Turn OFF the reading pane in Outlook

One of my users recently asked me a very odd question - How to turn off the Reading Pane in Outlook.

He told me that when viewing Public Folders, if he turned off the Reading Pane in one folder, when going to the next, it would automatically turned on. This issue was causing him lots of frustration.

I found that the answer to this question is not inside Outlook but in how Outlook is started. In simple terms, outlook needed to be started with the /nopreview flag.

Follow these steps to create a shortcut on your desktop to start Outlook with the Reading Pane turned off.

1. Right Click on your desktop and then select New and then Shortcut
2. In the window that comes up, browse to where Outlook.exe is stored on your computer
(Default location for Outlook 2007 is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Outlook.exe)
3. Once you have located Outlook.exe, in the path that is displayed, append "/nopreview" (without any quotes) to it.

So taking Outlook 2007 as an example, the location of the item will be
 "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE" /nopreview

4. Click next and enter a name for this shortcut (Outlook reading pane off)

That is all that is required. Now if you need to start Outlook and not have to keep on turning off the reading pane, just start Outlook using the new shortcut that you have just created on the desktop.

I found the above at http://usfsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3313/~/turn-off-the-reading-pane-for-all-outlook-2007-folders 

You can visit http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/command-line-switches-for-microsoft-office-outlook-2007-HP001218589.aspx for a complete list of command line switches for Outlook 2007

Where are attachments opened inside Outlook Stored?

One of my users had received a document via email and for some reason instead of saving the document and then editing it, he opened it straight out of Outlook and started updating it. Having lost documents in the past due to not saving them continuously, he kept on saving his edits every 5 minutes. 2 hours later, when he finished updating the document, he closed it and went for lunch.

On his return, to his amazement, he could not locate the word document. After about 5 minutes, he realised that instead of saving the document to his computer first, he had started working straight from the email :(

Now how many of you have come across similar situations? Well, the mere fact that you are able to save updates to the document means that they ARE BEING SAVED SOMEWHERE. Just where is the mystery :)

Well the short answer is that they are stored in a secure temporary folder. The location depends on the version of Outlook you are running and can be easily found by looking at some registry values.

For Outlook 2010, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Security


For Outlook 2007, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\Security

Outlook 2003, look for the value name OutlookSecureTempFolder under
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security
or
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\Security

The actual Microsoft document detailing the above can be found here

Hope this comes in handy

Week 30 Article 01 - Moving/Editing Autocomplete Entries in Microsoft Outlook

As technology advances I have noticed that we get more and more lazy. Where once people used to walk for hours to get to their destination, they now just sit down in their car and drive. Where once lots and lots of paper was used to do calculations, now a computer churns out the figures. Dont get me wrong. I love technology but there are times when I wonder .. is it making us more dumb?

With the release of Outlook XP (I might be wrong with the version, so do point out if I am), came the famous autocomplete feature. This used to be one of the popular feature of Outlook Express because people found it too hard to add email addresses to their contact lists. Note that though autocomplete is now available in Outlook, it doesnt populate your contact list as the similar feature in Outlook Express did. So if you were to move pcs for whatever reason, unless you copy over the autocomplete file (which microsoft has neatly hidden), you will have to remember all those email addresses all over again! (serves you right for being lazy I say!!)

Well I hate playing devils advocate so I will now give you the solution to your autocomplete woes.

Migrating to a New PC
When you are moving to a new pc, configure Outlook and make sure that you can send/receive emails using it. Send a test email out and check to see that the address you sent the email to is autocompleted when you send another email to the same address.
On the new pc go to c:\Documents and Settings\{Username}\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook and rename the files with the extension nk2 (eg rename it to outlook.nk2.old). These might be hidden so make sure you enable show hidden files.

On the old pc go to C:\Documents and Settings\{Username}\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook and copy the nk2 files to the new pc. When copying them over to the new pc, make sure they have the same name as the files that you just renamed in the step above.

Open your outlook and test to see if your old email addresses are autocompleted.

Editing NK2 File
Sometimes there are errors in the autocomplete list. For instance if a person changes email address, when you type in the first few characters of his name, autocomplete put in his old address and this can result in email issues. To circumvent this, you can use this free software called NK2View from NirSoft. It allows you to view/delete/edit your autocomplete entries. Now isnt that smart?

With this I wish you a happy week.