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Last year I created a simple macro for Microsoft Outlook 2007 that automatically created an appointment from an email , adding the recipients to the appointment invite. Apparently there has been quite a bit of interest in this, most recently someone asked...( Read More...
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Silly me. When I posted the macros to create Outlook appointments based on email messages and to schedule your drive time, I failed to explain how to add VBA Macros to Outlook. Well here's how:
- For the macro that you want to add, like NewMeetingRequest.bas, right-click on the file hyperlink in Internet Explorer and select Save Target As... and save it to your desktop or in Firefox, click on the hyperlink and select File...Save Page As...and save it to your desktop. (Remember the location where you saved it).
- Start Microsoft Outlook 2007
- In the Tools menu, select Macros...Visual Basic Editor
- In the Visual Basic Editor, you should see a project explorer in the left hand pane. If you don't see it select View...Project Explorer:
- Select File...Import File... and select the .bas file that you downloaded in step 1. Doing so will add the module to Outlook and it will be listed in the Modules folder.
- Now you might want to add the macro to the Quick Access Toolbar in one of the item explorers in Outlook. To do this, open an explorer by double-clicking on the item in Outlook (like a contact, an appointment, an email message, etc.)
- Click on the Customize Quick Access Toolbar button and select More Commands... from the menu.
- Change the Choose commands from drop down to Macros.
- Select one of the macros in the left list and press the Add >> button to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar button list on the Right.
- With the new button selected on the right, press the Modify button below to select a new icon and/or display name (to show when hovering over the button); press OK.
- Press OK again to save the changes to the Quick Access toolbar
Now the macro is hooked up to a button in the Quick Access toolbar and ready to use.
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I've always wanted to do this: I get an email message and I want to create an appointment from the the message. It's a simple task and I found that this was one of the goals of Chandler in the book that I'm reading right now, Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg. Incidentally, I just met Scott at Scoble's Geek/Blogger dinner in San Francisco last week. From the book, I learned that the software architecture that the Chandler team was using to accomplish this task was very complex. I looked into the Outlook 2007 UI I did not find this feature. Last week I visited a customer and the engineering manager there asked how to do this. The beauty of Outlook is that it is programmable! In about an hour, I was able to write a short VBA Macro that does the following:
- If the current item is an email, create a new appointment item
- Copy the categories, body, and subject
- Copy the attachments
- Add the sender as a meeting participant
- Add each email recipient as a meeting participant
- Each To: participant will be a required
- Each CC: or BCC: participant will be optional
I then added the macro to my quick launch bar for an Outlook message and it worked!
I have attached the macro for all of you to try out.
Enjoy,
Michael
