Your personal style is important in more than just your clothes and your attitude.  Signing your emails with just the right look can be just as important.  Luckily Outlook 2007 gives you lots of options for doing that.

To get started on your new look, open up the Tools menu and select Options from the drop down, then click the Signature button on the Mail Format tab.

Let’s start with creating just the right signature, or several of them.   You should have at least two signatures set up, one for creating new emails, and a shorter one for replies and forwards.  But you may want to set up a personal one vs. a business one, or if you have several email accounts, a different signature for each account.

Your default email account will automatically be selected in the account field, so if you want to create a look for a different one, don’t forget to select it from the drop down box.  To create a new signature, click the New button and give the signature a name that makes it easy to recognize.

Now just start typing your name and information in the window at the bottom. You have available many of the formatting options found in Word, so choose whatever font size and style seems appropriate to the message you’re trying to get across.  Email and web addresses will automatically turn into hyperlinks when you send your message if you enter them as text here, but you can also click the earth-link icon to enter a hyperlink.

To give your email that little extra something personal, you can scan and upload your handwritten signature as an image.  To do that, make sure your cursor is at the spot where you want your image to show up, then click the little icon that looks like a mountain with the sun shining on it.  Now browse to wherever you saved the image and insert it.  You can also choose to copy a picture from another program and then use Control-V to paste it from the clipboard.

Attaching your business card is a good suggestion for business emails to look more professional.  You have to have yourself entered in Outlook Contacts, including all the information you want to show up on your card.  Then insert your cursor on the line where you want your card to show up and click the Business Card button.  Scroll through the list of contacts to find yourself, select it and click OK.

If you want to automatically insert a signature in every email, click open the drop down menu next to New Messages or Replies/Forwards in the upper right corner of the window and select which signature you want to use.  If you do not choose a default, you can still choose to insert a signature at the end of your email by clicking the Signature button on the Insert tab of your message window.  Choosing one signature will wipe out the default if you choose to use a different one.

If you really want to get fancy, you can spiff up your stationary as well as your signature.  Click the Personal Stationery tab in the same window you used to set up your signature.  There are tons of styles to choose from that include backgrounds and fonts.  If you don’t want to get that fancy, you can just choose a font style and color for new messages and replies.  You can also tell Outlook which font to display plain text messages in, although that does not mean the recipient will see that font—that is determine by their defaults.

One thing you should keep in mind is that if someone has their email set to read all emails in text rather than html or rich text formats, none of your fancy fonts or backgrounds will show.  Even your pictures will be gone, though they should still attach themselves to the email as an image file.

Most people and companies, however, allow incoming mail to be seen as written, so feel free to be creative and make your emails look as distinct and personal as you are yourself.

Share: