Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 9:48AM 
Since Office 365 and version 2019 has been released, the capabilities of the Outlook Search function has greatly improved. To get started look for the Seach field at the top of the Outlook screen. This will get you started. Also, take a look at Microsoft’s Support page located here. This will provide you with the syntax you can use to further detail your search criteria to the results you are looking for.
Monday, February 27, 2023 at 9:28AM Over the weekend I saw an interesting article about using email templates in Outlook to get repetitive messages out to people. One of the drawbacks that they talked about when using the Outlook desktop application was that you could only use templates when creating a brand-new message. When I saw this, I thought to myself, “Why would I do this what I can do the same thing using the signature function?”
To access signatures in Outlook, Select File>Options>Mail>Signatures
I typically will use Microsoft Word to actually create my signature lines because it gives me a easier review of what the final outcome will be and then I copy and paste the new signature into a new signature option. You have the ability to assign a signature line separately for both New Messages and Replies/Forwards.
When composing an email you have a signature menu item at the top of the screen that you can pick and quickly change to the signature line that you prefer. This will change out the current signature line for the new choice automatically without worry whether this is a new message or up reply. It will work either way. I find this a much simpler method of being able to have complete, prewritten answers to questions or supplying information to clients quickly and easily in a consistent manner.
I hope you find this useful.
Thursday, July 16, 2020 at 12:01PM We had several clients call in yesterday telling us that their Outlook application was crashing when it was launched. It appears from Microsoft's post that it was caused by a forced update to the Outlook client. See information provided by Microsoft below:
Title: Users experiencing Outlook connection issues and crashes User Impact: Users may have experienced crashes or may have been unable to access Exchange Online via Outlook.
More info: Users may need to restart their Outlook client for the fix to take effect.
Our analysis indicates that Outlook on the web and mobile clients were unaffected. Users may have been able to leverage those protocols as an alternative means to access email and service features while we remediated this problem.
Affected users would have received an error message that stated: "Outlook couldn't start last time. Safe mode could help you troubleshoot the problem, but some features might not be available in this mode. Do you want to start in Safe Mode?"
Further information on what admins were able to see in event viewer for this crash event could have been found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/active-investigation-into-outlook-crashing-on-launch-9c59ad4b-813c-432a-afdc-f14717a4528d?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us
Final status: We've confirmed that the issue has been successfully resolved after extended monitoring of our telemetry. If users are continuing to see impact, please restart your Outlook client for the changes to take effect.
Scope of impact: This issue may have potentially affected any of your users attempting to use Outlook.
Start time: Wednesday, July 15, 2020, 11:12 AM (3:12 PM UTC)
End time: Wednesday, July 15, 2020, 6:35 PM (10:35 PM UTC)
Root cause: A recent change to the Outlook client inadvertently resulted in this issue.
Next steps:
We'll publish a post-incident report within five business days.
Thursday, June 15, 2017 at 10:05AM 
Jessy just emailed me that there is an issue in the recent Outlook Security patch causing problems with Outlook attachments. He has mentioned that we need to look at the following kb's KB3203467, KB3191898, and KB3191932 and remove them. Microsoft is currently investigating. They were just released a couple of days ago.
These are out outlook 2016 group policy settings which should not be blocking any Word or Excel attachments. So why is the patch causing issues for Word and Excel attachments?
See the Microsoft Tech Article here.
Description of the security update for Outlook 2016: June 13, 2017
Saturday, April 8, 2017 at 7:42AM If you are not needing to be part of team/organization that is shares information and documents, then you will want to consider one of the many personal options. The first is to purchase a perpetual license that can only be put on one machine, period. Your options here are Home & Student $150 or Home & Business $230. The primary difference is that Outlook comes with the Home & Business version. When purchasing one of these two packages you are purchasing the current version of the software that does not have an upgrade path to new version and can only be installed on one machine. The positive point is that you are acquiring at a fixed cost. If you do not upgrade your MS Office with each new version and if you have multiple machines that you want to put it on then you may find that the subscription service of Office 365 is a better option.
On the personal side you have two choices, either a Personal Subscription $70/year or a Home Subscription $100/year.
Office 365 Personal includes | Office 365 Home includes |
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| $69.99/Year | $99.99/Year |
This should give you some idea of where you want to go with this.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016 at 12:06PM Here is a quick video I just put together showing how to restore your Outlook folders display if you accidentally lose it. It could happen in one of two ways so I have both of them listed in the video. Let me know if you have any questions.
Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 10:40AM Here’s a quick video from Microsoft showing this feature.
