The Outlook Blog

I use Hosted Exchange and share my contacts and calendars with my colleague through the Public Folder.

To add a new contact to the Public Folders Contacts you must first click on that folder in the navigation bar (My Favorites), then use Ctrl-Shift-C to add a new contact.

The problem with the Hosted Exchange installation is that by default there is an option for caching/indexing that is NOT set in the Microsoft Exchange Account profile. However, it is easy to set once you know how.

First check that Exchange is in fact being cached. Click on File, Cached Exchange Mode, and check Download Full Items.

Next turn on . Click on Tools, Account Settings. Highlight Microsoft Exchange account. Then click Change. You are now in your Exchange profile settings (Change Email Account). Click More Settings, then the Advanced tab. Check both Use Cached Exchange Mode and Download Public Folder Favorites. You’ll have to restart Outlook for it to begin working.

Outlook and Hosted Exchange will automatically resync and you’ll now be able to find those missing contacts using the Search Desktop feature.

And if you don’t have the Search Desktop feature running, you can find it at

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/getitnow.mspx

If you have a bunch of emails in a folder and want to send them to a friend or colleague, here’s how.

- Click on the folder to display the items.
- Click on the first row to highlight it.
- Shift-Click on the last row (or just press Ctrl-A to highlight all of them).
- Right-click anywhere in the blue highlighted area and select Forward.
- Choose the To: person, your note and send them off.

Tell the recipient that to receive them they only need to do the following:

- Double-click on the email to open it.
- Right-click on the attachments and Select All.
- Drag-and-drop them as a group to the Mail Icon in the Navigation pane there in the lower left (or drag them into whichever folder they want)

Piece-a-cake!

There are times when you may need to upgrade your Outlook, move it to a new computer, upgrade to Hosted Exchange, or any number of other tasks, and sometimes your Address Book simply disappears. Worse, you’ll notice that you can no longer use the To: box in a new email (I don’t recommend that anyway–just type the person’s name or part of their name).

In all likelihood the address book is only hiding. Outlook thinks some other address book is to be used.

In many cases you only need to re-point Outlook to the right address book. Here’s how.

1. On the standard toolbar, find the little open address book icon and click on it.

2. Click on Tools, Options in the menu bar.

3. Drop-down the “Show this address list first” and choose the appropriate list. If you see any folder multiple times like”Contacts” simply choose one, then select Properties to see which Contacts folder that one is.

If you need to regenerate the address book from the ground up, see this blog:
“How to Regenerate Missing or Corrupt Address Book“

If you are used to creating new items in Outlook 2003 using the New Icon, be prepared for a twist in your thinking.

If you expand the new To-Do Bar along the right-edge and any item is highlighted within it, be aware that when you click on New in the Menu bar that you will in fact be creating a new Task not a new Email just because your inbox is showing.

Personally, I never use the New icon because I have to grab the mouse, position it over the icon, drop-down on the list if I’m not in the current items list, etc.–too much work!

I’ve always said you should learn your shortcuts:

Ctrl-Shift-M New Message
Ctrl-Shift-C New Contact
Ctrl-Shift-A New Appointments
Ctrl-Shift-K New Task

Outlook 2003’s Quick flags help you to categorize your messages, but Outlook does not allow you to rename the flags and remembering that a red flag means Very Important, blue means Project A and green is Project B is sometimes hard.

To make it easier, create a new custom toolbar called Flags and add each flag color (and Clear flag) to it. Edit the properties of each button to display the flag color and description.

Not sure where to begin?
1. Go to Tools, Customize.
2. Add a new toolbar from the Toolbar tab.
3. Drag the flags from the Commands tab, Actions category to the new toolbar.
4. Right click on each button on the new toolbar and change the color name.
5. Select Image and Text from the menu.

Note that the & precedes the Alt+ keyboard shortcut and if two or more visible tools are assigned the same shortcut, you’ll need to press Alt+ the key to cycle through all tools and press enter to activate the selected tool.

(This comes to us from Dianne Poremsky’s website Outlook-Tips.com, a great place fabulously full of tips)

An Outlook 2007 client found that some of her rules “couldn’t be checked”. As it turned out, she is a Virtual Assistant using Hosted Exchange and Exchange Servers like Hosted Exchange have a 64K limit (there is no limit on your standalone Outlook). We proved this by exporting the list (using Tools, Rules, Options, Export) and then simply hovering over the file in Windows Explorer to check the size. Yes, it was 74K, over the limit. Once she removed some unnecessary Rules, she was ok.

One more interesting note however. I imported her Outlook 2007 Rules into my Outlook 2003 (before I knew she was on 2007) and all the rule titles appear, but the rules don’t appear in the edit box below and remain unchecked. The rules remain uncheckable and the contents missing. They were fine in my Outlook 2007. Upshot: Outlook 2007 inbox rules are not backward compatible with Outlook 2003.