    *  Windows 7
      C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures

To see this folder you must have "View hidden files and folders" enabled or you can simply copy and paste the above paths in the address bar in Explorer to directly open the folder.

Quickly access the Signatures folder from within Outlook

Another way to quickly access this folder from within Outlook is to hold the CTRL button on your keyboard when clicking the Signatures… button in Options;

     click on "File" tab then select "Options" now select "Mail" tab and then click on the button "Signatures"

Just copy all the files that you find there to another location to make a backup.

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Color categories view in Outlook 2003

      You have two machines with Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. If you use colored flags in 2003 you can see the corresponding color category in 2007, but if you select a color category in 2007 you cannot view the color in 2003.

Is there something you are missing or another method where both 2003 and 2007 can use the same color coding methods either using colored flags or colored categories?

Outlook 2003 Colored Flags were migrated to Color Categories in Outlook 2007. There is no link in how Color Categories in Outlook 2007 are downgraded to Color Flags in Outlook 2003. This would be impossible as well considering the fact that there are many more colors to choose from in Outlook 2007 than in Outlook 2003.

However, the Categories assigned in Outlook 2007 are still assigned in Outlook 2003; they are just missing a color. You can define an Automatic Formatting rule in your view in Outlook 2003 to color the header text based in the message list based on which category is assigned.

   1. click on "View" under menu and the click "Arrange By-" and then select "Custom"

   2. Click on "Automatic Formatting" tab and Press option "Add"
   3. First add the Name of the rule
   4. Press "Font" to select a font and other font properties

   5. Press Condition and Select the More Choices tab
   6. Press the "Categories" button to select one or more categories that you want to show up in that font setting
   7. Press OK and Move the rule if needed (the last rule that applies wins when there are font conflicting settings)also create additional rules if needed

These steps can be followed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Outlook: Quick tips on favorites in Public folder

          Outlook keeps a lists of Calendar and Contacts that you have accessed from other users in the Calendar and Contacts Navigation; this works great. However, you also have several Contacts and Calendar folders in Public Folders, and when you access those, you do not see them added to the Contacts and Calendar Navigation.

How can you make them show up there?

These folders will automatically be added to the Contacts and Calendar Navigation when you add them to your Public Folder favorites.

To do so; browse to the folder in Public Folders, right click them and choose: Add to Favorites
 
You’ll get a dialog on where exactly you want to position the folder in Public Folder Favorites and how sub folders should be handled. If you just want this folder to show up in your Navigation Pane, accepting the default will do.

These steps work in Outlook installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to add background picture to your mail in Outlook 2010

          What's your background? you would like to add a watermark to your message which says “confidential” as an extra visual reminder. Whatever it is, I'm sure it's not just plain white, and the background of your confidential emails doesn't have to be either. Does Outlook hold such an option?

Well Outlook does not hold such an option, but you can create the watermark in a picture editing application and then set it as the background of your message. or click here for Watermark image


Add a Background Image to a Message in Outlook 2010:

Click on New to Create a new message
Then select the "Options" tab and now click on the button "Page Color"

Under options click Fill Effects, Now click on the tab "Picture"

Then select the image from location and then click on open and then you have your background image.

These steps can works in Outlook 2010 installed in Windows XP and Windows 7 .

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Outlook: Quick tip on preview Attachment feature in Outlook

              you often use the Preview Attachment feature in Outlook to quickly go through the attachments you receive. Should you be worried about any macro code or other types of security threads when looking at my attachments this way?

That’s actually determined by the application offering the previewer and is not up directly up to Outlook.

The default previewers offered by the other Office applications and Windows do not include any macro, ActiveX and scripting support and thus are safe to use for a preview.

Which level of code execution is allowed by a 3rd party previewer, such as the PDF Previewer offered by Adobe, is basically determined by the provider of that previewer. In general, these previewers are designed to be secure by default and offer only a limited feature set so you should be fine.

In either case; never open attachments that you do not trust and always make sure that your virus scanner is up to date and the on-access scanner feature of your virus scanner is running properly.these goes with outlook installed in operating systems like Windows Xp and Windows 7.

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How to disable address auto complete in Outlook 2010

       Outlook remembers every address you have typed in a To:, Cc: or Bcc: field. This is good: when you start keying in a name or address, Outlook automatically suggest the contact in its entirety.

Unfortunately, Outlook remembers the mistyped and old as well as the correct and current and suggest it indiscriminately. But, getting rid of entries you no longer want to appear in the auto-complete list is easy.

