I Heart Tech

Outlook is Acting Funny.

Well of all the Microsoft applications it does have the best sense of humor - so what do you expect? I received an email from a sweet gent I met at the ABA Spring meeting a few weeks back about Outlook's "goofy" behavior. He wrote:

The one Office program that remains an enigma to me is OUTLOOK.  I hesitate to use the "contact" and calendar features, because of its vulnerability to trojans, worms, and viruses.  And I just recently bought a new XP computer with Outlook 2003, because Outlook 2000 on my W98 computer would crash every other time I replied to a message.  (Outlook 2003 has done that once or twice, so something is still goofy.)

This is my biggest question, however.  Do you have any strategies for "saving" email messages in a format other than an archived Outlook .pst file, that can be text searched and identifies who it came from in the file name?  If you just save it as a txt file, you need to rename it because it names it as the subject.  That won't work for a string of replies. My inbox and sent folders are huge.

My response:

First, you're crazy...with up-to-date and proper virus protection, you shouldn't be afraid to use Outlook. It's an amazing tool for organizing your time and data, so get on it. (Sometimes I have to use Tough Love with these attorneys.)

Sounds to me like your issues with OL could be because your PST file (your entire Outlook file) is too big. If I remember correctly, you're either a solo or with a small firm and likely not running Exchange Server (which allows very large Outlook files). Outlook PST files take a BIG HUGE dump at 2 gigs. So you definitely need to keep an eye on it and archive regularly. Here is a link explaining the PST file size issue (and a bunch of other things) and then  another link to a handy utility you can use regularly to run some maintenance on that PST.

http://www.brienposey.com/kb/pst_maintenance.asp
http://www.slipstick.com/problems/scanpst.asp

Now, as for archiving. If you havent bought it yet, then this will be the BEST reason ever to dole out the dollars for a very important tool:  Acrobat 8 Professional. It will allow you to point and click at a folder in Outlook and convert that entire folder into an organized and searchable PDF file from which you can manipulate emails individually (that is still pull out only certain pages to forward on if you have to). It does convert all the emails to PDF (does not leave them in native Outlook format) as if you had printed them to paper and filed them in a cabinet. You can search for text, sort by sender or sort by date.

Making it Work..Step 3 - Talk About It

This could be the hardest part of our little project. Some of you  are going to do just fine - but many of you will struggle, perhaps even die. Survival of the fittest, my friends, survival of the fittest. You're going to have to communicate to all the right people what's expected of them. Yes, it's true. At some point technology just can't do it all, and we, the humans, must take action.

It is now time to gather the troops and talk about this new system.  Who's in? Who's out? What will be the magic word to be placed into the Subject line of the email? Will there be a syntax convention?  What other information will/can/should the call attendant gather? Can he or she include certain info that is useful to the recipient (is it a current client, a potential client)...etc. I think you get the picture. Although it's an incredibly minor adjustment to an already existing system - think about what you are doing.

It used to be that a caller's information was stuck in two places, on the pink note and on the carbon copy. Now, you have live data that can be searched and manipulated and at best, added to a permanent and shared contact database.