Thursday, August 4, 2016 at 9:08AM Internally and almost everybody here has been turning off the clutter function in Microsoft Outlook. It is been a feature that none of us have really liked very much because of its inconsistencies in the way that it operates. It is planning on replacing it with a feature called “Focused Inbox” which is all ready running in the iOS and android Outlook apps.
Focused Inbox uses a ta andb system separating "information between "focused" and "other" tabs. So now you have a program that is determining what is low or high priority and separating them into these two containers. I have not thought much of the algorithm that that phone apps is using two separate these messages so hopefully it'll start to get better as time goes on.
Clutter did not work particularly well for people who had complex inbox rules already in place to manage their email, or who did not receive enough email for the Clutter algorithms to learn what to do with it. For businesses, the sudden disappearance of email into a separate folder caused some support issues, with administrators having to seek out the administrative controls for Clutter after the CEO's important company-wide email didn't get read by half the employees.
Microsoft promises that when this new feature rolls out in Outlook that the messages and color will automatically be moved over to the other tab. When your outlook is updated Microsoft says that it will give you an opt in option that will appear in Outlook and he will give you the option to start using focused inbox. There will also be an option for you to turn off Focused Inbox at any time as well.
There's going to be another feature that is being added called the Outlook @Mentions Feature. It is a quick tagging function that will allow you to add users to email discussion. All you will need to do is to add the @ symbol in a message and you'll get a list of names with the next letter typed. Recipients of your email that have been tagged in this manner will see their email name in a blue highlight color, so they'll know that they had been added to the thread.
Microsoft states that this feature in Outlook will work with any email service you're using in Outlook. However the blue highlight feature will just be available for Outlook.com and office 365 accounts. This function should be added later in the year for other services like Gmail and Yahoo.
Wednesday, June 15, 2016 at 8:27AM An important part of Office 365 is the ability to store, manage and share information from a central location in the cloud. Here is a brief video describing some of the enhancements Microsoft has made to these products recently.
Friday, April 22, 2016 at 3:33PM Like a lot of you, I would want to have to enter information into my computer once in the best of all worlds have it show up everywhere that I may want to access it from.
I live and breathe inside of Microsoft Outlook with everything from email, scheduling, task management and accessing information about the people I need to be in contact with. So Outlook is a good container to house all this information for me. It also integrates with a lot of the business applications that we use at our office so it is an essential part of my daily routine.
So over the past month I've been experimenting with some ways to be able to share information that is in Outlook with other applications and devices that I use. The picture to the right is a good example of how I have accomplished at some the things that I use on a daily basis.
Google Calendar seems to be the central application that I need to coordinate the sharing of all the calendar data. Using a shareware program that I've commented on last month, called Outlook Google Calendar Sync, I have the conduit that I can use to connect Outlook calendar to Google calendar and have them synchronized automatically. This allows me to set up the connection from Cozi Calendar to Google Calendar to display all of my events for my family to share, again, without me having to reenter the information.
So now as I enter new events into my Calendar in Outlook, the Outlook Google Calendar Sync Application periodically updates Google Calendar and when ever my wife looks at our family Cozi Calendar she has the ability to plan around my schedule very easily. Another nice thing that happens is that unable to connect our Amazon Echo to my Google account and when I come down in the morning I can just ask Alexis what my days schedule is. I know then what I have to ramp up you soon I need to get moving towards the office. Voilà! Information at your fingertips
Tuesday, February 10, 2015 at 4:32PM Had a customer ask how to export their contacts to a .csv format. Here is a video I whipped up to show them how.
Thursday, September 25, 2014 at 12:08PM Microsoft sent out notification yesterday announcing that they have increased your file size upload to 10GB files and if you have the free Outlook.com email account you only have a 15GB storage limit. If you have upgraded to Office365 then you have a 1TB storage limit. Do you think that it is worth $60/year to have a 1TB of cloud Storage?
Tuesday, July 16, 2013 at 2:08PM Take a quick look at the Exchange Team Blog entry announcing the availability of the new OWA App for both the iPhone and the iPad. It will show you setup and screenshots of the application but the one drawback is that you need to have an Office 365 account to get it.
See the article here.
Office 365, Outlook, iOS, iPad, iPhone, iPhone Apps Saturday, August 18, 2012 at 12:00PM Microsoft is making another attempt to draw users into their Cloud Solutions by integrating their new email account with their other online services. Of course this is an Ad-based service but the ads are quite unobtrusive as you can see on the image to the right. As you work around the screen you will see that it has been given the Windows 8 start screen look and feel (what was know as Metro Style a few short days ago).
