Every month, I need to submit a report listing everyone I've received messages from. Is there an easy way to print just the sender names? I don't want all the messages to print.
Outlook printouts reflect what you see on the screen, so the most obvious way to approach this task is by using a custom Outlook view. Figure 1 shows the printout from a custom view set up to group by the From field and thus list not only all senders but also how many messages the user received from each person.
To create this view, use the View, Arrange By, Current View, Define Views command in Microsoft Office Outlook 2003. (In earlier versions of Outlook, use View, Current View, Define Views.) Then, to set the grouping, use the Group By command and group by the From field. In Outlook 2003, clear the Automatically group according to arrangement check box, then select the Show field in view check box.
After you apply the view, you can remove the "From:" label in each group by right-clicking the From column heading and choosing Format Columns. Clear the text in the Label field, as Figure 2 shows. After you return to the view, you can remove the Subject, Received, and Size fields and keep those extraneous headings from appearing in the printout by dragging their column headings away. To collapse the view so that it looks like Figure 1, use the View, Collapse All Groups command.
What if you need to submit your report by email instead of in printed format? Office 2003 offers a good solution. You can print the report to the Microsoft Office Document Image Writer printer, then attach the resulting .mdi file to a message. If you have Office 2003 but the person who needs the report does not, open the .mdi file in Microsoft Office Document Imaging, then choose Tools, Send Text to Word. The imaging program will apply optical character recognition (OCR)—which should work perfectly, since the source of the image was itself electronic text—and open a Word document containing your monthly senders list. After you perform any desired cleanup, choose File, Send To, Mail Recipient to create a new email message that contains the senders list as the body of the message.
