Update! See updated info at the bottom of this article.

Just curious. How many times a day do you open or maximize Outlook to read new email? How many times do you minimize Outlook to open your Internet browser? Or how many times do you access Windows Explorer to find a file? Did you know you can do it all right from within Outlook?

I provide a lot of technical support and spend much of my day with my face buried in Outlook, reading and answering tons of email. Because I concentrate on technical support, I often times have to jump on the web to look up some information, find a URL or do a little research to help someone out. I'm constantly switching between Outlook an Internet Explorer. Well, actually I guess I should say that I would be constantly jumping between these two applications all day long, were it not for the fact that I know a trick that saves me time!

I have my most frequently used web sites linked so I can open them quickly from within Outlook! A quick click and I can be on the web without having to close or minimize my email application. Another click and I'm back viewing my email. If I need to open a file on my hard drive, I can click the drive and locate the file through Outlook, too. If you use Outlook, follow along with me here and I'll show you how you can make your life a little easier when it comes to ferreting around your computer.

Accessing Web Pages from Outlook
There are various ways to setup your views in Outlook. We'll be concentrating on the Outlook Bar and the Folder View. For this article, I'm using Outlook 2002 from Office XP, so the screen shots may look a little different from your program. But you can also use Outlook 2000 to setup web page and drive access. Double click the View menu to instantly expand the menu so you can see all the options available on that menu. Notice the options for the Outlook Bar and for the Folder List. Make sure they're both turned on so you can follow along with this article.

If you're not familiar with these views, the Outlook Bar is a shortcut bar where you can easily add/remove items to which you might want quick access. The Folder List is a directory tree of all the actual Outlook folders and subfolders you've created.

Generally, I don't leave the Folder List open. I have it open in the image above, just to show you what it is and how to access it. We will need it open to use it to create web pages that will be accessible through Outlook. Normally, I just have my Outlook Bar visible along with my emails. If I'm reading an email and need to zip over to MouseTrax or Microsoft to look up a URL or some other information to pass along in an email reply, I don't need to close or minimize my email, I simply click the appropriate web page shortcut on my Outlook Bar and I'm at the web site I need.

Adding Your Own Web Links
Adding web pages to Outlook is easy! Make sure your Folder List is open and create a new subdirectory. To add a subdirectory, right click on Outlook Today (the topmost level in the directory structure) and click New Folder. I suggest you name this new folder WebPages.

Now that you have a subdirectory to keep your web pages organized, scroll down to the newly added WebPages subdirectory, right click it and select New Folder again from the mini menu to add the actual folder that will display our newly linked web page. I also suggest you name these new WebPages subdirectories the same name as the web page you'll be creating. Say you want to add a link to this magazine, TechTrax. Under WebPages, the new folder will be called TechTrax. In the image below, you'll see that I have my most frequently used sites listed. MouseTrax is my main support web site. TechTrax is this magazine. Then I have Microsoft and the Word MVP sites linked for quick access to these useful URLs. Finally, I have Google listed, which is my favorite web search engine.

Now you need to set the default view for each of your newly created folders to the appropriate web URL (web address). Right click one of the folders where you want a web page to be displayed. Select Properties from the mini menu that will appear. This will bring up the Properties dialog box for this particular folder. Select the Home Page tab. Check the option to Show home page by default for this folder. Now enter the URL to the site you want to appear inside that folder. Then click OK and you're set.

You can now click on that folder and the TechTrax home page will appear in your right window. But because I prefer to have the Folder List closed and out of my way, I've also added shortcuts to these web folders on my Outlook Bar. To add a folder to your shortcut bar, just right click on the folder you want on the bar and this time choose Add to Outlook Bar from the mini menu. The shortcut will appear at the bottom of the list. But you can easily click to select it and drag that shortcut up along the list to wherever you'd like it to appear.

To get back to your email, just click the Inbox shortcut, which is a default shortcut on the Outlook Bar. If you want to delete an item from the bar, right click it and choose Remove from Outlook Bar.

Adding a Hard Drive Folder to Your Outlook Bar
If you want to add shortcut access to a drive or particular folder on your hard drive, you need to right click within the space of the Outlook Bar. A mini menu will appear. Choose Outlook Bar Shortcut… to open the Add to Outlook Bar shortcut dialog box. Click in the Look in drop down and select File System. Your computer's hard drive folder structure will appear. Click on whichever folder you need, such as My Computer to open your drives. If you want to link a full drive, select a drive letter itself. If you prefer to link directly to a particular folder, ferret down to that folder and select it. Click OK to back out of this dialog. A shortcut to that folder will now appear at the bottom of the Outlook Bar list. Select and drag it to wherever you want it on the list.

