Many people are annoyed with the fact that their Microsoft Outlook programme, running in Windows 7 will no longer allow a single click access to email attachments and the ‘Opening Mail Attachment’ dialog box has the option ‘Always ask before opening this type of file’ greyed out and unable to be disabled. An important element of Best Practice Time management is ‘Continuous Process Improvement’ which allows us to be more efficient and effective. So, here’s how to disable this element of Windows 7 User Access Control for once and for all.

  1. To achieve this you must log on to Microsoft Outlook as an ‘Administrator’.
  2. To do this in Windows 7 simply close Microsoft Outlook
  3. Now go to the Outlook icon in your Start menu or in your Taskbar and hold down the ‘Shift’ button whilst right clicking on the icon.
  4. This will reveal an options menu from which you select ‘Run as Administrator’
  5. When Outlook opens up, simply sort the emails in your Inbox by ‘Attachment’ and Open each email up, click on the attached file to open it.
  6. When the ‘Opening Mail Attachment dialog box appears uncheck the ‘Always ask before opening this type of file’ and click ‘Open’. Then close the attachment and the email and move to the next email.
  7. Remember that if you are running Outlook 2007 and Office 2007 you will have attachments of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other files in both ‘Office 2007’ and ’97-2003 compatibility’ versions. That’s why it is useful to sort your emails by attachment so you can run through as many as possible.
  8. Once you have done this for your major file attachment types simply close down Outlook in Administrator mode and reopen as normal.

No more annoying dialog boxes!

If you are looking to help your company, team or yourself to work smarter on your priorities with Outlook why not ask us how we can help you. Go on, go beyond tips and get into a truly productive way of working on your priorities within your demanding workload.