Outlook: print emails of a conversation in the right order
- Nov. 24, 2024
 | Example files with this article: |
Introduction
I use Outlook as the work email program. It is set up to show emails as conversations, meaning that you can expand a conversation and see all related emails at a glance. From time to time I need to print out an email chain, for instance, a nasty bug in TM1 was reported in several emails with screenshots.
I observe a number of difficulties when simply printing:
- Printing the whole conversation (all emails) is a waste of time and money. Duplicate emails are printed multiple times.
- When I only print the last email, it is in chronologically descending times. I hate it reading through the prints backwards. An email could start at page 5 and ends at 7. The next email starts at 4 and ends at 5. And so on.
- Printed screenshots can be cut off at the side of the page.
- Signatures could take space when printed and consume ink.
- Etc.
That's why I wrote Outlook VBA to:
- Act upon the whole conversation of the currently selected email.
- Retrieve all emails in the conversation.
- Start MS Word and paste the emails below each other
- Remove some parts in Word related to signatures etc.
- Add a page number (this part could be different for you)
- Condense out of office emails (O.O.O.)
- Remove trailing whitespace
- A number of other quality of life changes.
You can download the code near the top of the page. I give you the full code, not redacted, so needless to say that certain parts of the code are applicable to my situation and Outlook environment. You might want to change/remove these parts. One thing that did not always work for me, was that some pictures were not shown in Word (linked picture).
You can adjust the code to save as PDF and like that you can keep a trace of an email chain.
