Using Folder Home Pages | Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours

Use folder home pages to replace the view on a folder with a Web page, or use the Outlook View control to display different Outlook items in a folder.

You can choose any Web page for the folder home page, but using a locally stored home page is usually the best because it won't cause Outlook to hang if your Internet connection is slow.

Outlook Today is a folder home page, but the folder it's in has security restrictions on the type of controls that will display. Folders don't have the same restrictions and, as a result, they can display controls that Outlook Today cannot. For this reason, it's generally better to leave Outlook Today as is and create folder home pages when you want to use a custom Outlook Today page.

Open the Folder properties sheet by right-clicking on the folder and choosing Properties from the menu. Select the Home Page tab and enter the URL or browse for a local file. Display the home page by checking Show Home Page by Default for This Folder (see Figure 3.15).

Figure 3.15. Set a local file or page from the Internet as your folder home page. Although you can use any file type that displays in Internet Explorer, using HTML-formatted pages is more practical than using text or image files as your home page.

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When you set a local file as your folder home page, Outlook will complain about updating offline files. Choose OK to close the dialog and click OK again to close the property sheet, or click Cancel if Outlook continues to complain. The local file is set as your folder home page, even though you chose Cancel.

To view the contents of the folder, uncheck S how Home Page by Default for This Folder. To clear the filename, choose Restore Defaults.

When you assign a folder home page to a Calendar folder, you need to use the folder list to view the folder home page. If you select the folder from Calendar's Navigation Pane, the folder contents display.

Although you can use any HTML page for the folder home page, you might like to use a page displaying other Outlook folders. Using the Outlook View control, you can display the contents of any folder in your profile in the folder home page.

Enter the following code into a new Notepad file. Adjust the height and width parameters to suit and replace Calendar with the folder you want to display. Save the text with an .HTML extension and use it for your folder home page (see Figure 3.16).

 <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>My Folder Home Page</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF"> <OBJECT id=ViewCtlFolder height=225 width=500 classid=CLSID:0006F063-0000-0000-C000-000000000046> <PARAM NAME="Folder" VALUE="Calendar"> <PARAM NAME="Namespace" VALUE="MAPI"> <PARAM NAME="Restriction" VALUE=""> <PARAM NAME="DeferUpdate" VALUE="0"></OBJECT> </BODY> </HTML>

Figure 3.16. Two Outlook View controls embedded in an HTML page display a Calendar and Tasks folder as a folder home page.

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If you show the Web toolbar, you can select a folder, and then copy the folder path from the Address field to use in the View control. Use the folder names following outlook: .

For more information about using the Outlook View control to create folder home pages or desktop wallpaper, see http://www.poremsky.com/AD_DD.htm.

The toolbar for the first folder used in your home page is enabled, as shown in Figure 3.16. Changing the views for additional folders used in a View control is a bit more difficult; in many cases you can right-click on the field names in the View control and choose a new view. For a calendar, right-click anywhere on the calendar and choose Go t o Date. Select a different view from the Go t o Date menu.