January 26, 2010, 12:55 PM — This tip comes from Jen Darr of PC Helps Support and will make sure you know what you're getting when you hit Print inside Outlook. Jen offers great advice on how to create a new print style with a different page size for your Outlook printouts. While I discourage printing e-mail as a matter of course, many times you do need to print something, so you may as well create the output that works best for you.
You have to start from a Folder, or at least a view that's not a message or other Outlook item. Let's take the Inbox view, since many people stay there plenty of time during the day.
Click File > Page Setup and choose Define Print Style. Select the style, such as Memo Style for our example. Click the Copy button. Now we'll modify the new copy of Outlook's Memo Style to our needs.
Provide a new name in the Style Name Field, such as Booklet Memo Style. Click the Paper tab, go to the Page section, and choose Letter Half. Click OK and then close.
When you want to print the next memo from an e-mail, click File > Print > Booklet Memo Style (or whatever you named your style). The page size selected, Letter Half, will be used to print. Once you select the style, hit the Print button.
Our goal here is to print the memo on two columns of a landscape page (wider than tall), rather than two pages of paper in portrait mode (taller than wide). Jen also likes this mode because a short memo will take up half the page, leaving plenty of room for notes on the other half. Just don't let your boss see the snide comments you make about the memos.
Be aware that Print Styles are outranked by HTML formatted messages. If your boss likes to load memos up with multiple fonts and graphics using HTML, your print style won't work. And that's a shame, since cutesy memos need some snide comments.
Thanks, Jen Darr of PC Helps Support, for your tip. And we'll do another tip from Jen on Thursday about printing from Excel.
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