Windows Tip: Creating template emails for Outlook 2007

If you work in an organization and use Outlook, you'll often find yourself sending the same types of emails, with variations, again and again. Examples of this might include memos, press announcements, expense reports, and so on. How can you avoid having to type the same information again and again when you do this?

A friendly geek made my life easier by showing me how to create an email template in Outlook 2007, and now I have a bunch of them on my system and they save me tons of time. Here's what I did:

1. Click New to open an Untitled Message window.

2. Type something like Press Release: BLAH in the Subject box.

3. Type the general structure of your email message using as much reusable text as possible. For the rest of the text, you can either type BLAH BLAH BLAH or use a Lorem Ipsum generator like this one.

4. Click the Office button (that big round thing), click Save As, type a file name like Press Announcement, select Outlook Template in the Save As listbox, but don't click the Save button just yet.

Now in your Save As dialog box, navigate to a folder where you can easily open your template from. For example, you could create a folder named My Outlook Templates on your desktop and open your templates from there by double-clicking on them. Or what I do is create the folder somewhere under my Start menu (for example,
in XP you could create a My Outlook Templates folder under your C:\Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu\ folder) so I can access my email templates directly from my Start menu. Either way, all you have to do to write a new Press Release is find the template you want, open it, replace the nonsense text with real text, and click Send.

Or maybe try leaving the nonsense text in the next time you send out a Press Release and see if anyone notices!