Today Office 2003 SP3 got released. In true Office tradition you can expect this to be the final Service Pack that we’ll see for Office 2003 (but I’m sure we’ll see some additional Hotfixes though). You can download Service Pack 3 here or of course use Microsoft Update or Office Update.
I’ve also updated the guide on how to create an Office 2003 CD (or installation point) with Service Pack 3 slipstreamed into it.
When you use Rules to sort your outgoing e-mails into folders you’ll notice that you can actually only “move a copy” to that folder. This rule is quite unclear and actually contradicts itself; does it move or does it copy?
Well it copies and when you use the rule by default, you’ll end up with duplicates which is probably not what you want; you want it to move! This is still achievable but it involves modifying another option and to carefully craft your e-mail rules.
Creating and selecting a signature is not that difficult in Outlook. However creating the signature you want with for example a company logo in it can be quite of a hassle.
This guide will cover both the basics and advanced examples for creating, using and managing signatures in Outlook.
When writing in Word, you may sometimes want to send the contents in an email. While you could send it from Word as an attachment File-> Share menu or simply copy/paste the contents in a new email there are some more sophisticated means as well.
For instance, you could add the Send to Mail Recipient command to the Ribbon or Quick Access Toolbar.
However, you’d still be in the Word environment. The drawback of this, is that you are missing some Outlook features such as;
This guide will explain how you can mimic the “Send to Mail Recipient” feature by using VBA code and allow you to work in an Outlook environment, giving you access to the features you need.
When you create a macro and are running Outlook with the default security settings, you are not able to run the macro at all or you’ll always get prompted first, unless you either tamper with the default security settings or sign your own code with a digital certificate.
Since it is not very common to have your own digital certificate, you probably set your macro security to a lower level to be able to run your macro.
There is no need for that; You can sign your own macros with SelfCert.exe so macros can run without lowering your Outlook security settings.
You’ve probably come across this at least once; You receive a nicely HTML formatted message with embedded pictures so the sender can tell the story with the pictures.
In this case, you can’t use the “Save All Attachments” command to quickly save all the images that are included in the email.
The macro in this guide allows you to save all the embedded pictures in their original file format to a selected folder.
Continue reading: Save embedded pictures in their original format
If you accidentally permanently deleted an item via SHIFT+DELETE or emptied your Deleted Items folder by mistake, and don’t have a recent back up to restore from, you can use this guide to try recover those deleted messages.
Continue reading: Restore Deleted Items from an Outlook PST-file
When you are in an Active Directory network environment, you can set Outlook policies to enforce settings on a specific or a group of users or computers.
This is mainly to be used to change or limit the default behavior of Outlook in a corporate environment but can also be useful in some home environments. For instance, as a home user you might want to set policies on what your children can and cannot do in Outlook.
This article explains how you can set Group Policies for Outlook and which tools are needed for it.
Setting the correct permissions on mailboxes and Outlook folders can be done in several ways when you are in an Exchange organization. The correct way for you depends on your needs. While some methods look quite the same the results can be very different. This guide explains in which way you can set permissions and what their results are.
Basically there are three ways of setting permissions;
This is where it starts. To be able to set permissions you must have them yourself. When your administrator creates your account he/she will also create a mailbox with you as the owner of the mailbox giving you automatically full permissions. This enables you to create an Outlook mail profile so you can start Outlook with your mailbox as the Outlook Today folder and allows you to set permissions for others.
Exclusive permissions for this method;
This is where you can set permissions on the mailbox shown as the Outlook Today mailbox. In Outlook choose Tools-> Options-> tab Delegates and the following screen will show;
From within this interface you can add people from within your organization to the delegates list and set appropriate permissions for them on the following folders; Calendar, Tasks, Inbox, Contacts, Notes and Journal. Setting permissions this way is probably the easiest and fastest. It also allows you to set some permissions which can’t be set by any other way.
The following permissions can be set on the folders;
| Permission | Effective setting |
| None | None |
| Reviewer | Can read items |
| Author | Can read and create items |
| Editor | Can read, create and modify items |
Note that you are only setting permissions on the folders that are listed and on not their subfolders.
Once these permissions have been set the delegate can open the folders they’ve got permissions to by File-> Open-> Other User’s Folder…
Exclusive permissions for this method;
This method gives you the best control on how others can access your folders. This also makes this method the most time consuming one.
Besides from the Permissions you can set shown in the table above you can also make adjustments to them by selecting or deselecting the available options.
Be careful with setting permissions for Anonymous cause you’ll end up giving those permissions to everyone in your Exchange organization.
This method can be used so that people can add your mailbox to their Folder List and makes accessing your folders just as quick and easy as accessing your own. If you do this you must make sure that you have at least Folder Visible permissions on that folder and on the one above to make travelling to that folder possible. If you don’t do this you won’t be able to expand the folders. So if you want to add a subfolder of someone else’s mailbox to your Folder List you’ll need to set permissions not only on that subfolder but also on the Inbox folder and the Outlook Today folder.
Once the permissions have been set you can add the mailbox by Tools-> E-mail Account-> button Next-> select Exchange Service-> button Change-> button More Options …-> tab Advanced-> button Add.
You can do this faster by right clicking Outlook Today-> Properties-> button Advanced-> tab Advanced-> button Add.
Exclusive permissions for this method;
Outlook uses Word as the HTML rendering engine and although many features have been added over the years and marketers have compensated for these limitations, it could still sometimes end up in a malformed display of the email message.
In short; The Word HTML rendering engine doesn’t provide support for things like animated gifs (unless you are using Outlook as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription), advanced css formatting and HTML forms, accessibility and more.
To overcome this, there is the “View in Browser” command in Outlook but that still opens the message in the ancient Internet Explorer.
This guide explains how you can render the message in a browser of your choice like Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome or Firefox by a click of a button.
An additional benefit of opening the message in an Internet browser is that you have the printing options of the browser available to you and therefore also the option to only print your selection.
