Month: February 2011

It’s been a long time since I answered a reader’s question here on the site, so let’s do this thing!

Reader Jeff was setting up a computer for a co-worker, and wanted to place several website shortcuts on the computer’s desktop. Dragging the website icon from the browser’s address bar to the desktop created the shortcut, but the problem was that those shortcuts only had generic icons, and not the “website icons” Jeff wanted. So how can you create a desktop shortcut for a website that uses the site’s actual icon?

Well, first of all, those icons are called “favicons”, and in most cases they’re located at www.domain.com/favicon.ico. You can use Firefox or Chrome to load each address and save the icon as an ICO file. You can also do this with Internet Explorer, but in many cases IE will insist on saving the file as a BMP file. You can sometimes rename the extension of the saved BMP file to ICO, but a lot of times IE will mangle the file header and you’ll get an error message when you try to actually use it. So just use Firefox or Chrome if possible.

Save each favicon.ico file in a permanent location with a unique, meaningful file name (such as jimcofer.ico). All you have to do then is right-click each desktop icon, choose “Properties” and then click the “Change Icon” button. Use the “Browse” button to locate the correct ICO file you saved in the previous step, then repeat for any additional icons.

Note that the desktop icons will now be “tied” to the saved icons. If you move the saved icons (for example, from My Documents\Icons to My Documents\Stuff\Icons) you’ll need to re-map them via Explorer.

If you’ve been using Outlook for some time, you’ve probably got a folder structure that works for you. And you probably also have a lot of email that could be archived out of your mail storage file.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s all-or-nothing solution to the issue – AutoArchiving – is quite limited. You can only archive items by their date. You can’t, for instance, tell Outlook to archive all 6 month old emails except categorized ones. Nor can you tell Outlook to archive all emails except this or that folder. You could always copy emails to a new data file manually, but that would mean recreating the folder structure, which can be a lot of work.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could replicate your folder structure in a new data file, and move older emails to it as needed?

You can, and it’s a simple, if drawn out, process:

1) Open Outlook and click “File” > “Import and Export”.

2) Choose “Export to a file”, and then click “Next”.

3) Choose “Personal Folder File (.pst)”, and then click Next.

4) On the next screen, select the top of the hierarchy (usually listed as “Personal Folders”) and make sure that “Include subfolders” is checked, and then click “Next”.

5) Choose a unique name for the new data file (such as “outlookfolders.pst”) as well as a location for the new data file (such as the desktop), and then click “Finish”.

6) If you see an additional screen called “Create Microsoft Personal Folders”, just click “OK”.

Depending on the size of your email archive and the speed of your computer, this process can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 45 minutes or more.

Continue reading “Copying Outlook’s Folder Structure”