How to create Microsoft Outlook shortcuts for email and tasks

Posted on October 21, 2007 at 10:45 am

Here’s a quick guide on how to create your own Outlook shortcuts (not Outlook keyboard shortcuts) on the desktop or Quick Launch bar so that you can easily create new email message, add new notes, add new contacts, or create new appointments without having to open the Outlook window at all! I find these shortcuts better than the Outlook keyboard shortcuts because those still require you to be INSIDE Outlook (to have Outlook as the current active window).

However, it would be really useful sometimes if I didn’t have to constantly open Outlook every time I want to write a new email, let’s say. It would be so much easier to simply click on icon on my desktop or even better, on my Quick Launch bar to create a new mail. You can do this by changing running Outlook with a set of different command line switches.

Here’s how you go about doing this: first you should already have a shortcut icon on your desktop or in your Quick Launch bar for Outlook as shown below:

Go ahead and right-click on the icon and choose Send To and then choose Desktop. You can also simply right-click and drag it to the desktop and choose Copy if you like.

Now you’ll see you have a “Launch Microsoft Outlook” icon on your desktop. If you were to click on that, it would just load Outlook. Now we’ll go ahead and change the command line parameters so that it does something else, like creates a new email or task.

Go ahead and right-click on the icon and choose Properties. You’ll notice in the Target text box, the path for Outlook will be in quotes followed by some / and then a parameter. In my case, it looks like this:

“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE” /recycle

What we want to do now is change the parameter. Delete the /recycle or whatever is after the OUTLOOK.EXE” part and replace it with any of the following depending on what you want it to do:

For a new email message: /c ipm.note

For a new pre-addressed email - /c ipm.note /m “address1@domain.com, address2@domain.com”

For a new note: /c ipm.stickynote

For a new contact - /c ipm.contact

For a new appointment - /c ipm.appointment

For a new task - /c ipm.task

Now click OK and go ahead and rename your shortcut to something more appropriate. You can then drop it back onto your Quick Launch bar by dragging it there. Next time you want to create a new email, just click on it. You can also setup these commands for your mouse if it has lots of extra buttons you’re not using! So you can create new mails, etc by simply clicking a button on the mouse!

But that’s not all! You can configure a crap load of command lines switches to do a lot more than just the above-mentioned ones by going to the Official Reference from Microsoft. However, these are mostly for advanced users and you probably won’t need them.

If you don’t have any Outlook 2003 icon on your desktop or Quick Launch bar, you can read here on how to re-create the icon Outlook icon on your desktop.

Source via MrTweak

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» Filed Under MS Office Tips

6 Responses to “How to create Microsoft Outlook shortcuts for email and tasks”

jit said on : December 22nd, 2007 at 6:15 am

thuis is such a helpful thing i have known

akishore said on : December 22nd, 2007 at 1:45 pm

Hi Jit,

Thanks! Yeah it’s really useful! I wish I had known how to create Outlook email shortcuts way earlier! It’s just so much easier, you don’t even have to open Outlook!

Fedmich said on : February 8th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

Very helpful indeed, thanks

Michael said on : March 19th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

Just the start of what I neeed to do. How do you get it to send automatically as well.

MRB said on : April 25th, 2008 at 5:20 am

WOW! I have been looking for these tips for about two months. What a relief to finally find this! Not only that but the instructions are dumbed down for me to follow.