From this menu option that you can get into by clicking on the Outlook object at the top left of the screen you have access to your mail, contacts, calendar and documents that are located out on SkyDrive. With a new account you will be allocated 7gb’s of storage on your associated SkyDrive and of course have free access to web-based versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
All of the web based applications have been updated so they show the ribbon interface but they are still limited as compared to the full desktop versions of Office. However, I can’t but admit that for most of our uses, these versions are more than adequate for day in and day out usage. I downloaded the OneNote app onto my Nexus 7 but it crashes instantly. Must be something to do with either the screen size or the version of Android.
You can pull contacts in from several different sources including Gmail, Outlook desktop, Facebook and Hotmail. You have the ability to connect any ICS based calendar system to your calendar display as well. You can use a modified calendar entry to create ToDo lists for the calendar as well. One complaint that I have is that your ToDo List doesn’t' show up on the Agenda Tab. For the way that I would use it, I would like some tab to consolidate all the date/time oriented entries.
Email is setup using one of two grouping functions.You can view your email from folders that you create. Shown in the image to the right, notice that I have multiple levels of folders in the Test Folder. To create a new folder on the top level, Right mouse click on the Folders menu option. You will be given the option of creating a folder or in creating rules for incoming mail. You can create rules based on who has sent it, the sender’s address, the To and CC lines, the message subject line and whether the message has attachments. Quite a bit of control here. You can move the message to a new location, automatically delete the message, apply a category to the message, remove a category from the message, flag the message or forward it to another user/email.
Right mouse click on any folder and you can create a new subfolder, rename the folder, delete the folder, mark all mail as read, or empty the contents of the folder. Right mouse click on an email message you will first see that a check mark will appear in the box to the left of the message. You then have the ability to Reply, Reply All, Forward, Mark as Read/Unread, Delete, Mark as Junk, View the message source and also set up functions for the sender of the message.
If you want to do something to a group of messages click in the box to the left of the header message line for all the messages that you want to process and you will see at the top of the screen the ability mark the messages as junk, move them to a folder and to categorize the messages using categories that you can setup. The categories are Quick Views that you can see in bottom grouping on the image to the right. This allows you to quickly pull messages from multiple folders that have been categorized for these views.
To create a new message just click on the New hyperlink at the top of the screen. You will be taken to a dialog box that you see below:
As you move through the beta of this product you will see the inconsistencies of the screens. Microsoft is still in the middle of the transition between Hotmail, Live Spaces and this new Outlook.com site. It will be very nice once they have made the final programming ports to provide the same look and feel all the way through. This is a pretty nice start for now.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 4:50PM Microsoft has just revamped the SkyDrive site to give it the same look and fell that Outlook.com received with the new Windows 8 Style interface. The rest of the site which includes Outlook, People, Calendar and SkyDrive are all on the drop menu and all have been converted to the new Windows 8 Style look except for Calendar which still is falling back to the old Windows Live Style. It even comes up with Windows Live and Hotmail (Outlook), Messenger, SkyDrive and MSN in the menu groupings.
You can get to SkyDrive directly by typing in skydrive.com. Microsoft states that the sight now defaults to a tile-based layout and boasts new features like instant search and a contextual toolbar. As the company notes, it's also designed with tablets in mind, in addition to desktop web browser. What's more, Microsoft has also rolled out updated SkyDrive apps for Windows and OS X, which promise faster uploads and other performance improvements, and it says it'll finally have an Android app in "just a few weeks."
See link below for a quick video on the changes. Click here if you want to access the skydrivevideos’s channel on YouTube.
Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 8:14AM Microsoft has started seeding its Office 15 technical preview to a select few earlier this year to get it ready for the public. Expect to see more of Metro Style interface, this should satisfy those Office detractors that have said that the ribbon bar is too cluttered. The cleaner interface and touch mode will make it easier to use on tablet devices as it is on the desktop.
Word15 has received several improvements. Microsoft is focusing on the “experience” of reading and writing. The new Read Mode removes control and menu items to limit the amount of distractions on the screen. The text will be reformatted on the screen as you enter into the Read Mode. There is a new Resume Reading function that allows you to bookmark the current position so that when you resume reading the document you will be placed back into the last position you were reading from.
Two new features allow you view information in a more dynamic way. Object Zoom allows you to double click on an image that will then zoom into full screen mode. This is great for pictures of table data, screen grabs or your favorite pictures that have been placed in the document. Expand and Collapse is a tool that allows you to expand and collapse paragraphs of text underneath a heading. This allows you to start with a shorter document that can be expanded to handle more text detail.