Now you can quickly jump to your computer hard drive right from within Outlook, without having to open Windows Explorer. If you double click a file from this view, it'll recognize the file association and will open within the program in which it's associated. If you click, say, a Word doc, Word would open, outside of Outlook, and then pull up that file.

If none of this sounds like something you want to tackle because you like the opportunity to close down Outlook now and then to get away from email and get on with other projects within other applications, know that you can just hit the Windows + M key combo to quickly knock down all your open applications to access your desktop. This move also works great for hiding what you're doing when the boss walks up!

Update!
Big thanks to reader, Colin Gardom from the UK. After reading and using the tips from this article, Colin did a little experimenting. He discovered how to change the icons for his added web page links in Outlook, so they actually look like web page icons. This made it easier to find his web shortcuts versus all his standard folder links. He wrote to me to pass along online generic propecia the info and I initially planned to add that tip to this article.

But then, after more experimenting, Colin replied back with even an easier way to add web pages to your Outlook bar. He apologized for the fact that his latest tip would make much of the folder processing info in this article obsolete. But that's fine with me! Anyway to do the job faster and easier is always good news. So here's Colin's tip regarding how to more easily put web page links on your Outlook bar.

In Outlook, you should see an address input box, just like on your browser. See the image below and notice the label for Address and the input box now showing the URL to www.mousetrax.com, my support web site.

If you don't see the Address input box, you can click View/Toolbars and turn on the Web toolbar, which will also contain the Address input box. See the image below to find the Web toolbar.

Note! Be sure you are connected to the web before you attempt to click a web link!

Once you have entered a URL and hit enter to load that web page into your main viewing area, move your mouse over to the Outlook bar on the left. Right click on that area. Apologies to our blind users, as I can't find out how to do this same move without a mouse. If anyone knows, please forward that info to dian@mousetrax.com!

After you right click, you'll see a mini menu with an option for Outlook Bar Shortcut to Web Page. See the image below for details.

Click the shortcut option and the URL for the currently displayed site will be added to the bottom of your shortcut list in your Outlook bar.

And now to add one more tip of my own to this update. After I tried Colin's suggestion (which worked great, thanks again, Colin), I realized, as usual, I'm starting to accumulate too much junk in my Outlook bar. Even though I'm using small icons, which can also be set via the right click mini menu, I needed more room.

To solve this problem, I decided to create a new Outlook bar group just for my web links.

As you can see on that same mini menu in the image above, there's an option for Add New Group. I selected that and added a new group called Webs.

Now, as you can see in the image below, I can click on the Outlook Shortcuts to get back to my standard email folders, but I can also quickly click on the Webs group to see all my frequently used sites. With a quick link activation here, I can get to the site without having to minimize Outlook, open Internet Explorer and use a shortcut from there.

And since the majority of my day is spent switching between email and a browser to look up information or URLs for users, this will save me a ton of clicks a day!

The Problem
If you use Microsoft Outlook, this article will show you how to better organize your email files to help prevent corruption and speed up how Outlook accesses your files.

If you save a lot of email, you could end up with one, very large email data file. In Outlook, your email is stored in one file, usually called Personal.pst. Over time, this file can become so large that it will not only cause Outlook to take longer to open and close, but there's a chance that the file could become corrupt if it's too large. If it does become corrupt, you could lose all that valuable email you've been saving! So it's important to take steps to protect those files. One way is to set files to be archived, thereby compressing and managing older emails in an archive file. The other way is to locate your PST file(s) and save a copy of it to another directory, drive, computer or CD as a backup. But there's another way you can help to reduce the risk of losing email. You can create several smaller PST files from that one large file.

In this article, I'll show you how to do this and suggest ways to better organize your email.

Locating Your Email Files
One of the first things you should do is to search your hard drive for *.pst to make sure you only have two files. One called Personal.pst and one called Archive.pst. If you have more than that, you should open these files to see what is contained in them, so you can better organize these files, too. When I decided to organize my mail, I did a search and discovered I had three personal.pst files. One was an old backup from a previous computer that had died. Another was from my desktop computer, back when I used it as my email center. And the third from the current file from my laptop. So the first thing I did was rename the other two so I could then move them all into the same directory for further sorting.

To open a PST file to see what's in it, open Outlook. Click File/Open/Outlook Data File.

That will bring up a dialog box pointing at the default file location for Outlook. This path is usually: C:\Windows\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. If you didn't already move any additional PST files into this path, then ferret around from this dialog box to find the path where those files are currently located. When you find the file you want to open, click it and click OK. As you can see from the image below, I have several different PST files.

When the new file is opened, you'll see it now listed in your Folder List. Click View/Folder List to display the Folder List, if it's not already displayed. As you can see in the image below, I currently have three separate PST files open. One is for my current email, this would be the file currently called Personal.pst. The other is one I've saved to contain email related to technical issues and a third one related to email about the web sites I maintain. And as you can see in the above image, you can easily match the names of the Web Sites file up with the Web Sites PST file. Same with the Tech Mail PST.

