Why Program Outlook Forms?

As a general purpose personal information management system (or PIM), Microsoft Outlook includes most of the general features that an individual or a group must perform, including such tasks as reading, sending, and organizing email, scheduling meetings, keeping notes, and maintaining a contacts list. The emphasis here, though, is on general; Outlook offers the basic set of features that most users require. In order to make Outlook capable of addressing the particular needs of individual users or groups of users, Microsoft added a number of customization and extensibility features to the product. These include Outlook's programmability (at an application level using VBA or a forms level using VBScript) and the ability to create custom forms.

By attaching VBScript code to either existing forms or new forms, you can modify the appearance or the behavior of the form, thus making it suitable for special applications. For example, you can:

• Change the recipient of an email message based on the content of the message to which you are replying
• Display or hide particular elements of a form depending on the attributes or content of a message, an appointment, or a contact
• Automatically store an item in a nondefault folder based on the item's attributes or content
• Get at data in some other documentlike a Word document or an Excel spreadsheetto include as your form's data
• Manipulate data stored in Outlook to summarize or display in an Outlook form