Microsoft Outlook Creating a Custom Button

Microsoft Outlook can be a very useful program and if you know the right steps you can also add additional buttons for your favorite websites, so you don’t have to spend time opening your browser and typing the web address. Follow these easy steps and in minutes you will have a link within Outlook that you can click on to open your personal website, Google, or even a program on your computer. This can be a great tool to utilize if you are like me and always working via Email.

First step is the most obvious we need to open Outlook, and I know a lot of you laugh but not everyone possesses advanced computer skills. Once Outlook is open then we need to make sure that all of our tool bars are open and displaying. To do this go to “View” in the tool bar at the top of Outlook, a drop down will open and in here will want to go to the option called Toolbars, now there will be three options in here (standard, advanced, and web) and they will either have a check or not have a check. We want them all to have checks.

Now all the toolbars will be present, next we need to go to the Tools option at the top of Outlook and then go to Customize. A new window will open with three tabs (Toolbars, Commands, and Options). We will need to select the Commands tab.

Now you will need to go to the button labeled Rearrange Commands and click it.

Once again a new window will open with some options. At the top there are two circles one with a dot in it and the other without a dot. These are called radio buttons if you are a computer nerd we will just call them the little white circles. We will need to put the dot into the second little white circle labeled Toolbar, you do this by clicking the little white circle. This should activate the white box next to the little white circle, which we will need to click on and it will “drop down” some options for us to choose. We will want the very last option which is labeled Web, scroll down to it and click on the word Web and it will close the “drop down” options.

Now you will have some options in the white dialog box, they should be some variation of Back, Forward, Stop, Refresh, Start Page, Search the Web, and Address. We are going to add our own button to this page and then change it to be a link to a webpage or program.

Next you will want to click on the button labeled Add on the right of the box. This will open a new box.

Next we will need to scroll down in the white box on the far left to the word Web and then click on it, this will change the box on the right.

Next we need to choose one of the options on the right that isn’t already a part of the program, I am going to choose News, which is about half way down the options. Click on News then click OK.
Now it will close the dialog box and put News at the top of our prior window.

Next we need to click on the button labeled Modify Selection; this will bring in a drop down with our options.

We will first need to name our button accordingly. The & sign makes a shortcut key for you, what ever letter you place this before is going to be the new shortcut key on our keyboard for this command. I labeled my button Jaso&n.

Next we need to assign a hyperlink which is the last option in the Modify Selection dropdown. Go to Assign Hyperlink and then Open.

In this new window you have several options you can type in the web address in the white box at the bottom (labeled Address). Type in Http://www.google.com (or what ever website you want to open), then click OK. Close all windows and test your link at the top of the page.

Or if you would like to make the link open a program (I am going to use MSN messenger) you can browse to the program you would like to open with this button and double click it or single click and hit OK. Again test your link after you have closed all windows

This should work!