June 2006
Outlook
Productivity Tips
by Andrea Kalli
Tip #1
Outlook offers a way to spruce up your email by creating your own stationery.
Just as long as you use HTML as your message format or if you use Word as
your message editor, you can use stationery to enhance your message. Stationery
is a preformatted theme, much like a theme in FrontPage. Selecting stationery
affects how fonts, bullets, and horizontal lines are displayed within your
message. You can utilize one of the existing stationery formats in Outlook
as a starting place, or you can create it from scratch by using any HTML editor,
such as Word or FrontPage. I think the most important thing to remember when
creating it from scratch is that you have to save the file AND any images
that you are using in your stationery in the appropriate location on your
computer, C:>Documents and Settings>(username)>Application Data>Microsoft>Stationery.
I have also found that .jpg image files are more consistent than .gif image
files. There are different ways to use your stationery when sending emails.
You can set the stationery as default so all your emails use it, or you can
set the default to "none" and pick and choose when you use the stationery
by going up to Actions>New Message Using>and pick the stationery or
select More Stationery if yours is not in the list yet. Another tip is if
you want to use this stationery for an email to a specified group of people
you have some options: you can either create a new email from your Inbox and
use a Distribution List that you would have already created containing specific
contacts, or you can start the email from the Contact folder. This method
requires you to have the appropriate stationery set as the default first.
Then by selecting the contacts (my personal favorite for contact selection
is using the by Categories view), you'll use Actions>New Message to Contact.
It's important to remember a couple of things about email stationery: 1) They
create larger messages that are often unreadable by the recipient. 2) As the
sender, you cannot control how all your recipients will see your email. Not
everyone accepts or welcomes HTML messages. If you are not sure you want to
mess with creating your own stationery but you like the idea of it, then you
can either purchase 3rd party email stationery from someplace like www.crystalgraphics.com,
or you can have stationery made especially for you from someplace like e-stationarydepot.com.
These links are provided for your convenience and does not mean that we endorse
them in any way. They will, however, provide you with the opportunity to see
what type of products are available.
Visit the site, http://www.virtualassist.net for tips and videos.
=================
