Understanding Outlook
Understanding best practices to protect Outlook data
A question/issue seen frequently is how to protect Outlook data on machines used by multiple users. To summarize what can and can’t be done Once a user is logged into the Windows account, there is no way to password protect an Outlook profile which means any user can open Outlook using any existing profile by […]
Understanding Auto-Complete versus Contact folders
There is a frequent mis-understanding about the difference between the Outlook AddressBook and auto-complete cache in terms of what contacts are stored and where. Outlook AddressBook The Outlook AB is a specialized view of the contact folders that have been configured to be a member of the AB. The first email account configured in the […]
Understanding Outlook IMAP account data files
As people migrate from earlier versions of Outlook (‘2010 & earlier) there is some confusion on how data for Imap email accounts is stored in Outlook ‘2013/’2016 as compared to earlier Outlook versions (‘2010 and earlier) For the sake of simplicity, the focus will be on environments where the first email account configured in the […]
Outlook How To
How to recreate contact entries-addressbook from email folders
There are times when all contacts are lost with the result being that the Address Book is empty. One such case is when contacts are stored in an IMAP contact folder with the added description of “This Computer Only” and the OST file is recreated by Outlook. In order to recreate the email addresses from […]
How to split an Outlook Contact Group-Distribution List
There are times when splitting a Contact Group (Distribution List) is required such as number of members is too large or desire to split the members along different interest lines. There is no way within Outlook to split an existing Contact Group in smaller segments. The approach to use to split the group would be […]
How to create an Outlook 2016 profile without an email account
After Office 365 (Office 2016) has been installed, you will be prompted to configure an email account. Not everyone wants to use Outlook as their email client or only want to use it to maintain their contact and calendar data. Unlike earlier versions of Outlook, the only way to eliminate the constant prompt to configure […]
Avoiding Problems
Understanding the difference email account/address hacking and hijacking
A frequent question posted in various forums is a concern about an individual’s email account getting hacked because there are countless emails being sent out using the email address which the individual says were not sent by them. There are two very important things at play which must be kept in mind. The first is […]
How to fix an Outlook .ost file
When issues occur and the suspected cause is an error in an underlying OST file, many people try correcting the issue using ScanPST. The reality is that the best way to resolve issues with an OST file is to allow Outlook to recreate the file. With Outlook closed, just need to locate the ost file […]
Understanding PST file size limitations – ANSI vs Unicode
This is an article that really applies to those who have been using Outlook since the days of Outlook ‘2000 and have migrated .pdt data files as they’ve upgraded to newer versions along the way (i.e. to ‘2003 / ‘2007 / ‘2010) and have or are moving to the latest version of Office 365 (i.e. […]
General Articles
Creating an Outlook backup strategy
There are many components that go into having a comprehensive backup strategy and unfortunately, many people focus on Outlook to the exclusion of all else. Various approaches are going to be reviewed from the most simplistic to a comprehensive system level approach. Starting with the basic mistakes The biggest mistake people make is that they […]
Understanding Outlook Addin Problems After Upgrading
A very common type of problem description posted in the Microsoft Outlook Answer forum is one where something no longer works as expected particularly after Outlook has been upgraded. The term <upgrade> in this case also means when a newer version of Outlook has been installed on a new machine but the same versions of […]
Creating an Excel Named Range & avoiding Outlook import problems
The most common problems people encounter when importing data using an Excel file involve a missing <Named Range> or an incorrectly defined <Named Range> resulting in either too few or too many rows being imported into Excel. This video shows how to create an Excel <Named Range> and how to avoid common pitfalls related to […]
Recent Posts
How to manually configure an email account in Outlook 2016
Some people are getting confused when migrating from earlier versions of Outlook to current versions of Outlook ‘2016 in reference as to how to manually configure an email account since the UI has changed. The first screen that gets presented is the one below which requires you to enter an email address. Once the email […]
How to change the Outlook 2013-2016 email message subject value
For those who want/need to change the email subject of a received email message either because the sender left the subject line empty or just to better organize the messages, the process to edit the subject field is simple but not readily evident for everyone. In order to change the subject of a received email […]