You can also stop Outlook from suggesting email addresses as you type:

    * Select "Tools" under menu and then select "Options" from the menu.
    * Go to the Preferences tab.
    * Click E-mail Options
    * Now click Advanced E-mail Options
    * Make sure "Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc" field is not checked.
    * Click OK.

   

These steps can be followed Outlook installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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Known Issue: "Folder full Issue" in Outlook

 

     When you try to delete a folder or move a folder, you get;

“Cannot Move The Items. The Folder is Full”.

you get this even with folders that have nothing in them.

Permanently deleting (SHIFT+DELETE) doesn’t work either and results in the error;

“The message interface has returned an unknown error. If the problem persists, restart Outlook.”

How can you get Outlook back to work again?

This means your pst-file or ost-file either has reached its maximum size or holds a corruption.

An easy fix could be to empty your Deleted Items folder and try again. If that doesn’t work, the first thing you should do is verifying whether you are working with a pst-file or ost-file in ANSI format or UNICODE format.

Second, look up the size of the file as reported in Windows Explorer. You can find the location via;

File-> Data File Management

Maximum size

There are several limits that you could have reached;

    * If you are in ANSI format and the reported file size is around 1.8GB, you have reached the absolute maximum size of the pst-file. In that case, you’ll have to use the pst2gb tool to crop the oversized file to a smaller size so it can be accessed again and you can delete files, archive it or move it to a new pst-file in outlook.

    * If you are in UNICODE format and the reported size is around 4GB, you have reached the absolute maximum file size of your disk format (FAT32). Converting your disk format to NTFS is highly recommended.

    * If you are in UNICODE format and the reported size is around 20GB, you have reached the default maximum files size of the pst-/ost-file. You can (temporary) increase this default limit so you can move around or delete files. After this, it is recommended to remove the modifications again unless you have a specific need to really let this pst-file in outlook grow any larger (think about back-up and restore time as well)

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Known Issue: Unable to hyperlinks in Outlook

           When trying to click on a hyperlink within an email you get the following error;

“This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”

you are the administrator of this computer. How can use use these deactivated links again?

This usually happens when there is no default Internet browser (properly) registered in Windows.

To recover, it often is enough to reassign a default browser via;

    *  Windows 7

      Click on Start then select Default Programs

    * Windows XP

      Click on start and then select Control Pane, Now select Set Program Access and Defaults

When you have multiple browsers installed, it sometimes helps to set the other browser as the default, apply the changes and then set your preferred browser as the default again.

If you only have a single Internet browser installed in Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can also deselect all the defaults for the browser by pressing “Choose defaults for this program”, save the changes and then select them all again.

Reset the browser

Depending on your Internet browser, you might additionally need to reset the browser. For Internet Explorer this can be done in Control Panel-> Internet Options. When you use Internet Explorer 6 or lower, you’ll find this option on the Programs tab. For Internet Explorer 7 and 8, you can find this option on the Advanced tab.

For Firefox, open a Run command and type the following (note the spaces);
firefox -safe-mode firefox-safe-mode

In the dialog that pops-up select the option “Reset all user preferences to Firefox defaults” and press “Make Changes and Restart”.

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How to manually track meeting requests

    On occasion, it could happen that message tracking is not working correctly and responses are not automatically recorded in Outlook. You could still process and track those responses manually then to still have an up-to-date reference on who is coming and who is not.

 
This method also works for when you got an answer to a meeting invitation via telephone, at the water cooler or via any other means besides Outlook.

The way it works is quite easy;

   1. Open the meeting from your calendar and select the Tracking section.

   2. Click on responds field of the attendee.

   3. From the drop down list, manually select the responds;

          * Accepted
          * Declined
          * Tentative
          * None

These working in Outlook installed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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How to sort Outlook notes alphabetically

      You are having the collection of notes and it's getting harder to find the correct one. Is there any way, you can sort them alphabetically?

You can do this by customizing your view.

Depending on your current view, but assuming the default, the easiest would be to right click on an empty spot between the notes and click “Sort”. In the dialog that pops-up, you’ll see that the default sorting method is based on the created date. Set this field to Subject and the notes will be sorted alphabetically.

The long way around to this dialog depends on your version of Outlook;

    * Outlook 2003

      * click on "View" tab and then click Arrange By
      * Now select Current View then click on Customize Current View

 
      * Select Sort option and then do changes.

 

    * Outlook 2007

      * click on View then select Current View
      * Now select Customize Current View and then button Sort
      * Now you can do the changes.

    * Outlook 2010

     * click on "View" tab then select "View Settings"    

 
     * Now Select "Sort" option and then do changes.

 
These steps can be followed in Windows XP and Windows 7.

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