Create a New Email Folder
Let's assume you're dealing with just one large personal.pst file. You want to organize it better. So you're going to need to create a few separate PST files to which you can move the email around.

Click File/Data File Management. This will bring up the Outlook Data Files dialog box.

As you can see, it shows that I'm currently working with three PST files. You can also see that new mail delivery is defaulted to arrive in the Dians Current file. Click Add in this dialog to add a new PST file. A dialog box will appear confirming that you want to add a new personal.pst file. Click OK.

That will bring you again to the dialog box that defaults to your PST files. If this is not where you want to save these files, then select another directory. Give your new file a name and click OK to save this new, empty mail folder.

Tip: Since this is the default path that will appear whenever you save or open a PST file, I'd suggest you just save it here. I attempted to better organize my files by creating a Dian Email directory and saving all my files there. But I found I was wasting a lot of time having to locate that path over and over again. It's much faster to just accept this default path!

If you're planning this new folder to be used for, say, storage of all the email you send/receive from family members, then I'd suggest you save this file as Family.pst. After you give the file a name and click OK, you'll be presented with another dialog box. This one allows you to customize the configuration of your new folder.

As you can see in the image above, I have named the file the same as the name I used to save the file. The name you enter into this dialog box will be the name that will be displayed in the Folder List in Outlook when this file is open. So it only makes sense to give it a similar name. That way you will more easily know which is which.

Also in this dialog box, you can set your compression preferences, as well as whether you'd like the folder passworded. If you give it a password, be sure you use a password you won't forget. If you do forget it, you'll be locked out of all the email you put in this folder. When you're finished making your selections, click OK.

After clicking OK, you'll be taken back to the previous data file dialog. As you can see in the image above, the new file is now listed among my open PST files. At this point, you can also highlight your new PST file and click Settings.

You'll be presented with a dialog box that will allow you to compress the folder, if necessary and also to add any comments as notes to yourself so you won't forget what information is contained in this file. After you back out of the open dialogs, you'll notice that your Folder List now also shows this new file. It's now available for your use. Also notice that it also has it's own Deleted Items default folder.

I can now expand one of the other, larger folders and choose email from that file to click and drag into my new file. If I had created this file to hold all my Family related mail, I first would have obviously saved the file as Family.pst. Then I would have named it Family. And now I would go through all my email folders in that one large folder and pull out all email related to family issues and move it into this folder. You can drag over individual emails. You can click on one item, then hold down the Shift key, move your cursor to the end of the list of files you want to move, click on the last item and all items between will be selected. Then you can move the file in masse. You can also use the Ctrl key to selectively click to choose emails to move in a group. Or you can click and drag a whole folder into this new file.

Closing Email Files
Because I don't need to have this new folder opened all the time while in Outlook, I can now close this file. Highlight the folder, right click and click Close. This will keep all my email in this folder safely stored away in the Outlook directory.

However, should I later need to locate an important email from Uncle George, I would simply click File/Open/Outlook Data File, as we did in the beginning. I'd locate the PST file I'd need to search and click OK to open it. Then it would again be listed in my Folder List of open and available files.

Saving Backup Files
After I have created all my new PST files for each category that I need and I've taken the time to move all the email from the large personal.pst file into the separate files, it's important to make backups of these files. Then, should any individual PST file become corrupt, I'll have a backup to move over into my default directory.

After you close Outlook, open your Windows Explorer (hit Windows + E or right click the Start button and click Explore). Navigate to the directory where all your PST files are currently located. Select them all and hit Ctrl/C to copy them all. Then move to some backup directory, select it and hit Alt/V to paste a copy of all these files into your backup directory. Just be sure to do this now and then so you know you have a current copy of your files.

Note! Although you can copy files while Outlook is open, you will not be able to copy all the PST files because some will be in use. So it's best to wait until you've closed Outlook so all the files are available to be copied at one time.

Staying Organized
During my normal use of Outlook, after I receive and read email, any email I want to keep, I put into a central directory called Mail To Sort. I keep this folder handy by putting a shortcut to the folder on my Outlook bar. (NOTE! To learn how to take advantage of the Outlook shortcut bar, read this article: Looking Out Through Outlook.) Obviously, these emails are a mix of all the various mail categories. But rather loss propecia than taking time every day to sort out my email by opening and closing all the PST files, I wait until the end of the month and do it all at once. I can click on the Column Titles to sort by Sender or Subject to group your email. Then I can grab chunks at move them all off into their respective PST files. This way I can keep my In Basket from becoming too cluttered between sorting, yet I don't have to spend time each day opening and closing all my files just to sort a few pieces of email.