Managing Outlook- Part Two

By Robert Sanborn

Managing Outlook Data Files
 
Normally, you wouldn’t really need to worry about how Outlook manages files but if you need access to several emails from within Outlook on a different computer, there are a few ways of getting it done. One would be to simply email the messages to you to another account.  Another would be to save individual messages as a text file and not deal with the Outlook data file structure. Just open up the message you want and click /file/save as/.  If there is an attachment you need with it, you simply copy that attachment to any folder on your computer. To export messages to a text file, look at these instructions here: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aetw.html.

If you need access to more than just a few messages, it gets far more difficult. Remember that Outlook is a database so just copying off messages or a folders worth of messages to another file to be able to read them will not work very well and in fact, you need to have Outlook available on the other computer that you are going to read these messages. If you don't have the same version of Outlook on that other computer, you need to take special care in copying over the folders to make them compatible with that version of Outlook.
 
Outlook does an excellent job of allowing you to manage your email into subject folders.  When you first start Outlook, you have the basic folders of Inbox, Drafts, Sent Items, and Deleted Items. All are subfolders of the main Outlook database. You can right click on Outlook and add as many folders as you like and then move your messages to the various folders. I even set up rules to grab a message when it comes in and automatically move it to its appropriate folder. If there is a new message in one of the folders, it will be in bold with a number beside it indicating how many new unread messages are in that folder so it is easy to spot the new mail when it comes in.
 
Outlook 2010 makes it much easier to deal with the .pst files. If you have an older version of Outlook, you may have to do a Google search to find out more information.  Indiana University has a good reference article (from what this is based on) at: http://kb.iu.edu/data/aesn.html  - the following is from IU.

Next time we’ll learn how to set up personal folders.