For those of you that have installed Office 2007 on your computers, you’ve probably noticed a big problem in the new Outlook.
In previous versions of Outlook, HTML-formatted e-mail messages used the Internet Explorer print dialog, while text-only messages used the print dialog written for Outlook. The print dialog that’s been written for Outlook only gives you three options when choosing which pages to print: all, even or odd.
In Outlook 2007, Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, decided to use the Outlook print dialog for text-only and HTML e-mail messages. Unfortunately, they didn’t bother updating the print dialog, so you still only have the three choices listed above.
When you decide to print an e-mail that’s 10 or 20 (or more) pages long, but you only need the first page, that ends up wasting a lot of paper. Even if you only print messages that are 3-5 pages long and you only need one of them, you still end up wasting a lot of paper.
A company called Savvisoft has come up with a simple, inexpensive solution. Basically, they’ve written their own print dialog for Outlook 2007.
Blueprint for Outlook offers a lot of nice features that were left out of Outlook for some reason. The first, and most important feature is the option to print specific pages. In addition, the print preview has been improved, you can highlight a certain portion of the message and choose to print only the selection, you can print attachments and/or files that are linked to the message and much more.
I have tested the Enterprise edition and the Basic Edition. I didn’t see any features in the Enterprise edition that I really needed, so, IMHO, the Basic edition offers plenty. The price of a license for the Basic edition starts at $14.99 and goes down considerably depending on how many licenses you decide to purchase. The cost of Basic edition licenses bottom out at $7.99/license if you purchase over 100 of them.
For those of you that have Outlook 2007, I highly recommend downloading and installing the Basic edition of Blueprint. Savvisoft offers 30-day trials of each version of the software. What’s nice about that is, if you try all three different versions, you can actually use it for a total of 90 days before purchasing a license.