I just heard of an article over at PC World that can help making working with Microsoft Outlook less painful than it can be at times.
Head over to PC World and have a look at the article. Some things I knew, some were new to me, but if you haven’t done any tweaking (lately) in your Outlook setup, it could provide useful to you.
For some things you have to be a bit mindful though. The author states at one point for example: “Along the same lines, a number of users say the Business Contact Manager seriously slows down Outlook 2007, so if you have that installed, try uninstalling it using the same procedure.”
I hope that if you ARE using the Business Contact Manager that you know better than to just un-install it while trying to get your Outlook to run faster. As always, some caution and thinking of your own is required.
I think I may try the program to remove attachments from the Outlook file and save them separately. On the other hand my Outlook file is “only” 600MB, so maybe I don’t have to try it yet. While I like the idea, it still makes me uneasy just thinking about it. What happens if for some reason the link from the e-mail to the new file on the hard drive breaks and I need to find it? I guess I’ll have to seriously look into it when my file gets bigger. I am having quite some things to auto-archive and also manually export my sent items every month to a new file. So that helps with the size. Not with searching for things, but with the size.
Regarding Annoyance 6 – corrupt PST file:
Newer versions of Outlook (2003 and up) actually don’t have the problem with the 2GB file limit any more. They “easily” handle files larger than that. So – does that mean because you are running Outlook 2003+ you are safe? No necessarily!
If you have moved your PST file from previous installations of Outlook, it is still in the old file format that has the limit, and simply using it doesn’t upgrade the format. Outlook just keeps running it as an old style file.
So how do you tell Outlook to upgrade it? You don’t. Outlook can’t upgrade the file format! – I don’t know who had that great idea to omit that function.
So how do you do it? Have a look at this website to help you out. For completeness, I also would like to mention the following programs (which I haven’t tried):
Mark Krieger helps organizations and individuals to create systems for success, both on the IT and operations side and implement strategies for financial well-being. www.makbiz.ca