outlook feature similar to 'stationary' in lotus notes

[Andy Juzy]

I come from a Notes world and think in those terms but am now using Outlook
2000 at a large international company.

Notes had a feature called 'Stationary' which was similar to a 'draft'
message in that you were able to prepare an email by specifying who it would
go to, its subject line and the body of the message. It was different from a
draft email, however, in that after you sent it it would remain as
stationary. So you could, for example, modify it slightly every week before
sending it out knowing that you would not have to retype the 95% of the
message that never changed.

For example, I run a weekly conference call meeting and each week before the
meeting I send out a reminder about how to join the meeting and I include
some attachments.

In Notes, I set up a 'stationary' message which allowed me to address all 20
people on the distribution, set up the Subject: in a way that I could easily
modify every week, and allowed me to type in some text in the body of the
message. (I'm not interested in work-arounds like setting up groups of
people, etc.)

So the stationary looked like a normal message which I could modify and send
each week KNOWING it would be there in its draft/virgin state whenever I
needed it.


So is there a STATIONARY type thing in Notes?

Thank you,

Andy

 

[Ben M. Schorr - MVP]

Aloha Andy,

You can do that in Outlook a couple of ways. The simple way is just to go
to your Sent Items folder, find last week's message, open it, click Tools
| Resend This Message (or is it Actions | Resend This Message? I can't recall
offhand), then make your edits and resend.

The slightly more elegant way would be to go to create the basic message
then go to Tools | Forms and save it as a form.

-Ben-
Ben M. Schorr - MVP
http://www.rolandschorr.com
Microsoft OneNote FAQ: http://www.factplace.com/onenote.html

 

[Andy Juzy]

Clearly I would prefer to avoid searching through my Sent log and then
reforwarding msgs, etc.

I'm looking for the 'right' and 'natural' way to do it which you have said
is Forms.

I went into forms and ran into several problems.
1) I set up a message form and could fill in some email addresses and the
subject field but could NOT type anything into the message body box. Should
I be able to.
2) I then did Save As and was directed to save in some windows directory.
Ideally I would want to save it within Outlook itself. In Notes, for
example, there was a folder called Stationary that was positioned at the same
level as Drafts, Sent Items, etc. Can I keep the forms there?
3) So I saved it in My Documents anywan - just to proceed with
experimentation. But when I double click on the form it doesn't turn into a
real actual message that I can Send anywhere. What do I do to actually send
it?

Thanks,

Andy
p.s. how did you know I was Samoan?

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

Turn off Word as the email editor, then create a new message, and add To, SUbject, and Body as you like. You can then save it as an .oft form template file or use the Tools | Forms | Publish Form to publish it as a custom form.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003

and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers