By Eric Legault, Microsoft MVP
The Rules Wizard is great for a lot of things when automatically
processing incoming e-mails. However, when there's that one
certain thing that you can't do with it, you can always be the
Wizard yourself and write your own rules with VBA. However, one
of the greatest challenges for developers programming with
Outlook is learning how to effectively hook into application
events. While it is relatively easy to gain access to objects on
the fly, it is not entirely obvious where, when or how these
objects should be managed. If Outlook automation was anything
like most object models, it would be very straightforward.
Read complete article...
Ken asks:
"We are on Exchange Server 2003 & Outlook 2003. We do not enforce
standards for email format (RTF, HTML, or Plain Text). Very often
people need to send a screen shot to another person within or
outside of the company. With today's high resolution screens, these
embedded screen shots or attachments can be very large 2-10MB).
There are a group of people that use good sense and resize the
images or crop them prior to sending, but not everyone is good or
capable of doing that.
The other MSFT Office Suite programs like Word and PowerPoint have a
very handy one-button tool to compress an image or crop it, this
tool (Picture editor) is missing from Outlook unless you are using
Word as your email editor (not sure if it's there, but I'm guessing
it is).
I'm looking for a way to make this EASY for all of our employees. We
have deployed C2C to compress attachments, but it does not resize
the image which we would like to do. Things that are automated are
better, but if there were an easy way to explain to employees how to
do this with existing tools it would be good. Having them copy it
into another application first, resize the image, save the file,
then paste the document or image is just too much for people to do
when they just want to quickly send a screen shot of a problem they
are experiencing."
It really depends on how your users are adding the screenshots to
the email message. If they paste it into an HTML message body,
Outlook won't offer to resize it, but they can use the Picture
toolbar to crop or compress it if they use Word as the editor.
Cropping or reducing the size is recommended, if only to make the
image easier for the recipient to view. Sending the same screenshot
in an RTF formatted email results in a much larger message.
If the users save the screenshot as a BMP, JPEG or GIF and insert
the image as an attachment, both the Outlook and Word editors offer
image resizing via an option in the task pane.
One problem I run into often is that many users only know how to
paste a Print Screen into Word and send the document. Along with
often resulting in a huge attachment, many people don't like to open
Word documents unless they requested them, because of virus
concerns. For this reason, pasting screenshots into Word then
sending as an attachment should be discouraged.
If this is the only way your users know to do screen prints, they
should use Word's Office Envelope feature to send the document as an
email.
They can use Word's picture editing option to crop or resize the
image before sending but because the image size is reduced by Word
to fit the page, they don't have to crop or compress the picture -
just paste the picture in the document and add their comments, then
click on the Email envelope button on the Standard toolbar or use
the File, Send to, Mail recipient menu to display the email address
and subject fields.
Keep in mind that in order to send documents in this manner you need
to use the same version of Word as Outlook. It won't work if you use
Office XP and upgraded Outlook to the newest version. Also, if you
use older Office suites your results may vary. Office 2003 does a
pretty good job at controlling file size when sending email, even on
the default settings. Older Office suites don't clean the resulting
messages as well and file sizes will be larger.
A second area where users often go wrong when sending screenshots is
sending an image of their entire desktop instead of just the dialog
or window they have a question about.
They do this because they don't know that they can copy just the
window that is in focus using Alt+PrintScreen. Many users also
aren't aware that the text in many dialog boxes can be copied,
making it easy to send the exact error message to the recipient
without involving screenshots.
Click anywhere in the dialog (other than on the Ok or Cancel
buttons) and press Ctrl+C to copy it, then paste it into the email.
When the dialog supports copying, the paste will look something like
this:
---------------------------
Microsoft Office Outlook
---------------------------
Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. The command line argument is not valid. Verify the switch you are using.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------
Many newer applications support copying the text in dialogs so it's
worth trying with all dialogs before doing a print screen. If the
dialog doesn't copy, use Alt+PrintScreen to avoid typing out the
exact error message.
If you haven't responded to the Slipstick polls yet, be sure to
visit
http://www.slipstick.com/. We want to know the version of
Exchange server you're using as well as the version of Outlook and
what type of email account is set as your default account in
Outlook.
It's not surprising to me that Exchange 2003 holds a wide margin
over Exchange 2000 and Exchange 5.5, but Outlook's results did catch
me by surprise. I knew from the questions I see about Outlook 2000
usages that it was still used by many sites and home users. While
it's far behind Outlook 2003 in our polls, it holds a slight lead
over Outlook 2002.
Exchange accounts lead POP3 by a respectable margin, but comparing
the 55% Exchange use to 45% non-Exchange, our results very much in
line with the SQM data Microsoft collects on Outlook usage.
You can respond to the polls and check out the results at
http://www.slipstick.com/.
If you tried to download the holiday update I mentioned in the last
issue of EMO, you discovered that the download was not available.
This is because Microsoft temporarily removed the Outlook 2002
holiday update while they correct the errors in it. Along with the
Thailand date mix-ups, Christmas is missing from the US holidays and
a few other holidays are either wrong or missing from the file. Once
its updated and rechecked it will be available again. Hopefully
error-free this time.
http://www.outlook-tips.net/howto/missinghol.htm
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