Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003 supports Unicode® and provides full support for multilingual data. If you work in a multinational organization or share messages and items with people who use Outlook on systems that run in other languages, you can take advantage of Unicode support in Outlook. Running Outlook in Unicode mode enables you to work with messages and items that are composed in different languages.

Previous versions of Outlook provided support for multilingual Unicode data in the body of e-mail messages. However, Outlook data — such as the To and Subject lines of messages and the ContactName and BusinessTelephoneNumber properties of contact items — was limited to characters defined by your system code page. Outlook 2003 no longer has this limitation, provided Outlook is running in Unicode mode with Microsoft Exchange Server as the messaging server. (Unicode mode is also supported with POP3 accounts, as long as items are delivered to a Personal Folders file (PST file) that supports Unicode data.)

Non-Unicode systems typically use a code page based environment, in which each script has its own table of characters. Items based on the code page of one operating system rarely map well to the code page of another operating system. In some cases, the items cannot contain text that uses characters from more than one script.

In Outlook 2003, the two systems of storing text code pages and Unicode coexist. However, Unicode mode is recommended and is the default mode, if the configurations of a user's profile, Exchange server, and administrator settings allow it. The mode is automatically determined by Outlook based on these settings and cannot be changed manually by users.

Running Outlook in Unicode mode on the Exchange server can also ensure that by default, the Offline Folder files (OST files) and PST files used in Outlook profiles can store multilingual Unicode data and also offer greater storage capacity for items and folders than non-Unicode Outlook files.

Related link

You can learn about additional Unicode support improvements in Outlook 2003. For more information about these features, see Unicode Enhancements in Outlook 2003.