Outlook Help

Bee

Founding Member
#1
Hello - I need some help with Outlook if possible...

I save my work emails into Outlook folders, but they are only available to me. Ideally, I'd like to drag all of my emails onto drive folders where they c. I can do this individually, but where I have a number of emails with the same subject line, Microsoft doesn't seem to be smart enough to work out that the content of each email in a string is different and therefore I can't batch save.

Anyone know how to do this?
 

The_Doc_Man

Founding Member
#2
Ideally, I'd like to drag all of my emails onto drive folders where they c
That sentence seems incomplete. Care to rephrase?

You SHOULD be able to open a folder and customize the view. Even if messages are otherwise letter-for-letter identical to each other in title and content, you should be able click on the column header in that folder view and select to sort the messages in ascending or descending order. Unfortunately, you can only sort on one column header at a time. However, messages with similar Subject lines will appear together. Or you could choose the sender as your sort criterion.

Depending on the folder customized view, you might see arrival date, sender, subject line, priority, and perhaps another half dozen or so options for folder content display. On the left, it should be possible to view your list of folders in what is called "tree view" - showing parent/child relationships. If you have private folders, they are usually nearer the top of this tree view. Outlook has one "private" drop-box for mail information, usually of type .PST and usually in a child folder of the place where Office was installed. Externally declared folders used for long-term personal storage or for sharing of messages will be lower in that tree view but can be stored anywhere. (The rule is "Local first" in terms of folder display.)

Once the messages are sorted, you should be able to do this:

1. Click on the first message you wanted to move. Click only once to select it. IF you have Outlook set to Open on Single-Click, you need to reset that to only open messages on double-click. (This act to highlight is called "Selection" which is the same name as the similarly named action in other MS Office utiliities.)

2. Now still in the folder view, Shift-Click on the LAST message you want to move. This is "Group Selection."

3. Now drag-n-drop the group into the desired folder in the tree view. You do this by Click/Hold on any of the highlighted messages and move the cursor to touch the desired folder in the left-hand tree view. You might see an overlay that looks like "==> foldername" as a visual confirmation that you are moving files to the named folder. That depends on factors I can't at the moment enumerate, but it is like moving files to folders in Windows Explorer. Same exact visual paradigm.

If you need to adjust the selection behavior, that is usually found in the ribbon via the File >> Options path. It has been a while since I diddled with that part of Outlook so I can't be more specific than to say that is probably where you would look.

Keyboard shortcuts relevant to this process:

Left-Click: Selects a single message (and implicitly releases any prior selection group)
Ctrl/Left-Click: Selects a single message but does not release prior selections. (Creates a non-contiguous selection group)
Shift/Left-Click: Selects the message under the cursor and ALL MESSAGES on screen between the nearest selection, adding the messages to the group.
Ctrl/Shift/Left-Click: Allows you to add another message discontiguous with any prior selections with the assumption that you are going to add two disjoint message groups together.

It is NOT a coincidence that this is the same paradigm used by Windows Explorer to bulk-handle files in a folder.

Once you have a group highlighted and regardless of how you performed the selection, you can act on the whole group.

If this is not the source of your difficulty, please try to rephrase the question.
 
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Bee

Founding Member
#3
Sorry, I'm typing on a crappy notebook rather than my pc.

If I get an email from Charlie, called House, I can save the file into a network drive, by clicking Save As and choosing the destination.

If I reply to Charlie, then he replies to me, his email will be called Re: House. We might send a few more messages backward and forward, but the subject line won't change, it will be called Re: House no matter what the content is.

So, I want to save those emails for my team to access and so would put them on the network drive in a folder named House.

But to save them, I either have to do it individually (Save As) and I would need to change the filename each time. I want to save them all - and not have to change the filename. Does that make more sense?
 

The_Doc_Man

Founding Member
#4
Ah, a "Save As" case...

There is another way that could be automated if everyone has Outlook. You could create a "secondary" post office file (.PST) in a shared area, create a folder in the .PST file (using the name HOUSE of course), change that file to allow shared read access, then store the messages in that secondary file. If everyone in the office has Outlook, they can each connect to the shared .PST file once you set the permissions correctly.

If not everyone has Outlook, your problem gets tougher because you would need to create a macro to save each file and I'm not up on Outlook macros. I could perhaps do it with Access but not so easy from Outlook. I do not know of a built-in method to do multiple file saves.

I did a quick internet search but there are only two predominant answers. One is to select one of several third-party products that implement the code you would need. The other involves you or someone else writing some code using the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) editor to create a callable function that does a message-save-to-file operation.

The trick with the VBA case is creating a unique file name for each file you want to save. The actual save isn't that hard but the file name generation, depending on what you wanted to do, could become a real bear.
 

Bee

Founding Member
#5
Thank you. I don't think I'll be able to implement those solutions because these are work files and my IT dept dislike deviations from their standard operating model.

It's a real nuisance. I'm a property manager with over 400 buildings to look after - from cleaning through to acquisitions and disposals (and everything in between). I've got building files set up for each building both on the network drives for storing .docs .xls .pdf etc and then I've got in my personal email a duplicate set of folders for each building with the various emails relating to that property/activity. I wanted to combine them into one set of folders on the network drive so that all information is shared and accessible to all members of the team, no matter what their specialism.

We do have a property management database which should assist, but not everyone is using it.
 

The_Doc_Man

Founding Member
#6
The question is whether everyone has Outlook. That one is easy. The VBA/Macro method would be a bit harder and if you have a typical IT department they would immediately resort to the NIH syndrome... not invented here.
 

The_Doc_Man

Founding Member
#9
Actually, you can customize Outlook because of the Rules - but the issue for your specific problem is that standard Outlook doesn't have a "Save As" rule. It only has a "Save message to other messaging folder" rule. I looked in my own copy of Outlook and in a couple of online searches.

If you can't customize your programs at all, then you cannot implement a VBA macro AND you can't buy a 3rd-party product. Which means your two remaining choices are doing SaveAs by hand for every file one at a time, or assuring that everyone who needs this has standard Outlook and can see the shared folder. That's it. That's all there is.
 
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