Prompts in Outlook Form

[LDMueller]

In Outlook 2003 I have a published form which is a basic letter with the
following in the message box as follows:

Re: Our File Number: XXX
Entitled “XXXâ€
Issued XXX

Dear XXX:

The 7½ year maintenance fee was duly paid for the above-referenced
patent, as indicated on the attached communication from the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office. The patent will now remain in force for an additional four
years.

No further action on this patent is required until XXX, at which time
the 11½ year maintenance fee becomes due. We have docketed that date and
recommend that you calendar it as well.

If you have any questions in connection with this matter, please call
XXX.

Sincerely,

Currently I have my user pressing F4 to search for the "XXX" which then they
type the information, then press F4 to go to the next "XXX".

Is there a way to run the form and then be prompted for the information
which goes in the "XXX" fields? I'm thinking I should put some code in the
form, like the following, but I'm not sure how to get it working. I don't
really have Form Fields in this form.

'Prompt user for Our File Number
strFileNo = InputBox("Please enter Our File Number", _
"File Number")

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

LDMueller

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP]]

Are you planning to send these to external recipients? I would not use a
published form for that, certainly not without a lot of testing, because in
many environments it will create attachment problems for external recipients
who are not using Outlook. I would handle this either with a Word document
and mail merge or as a saved .oft file with a VBA macro to create a new item
from the file and then prompt the user -- preferably with a VBA user form,
but multiple InputBox() calls would also work. Instead of XXX, you'd want a
unique token string in the message body for each "field."

If you don't want to write code, you might want to look at the Email
Templates tool at http://www.emailtemplates.com.