Document collaboration has ben improved as well. It is easier to Track Changes, create and read Reply Comments made to specific areas of text. There is now a localized password function that allows you to make changes and lock them down with password protection. Present Online allows users to share documents with others through a browser window.
There is better PDF document handling built into this version as well. Word 15 will allow you to open a PDF document and have the document reflow on the screen to fit automatically just as if it were a native Word document. Inserting and view videos has become easier as well with new functions allow easy insertion of video and pictures from Faceboo, Flickr and other services.
Not surprisingly with the new Metro Style Interface, Word 15 allows users to more easily navigate through documents through the Touch Mode interface. This shows Microsoft’s focus with Windows 8 and tablet technology. It is going to be interesting to see all of these new touch centric features working together on Windows 8 based tablets later this year.
Excel 15 updates include better/simpler methods for visualizing large data sets that you are working with. A new Quick Analysis Lens feature lets Excel 15 users quickly access ways to visually represent data, and Recommended Charts and PivotTables helps surface the best way to visualize certain information based on data patterns. Flash Fill, a new feature to Excel 15, will also simplify the reformatting and rearrangement of data in an Excel spreadsheet. Excel 15′s Touch Mode feature is designed to let users browse through charts, graphs, and tables on tablet devices with their fingers and hands.
There are also some new chart formatting control features that use an interactive interface to fine tune charts quickly. Chart animations will help you to present your data in a dynamic display that will show changes as your data points are added or existing numbers are adjusted.
A new Excel Start Experience will provide access to a collection of professionally designed templates, including ones for budgets, calendars, forms and reports.
PowerPoint 15 updates include a big visual change. Microsoft is changing the default aspect ratio to a 16:9 display format with the thought of creating a professional-looking design with cinematic appeal. This complement most wide screen displays that are being used on your PC’s, Notebooks and Projectors today.
The new Start Experience is also present in PowerPoint 15, providing quick access to favorite files, professionally designed templates, and most recently-viewed presentations. A new chart engine access feature lets PowerPoint 15 users lift charts from Excel 15 worksheets and put them into slides without disrupting the existing formatting of a presentation.
Touch has been a big focus in this new version as well and the new features are designed to allow presenters to move through slides using a touch screen or tablet PC. PowerPoint 15 also features the same Resume Reading feature that has been added to Word 15 with automatic bookmarking the last position in your PowerPoint slide deck.
Outlook 15 hasn’t been left out either. A new peeks feature will let users see their schedule, view details about people they are emailing, and review tasks all within the same display. A new Weather Bar feature will also let users check the weather before accepting meeting invites or planning new meetings.
Inline replies has also been added to Outlook 15, letting users reply to an email in one-click. Microsoft has also made some improvements to its multiple email account support in Outlook 15, allowing users to view, create, and respond to all email accounts in one place, including Hotmail and other third-party web mail providers.
Animations in Outlook 15 have been improved to quickly move between email, calendar and tasks. The Metro Style interface takes up less space to provide more real estate for the presented information. Power users will be happier with the Context sensitive commands to provide simple, visible, on-click commands to help power users stay on top of their email flow.
OneNote 15 has also received the Metro Style Interface update. Auto-updating file views will let OneNote 15 users see content previews from embedded Excel and Visio files and any content updates that have been made in the original files.
Table support has been improved, allowing you to sort, add headers, and convert a OneNote table into an attached spreadsheet. This will bring improved calculation capabilities within your OneNote document.
The Touch Mode feature of OneNote 15 lets tablet users take advantage of their fingers and hands to move through pages and notes without a keyboard.
OneNote 15 also includes the new Resume Reading feature found in Word and PowerPoint 15, automatically saving the last position in a notebook so OneNote users can pick up right where they left off, even on a different PC or tablet.
Conclusion: I am looking forward to spending time with this product later this year when it comes out for general preview. The features that I have mentioned above are only some of the planned updates to the Office Products and I am sure there will be more touch and collaboration functionality as Windows 8 is finally released as well. Expect the release some time this summer and probably a RTM before the end of the year.
Friday, October 28, 2011 at 4:07PM 
The Personal Folders Backup download creates backup copies of your .PST files at regular intervals, in Outlook 2002 and later versions, making it easy to keep all of your Outlook folders safely backed up.
Backing up your Microsoft Outlook information is quicker and easier with the Personal Folders Backup feature. Personal Folders Backup creates backup copies of your .PST files at regular intervals, in Outlook 2002 and later versions, making it easy to keep all of your Outlook folders safely backed up.
