Do you send the same message on a regular basis, or do you repeatedly send mail that's structured a certain way? For example, perhaps you send a weekly status report that's always addressed to your manager, displays "Status Report" on the Subject line, and lists the same activities each week: read e-mail, attend meetings, conduct research. If so, you know how annoying and time consuming it is to retype this information each time. In Outlook 2000, you can avoid this by creating a New Message form that has the information built in.

Create a message form to use as a template

1. Create a new e-mail message. Add the recipient, subject, and message content that you use each time you send this type of message. Exclude information that will vary each time.
2. On the Tools menu, point to Forms, and then click Publish Form As.
3. In the Look in list, click Personal Forms Library.
4. In the Display name box, type the name you want to appear in the list of forms.
5. In the Form name box, type a name for the form if you want it to be different from the display name.
6. Click Publish.
   

The next time you need to send this type of message, open it from the Personal Forms Library: on the File menu, point to New, and then click Choose Form. (Click Personal Forms Library in the Look in list, if necessary.) Send the form as is or add new information. (Outlook won't add the new information to the form template stored in the Personal Forms Library unless you republish the form.)

To add fields to your New Message form, you need to customize the form in the Outlook Forms design environment. For more information, see the Advanced Customization book in the Outlook Help table of contents.

 Note    Instead of publishing the form to your Personal Forms Library, you can save it as a template (.oft) file. However, a form saved this way takes longer to open, and it won't be available if you open your mailbox from another computer.