You can DELEGATE the creation of standard, often used text within emails to Outlook 2003 itself by using the Auto-correct functionality of MS Word. I use the following method for 6 short, often used email texts in my business, but there is no limit to how many you can create – except, of course, the 80/20 rule is ruthless and a handfull of carefully selected autotexts will probably do more for you than a full library.

Situation: You have to send a number of similar emails as part of your Approval / Control / Management or Customer Contact duties. You currently create individual emails in response to individual requests etc. Also, you might want to include a standard text at the top or bottom of your mails.

Solution: Create standard texts which can be used at the touch of a button. Here’s how:
Make sure that you use Microsoft Word as your email editor (it provides much more flexibility than Outlook’s email editor anyway) – Go to TOOLS  – OPTIONS – MAIL FORMAT tab – in MESSAGE FORMAT area select HTML and check both the MS Word options – click OK to close.

Now use the ‘Autocorrect’ function in Microsoft Word to create your replacement text.

  1. Open a new email and type your text, you can change font styles if you wish.
  2. Now highlight your text and go to TOOLS in the open document/email and select AUTOCORRECT OPTIONS.
  3. Note that your text is now automatically inserted into the form, now enter a couple of letters in the REPLACE area of the form to generate your autocorrected text in your email. I use ‘qw1, qw2, qw3’ etc for my various standard texts because I can’t think of commonly used words that start with QW!
  4. Save the instruction and play with it in a new email.
  5. Once the text is generated in your email or document you can edit it with specific changes if you wish.

I hope this helps, let me know if it does!
Of course, you can always contact us directly to tailor a support programme to your needs.