Designed form disappeared!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Lady Dungeness
  • Start date Start date
L

Lady Dungeness

I want to design a new Contacts form. I opened a blank Contacts, saved it
to desktop as DesignMe.oft, and went to work. I got the phone number fields
the way I wanted, and saved as *.oft, overwriting DesignMe.oft. I closed.

When I went to open DesignMe.oft -- my designed form was nowhere to be
found! Where in the system should I be looking for it? I want to test it a
little and design it some more.
 
Beginning with Outlook 2003 SP2, users can work with most .oft form templates files only by opening the template from the Tools | Forms | Choose Form dialog, browsing for User Templates in File System. If you're planning to use it to create items, you'll want to publish it to your contacts folder.
 
Is there any way I can get it back? It's sitting there on my desktop.

Lady D


Beginning with Outlook 2003 SP2, users can work with most .oft form
templates files only by opening the template from the Tools | Forms | Choose
Form dialog, browsing for User Templates in File System. If you're planning
to use it to create items, you'll want to publish it to your contacts
folder.
 
OK. I had to tweak the instructions a little ... Outlook 2002 would not let
me browse; it limited me to pre-selected locations. So I copied the *.oft
file from the desktop to one of the locations that had a directory path.
From there, I could select it. Thanks for the pointers.

Lady D


Did you try what I suggested -- Tools | Forms | Choose Form? (Or Design Form
if you want to go straight to design mode)

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54
 
Oops -- replied too quickly. But when I opened the *.oft file through the
Choose Form dialog, it brought up the standard contact form -- not the one I
designed and saved to *.oft. Oh well.

Lady D

Did you try what I suggested -- Tools | Forms | Choose Form? (Or Design Form
if you want to go straight to design mode)

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54
 
I can't explain why that would happen. In any case, next time, you can use the Publish Form command to publish the form to your contacts folder.
 
OK. So "publish" is kind of like "save as template" in outlook-speak?

Lady Dungeness



I can't explain why that would happen. In any case, next time, you can use
the Publish Form command to publish the form to your contacts folder.
 
Not really; they are two completely different approaches. Save as template is what you've already tried and generally is useful only for making a backup copy of a form. Publishing a form is more secure, so you don't get so many complaints or unexpected behaviors. If you publish to a folder, the form also becomes available on the Actions menu and can be made the default form for the folder.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54
 
Thank you. I like the part about being available from the Menu. Very
handy.

Lady D

Not really; they are two completely different approaches. Save as template
is what you've already tried and generally is useful only for making a
backup copy of a form. Publishing a form is more secure, so you don't get so
many complaints or unexpected behaviors. If you publish to a folder, the
form also becomes available on the Actions menu and can be made the default
form for the folder.

--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming:
Jumpstart for Power Users and Administrators
http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?id=54
 
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