Last week Microsoft released Office 2010. I have been using Beta and Release Candidate for quite some time and have been waiting for RTM version. So I downloaded installer from MSDN and launched it. Right off the bat, I get the following error dialog box.

---------------------------
Setup Errors
---------------------------
Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease 
version of Microsoft Office 2010. You must first uninstall any
prerelease versions of Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated 
technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
---------------------------
OK   
---------------------------

I was hoping there will be straight forward migration from Beta to RTM. But fair enough that Microsoft wants machine clean of all Beta and Release Candidate installations. So I went to Control Panel and opened up dialog box to uninstall programs. Picked up the Beta installation of Office 2010 and uninstalled it.

I launched Office 2010 installer again, this time I got the same message again that I need to uninstall previous versions of Office 2010. After banging my head for some time, I decided to look at list of all installed programs and find anything that says beta. Bingo, there I found an installation of Outlook Hotmail Connector (Beta) as shown below in screen shot.

After uninstalling Outlook Hotmail Connector, my installation of Office 2010 went very smoothly. If you are running into same issue, make sure that any component related to Office 2010 that you installed during Beta or Release candidate, you uninstall all of those. Some of those components may not say Beta in their name. But if they are related to Office 2010, they need to be uninstalled.

Yesterday I reconfigured my laptop and got myself fresh install of Windows 7. First thing I want to do on my machine is to get set up with my email client which happens to be Microsoft Outlook. I have been using Outlook 2007 for quite some time. I realized that I have a beta testing invite for Office 2010 sitting in my inbox from Microsoft. So I decided to give it a spin.

Download and install of Office 2010 went smooth. That was a good start. Now came time to configure my gazillion email accounts in email client. Having subscribed lot of development and technology news groups I get few thousand emails and it is always a challenge to organize them appropriately. So I rely very heavily on rules in Outlook. I always disliked Rules wizard in Outlook. I have to go through so many steps to create a simple rule. Only thing I want is simple one click operation that will set up rule like "move email from X to folder Z all the time". So I was looking around for my tool bar to see where rules wizard is. So there was a change for me. Now this Rules button is available in Move group of tool bar buttons. But I saw a small arrow below the button. I clicked on it and I was just thrilled. There is what I have been looking for all the time... One click option to set simple rule. By click of one button I was able to set up a simple email move rule. You can see the simple steps as shown below.

• Find Move group of buttons in Outlook tool bar.

  

• Click on the arrow below Rule button and it will bring up a simple menu below it. And select you rule condition.

  

• Now select the folder where emails are to be moved. And you are done.

  

I could not ask for any thing more simple than this.

If you are creating news letter with nicely formatted HTML content and images etc. and using Outlook to send those emails to your subscribers and user, then here are simple steps that you can follow to do it on Outlook 2007.

• Create HTML file with all the content that you want to send as email content. Here are few things that you will have to mind
  • Use inline styles.
  • Post your images on an external web site and then add links to that URL in your content
• Start outlook client application
• Click on File >New > Mail Message menu option or simple click on New button.

  

• Click on Attach File tool bar button as shown below

  

• From Insert File dialog box, browse to location where you saved your HTML file. When you click on that file, notice that Insert button in lower right corner is active now. Most important thing to note is that there is a Down Arrow next to the button that most of us do not pay attention to. Click on it and it brings up a menu with 2 options. Click on Inset as text option.

  

• You will notice that your HTML file's content has been inserted as content of your email now.
• If everything looks good, click on Send button and you are done.

This morning i was searching my emails in Microsoft Outlook for an email with some attachment. Well bad luck ... i could not find the email and probably i deleted it. Here comes wonderful feature of temporary file storage to rescue. When you open an attachment in Outlook, application creates a temporary copy of this document on your machine. Each time you open the same attachment, a new copy of this attachment gets saved. These temporary files are located at following folder location.

C:\Documents and Settings\viper\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.Outlook\8PVFOLU0

This path assumes that your OS is installed in C drive of your machine, which is the case for most users. Then you will look for user name under Document and Settings folder. For example in the path above, Viper is my user name. Only part of this path which is random is the last folder name. 8PVFOLU0 is randomly chosen when Outlook creates this folder. So in your case it could be different. So what you can do is, get down all the way to Content.Outlook folder and look for folders. One of those folders will have your files.

Your attachment files may not be there if:

• You have cleared temporary internet files folder
• You did not allocate sufficient space for temporary internet files and some of the content of outlook folder got trashed to make room for new content

Otherwise you are good to go and on the way to recovery.