With Personal Folders Backup, you can choose which of your .PST files you wish to back up, and how often you wish to back them up.
Each .PST file contains all of your Outlook folders, including the Inbox, Calendar, and Contacts. You can have a single .PST file (usually called "Internet Folders" or "Personal Folders" in your Folder List), but you might also have an additional .PST file that you use for archiving ("Archiving Folders"). Personal Folders Backup lets you back up any or all of these .PST files.
PFbackup and Outlook 2010
Although the Personal Folders Backup add-in 2007 compatible version (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=8B081F3A-B7D0-4B16-B8AF-5A6322F4FD01&displaylang=en) does not work with Outlook 2010 by default, you may enable it to work with Outlook 2010 by adding the following registry data to complete the backup process at shutdown.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Microsoft.OutlookBackup.1
DWORD: RequireShutdownNotification
Value: 1
For Windows XP
1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
Windows 7 and Windows Vista
Click Start, and in the Search box type regedit, and then click regedit.exe in the search results.
3. Locate, and then click the following subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\Microsoft.OutlookBackup.1
4. Click on Edit, and then New - DWORD Value.
5. Rename the value to RequireShutdownNotification.
6. Right click on RequireShutdownNotification and then click Modify.
7. In the Edit DWORD Value dialog box, type 1 in the Value data box, and then click OK.
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 2:14PM Microsoft's Office 365, the next piece of a broader play by Microsoft to bring its suite of Office server tools and collaboration work flows onto the cloud, is expected to launch sometime next year.
The company is already in the stages of testing it with small businesses and has a list of some 60,000 organizations, which are waiting to get access. In the meantime, Microsoft is continuing to fine-tune the product and expand its testing group--both in scale and the size of the companies that are being allowed in.
CNET reports: CNET was lucky enough to get early access to Office 365, which has been designed to work on a number of Web browsers, including Firefox and Safari--though not yet Chrome, which will work when the product is finalized. Office 365 is also cross-platform, so it works with both Macs and PCs. The good news is that in our brief testing, everything worked as advertised. The bad news is that you can't get it right now, and it's still a long ways off from something that lets you every feature out of the Office ecosystem without installing software.
So what is Office 365? This is a service that takes several server based applications and hosts them for you on the internet. These applications include hosted versions of Exchange (Outlook), SharePoint and Lync (replacement for Microsoft’s Communication Server) without having to host these services on your own network and never having to worry about maintenance updates. The service is going to run between $2 and $27 per user per month depending on your company size and which services your subscribe to.
Office 365 is available on a limited testing basis only and has a waiting list of over 40,000 but Microsoft is adding new subscribers daily as they test their server loads and functions. According to CNET they had absolutely no problem with their initial use of the product and they felt the system response was very good.
There is still a heavy reliance on local Office Applications and part of your subscription can include Microsoft Office for your local machine. Otherwise you have to rely on the consumer site for Office Web Apps for accessing Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you are using Office on your local computer then one of your options with this subscription will be to save your documents to the Team Site (SharePoint) so you can share your files with others or with yourself from other locations.
You no longer need to have Outlook on your local machine in that the interface to the hosted Exchange Server is the new version of Outlook OWA that looks just like the packaged version. It has stronger links back to the Team Site (SharePoint) so that you can open documents into a pop-up browser window right from Outlook. This is quite useful in cases where your local computer doesn’t have Office installed on it. Outlook takes full advantage of keyboard shortcuts which helps you to quickly maneuver through your email.
Lync has some interesting connection to some of Windows Phone 7 and iPhone connections. This is something that I am going to look forward in testing myself to see if it is really useful or not. It provides other features like instant messaging, audio and video conferencing and voice call service. This version is based out of a web browser so it doesn’t have all of the capabilities of the full blown product but I can’t comment on that as of yet since I haven’t used it.
It is nice to have SharePoint on the system so that you can manage its capabilities on a team basis. Between simple list management, communication and file storage this is a great product to enhance how you do things and control workflow in your office.
All in all I would suggest keeping an eye on how this product progresses and when it becomes readily available might be a great addition to your company’s needs. It certainly will be something to look at to see if the pricing can fit within a budget that you can afford for the extra services that you can take advantage of.
Saturday, April 17, 2010 at 2:54PM One of the new features of the Outlook client in Office 2010 is the ability to create workflow functions called Quick Steps that can be used over and over again to help you become more productive. This post contains both step by step text help and a video that shows you the steps on using this amazing new feature.
