Customising Outlook 2000
Outlook is one of the least
well understood of the Office
I
f you support Microsoft's Outlook 2000, you will know that it is much more than
a simple email client. With its calendar, contact list, task list, notes folder and
journal, Outlook is a sophisticated multi purpose productivity tool suitable for
use either at a personal or workgroup level.
apps, and the hardest to
In this article, we'll look at some of the less familiar ways of customising Outlook
support. We present some
2000 and thereby enhancing its functionality. These techniques are in addition to the
guidance on making it work
various customisation features which are common to all Office 2000 applications,
such as the ability to use personalised menus and to customise the toolbars (for more
the way you, and your users,
information, see Office 2000: End Users Features, PCSA Updates 133, 134).
want it to.
The Outlook Bar
By Mike Lewis
A central feature of Outlook 2000's user interface is the so called Outlook Bar, that
is, the vertical toolbar at the left of the main window (Figure 1). At first glance, this
provides little more than a set of buttons for navigating to the various Outlook
folders. But with a little modification, it can do quite a lot more.
The Outlook Bar can contain shortcuts to any Outlook folder, to any drive or
directory on your local or network file system, or to any Web page. Clicking on the
shortcut for a drive or directory gives you a Windows Explorer style view of the
drive or directory's contents. You can use this to navigate to other parts of the file
system, launch applications, map network drives, and do any of the other things
that you can do in Windows Explorer. Similarly, clicking on a Web page shortcut
has the effect of turning Outlook into a mini Web browser. This is useful if you want
to give users quick access to, say, a daily news update held on your intranet.
To make the Outlook Bar easier to work with, you can organise the shortcuts into
up to 12 groups, with as many items as you like in each group. By default, the bar
contains three groups: Outlook Shortcuts (for the seven main built in personal
folders); My Shortcuts (for Drafts, Outbox, Sent Items, Journal and the Outlook
Update Web page); and Other, which contains shortcuts for My Computer, My
Documents and Favorites. (This arrangement applies to users for whom Outlook is
configured with personal folders for Internet mail; with other configurations, the
default Outlook Bar might be slightly different.)
To add a new folder or file system shortcut to any of these groups, first select the
group, then select Outlook Bar Shortcut from either the context menu or the
File/New sub menu. This will open a dialog like the one in Figure 2. In the Look In
control, choose between Outlook or File System. Then use the treeview to navigate
to the object (folder, drive, directory etc) in question. You can also create shortcuts
by dragging items from the folder list.
Resources
Go to the Office 2000 Resource Kit site at
http://www.microsoft.com/of
fice/ork/2000/Appndx/toolbox.htm
to obtain the documents mentioned in this
article. For OUTLOOKBAR.DOC, follow the link to Outlook Bar Reference
Information. For the Outlook Today files, follow the link to Outlook Today
Information, then click on OUTTODAY.EXE to download the document, and
on OUTEXMPL.EXE to obtain the source files and examples. Note that none of
these files is present on the CD ROM which accompanies the printed version of
the Resource Kit.
Issue 141:April 2002
PC Network Advisor
File: E1544.1
page 11
End User Support:Software
www.pcnetworkadvisor.com
<< < GO > >>
New! The best sites for quality inkjet printer cartridges and the best sites for cheap inkjet cartridges