Living in Outlook: Message Templates
The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We’ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments!
At my job, I often send team status reports to the same people, or have a specific message style that I really like and tend to reuse. Even at home I have my message styles for Christmas, birthdays and pretty much anything family-related.
If you are anything like me, sending these types of messages probably goes something like this:
- Search for the last similar message
- Select it and copy the body
- Open a new item and paste the content in
- Delete the old information and add the updated text and images
This can become an annoying process. Fortunately, Outlook Message Templates are an excellent solution to this problem. Templates are easy to make and when you’re getting ready to send that same status report or holiday message just open your template, add some new content, and hit send!
In the following example, I’ll show you how I use templates at work for sending quick status reports.
Step 1: Create the Content
| The first step involves opening up a new e-mail for composing and adding the content and styles you want applied every time you open the template. |
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| Once you create your template content, click on the Office Button and choose Save As. |
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| Next, change the Save as type to Outlook template (*.oft). |
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You have just created your first template!
Step 2: Open the Template
Now that you have created and saved a template every time you need to send that weekly status report you can simply open the template, add updated content like new graphs or tables, and send it. If you ever make any changes to the template that you want to save, follow Step 1 and re-save the template.
There are two common ways to open templates:
| You can open the file in the Windows File Explorer or if you saved it to the default location open it through the Tools | Forms | Choose Forms... menu and select User Templates in File System from the Look In dropdown. |
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That’s it! Templates are really easy to use!
Tune in later this week for a follow-up post on content linking with Excel that makes table and graph updating even easier.
As always, let us know how you use this feature to make your Outlook experience even better!
Jed Brown
Outlook Program Manager
