Outlook is a great tool for exchanging emails with friends and co-workers. Lots of times we send emails that are important enough that they need to be printed out and taken to business meetings and we usually taking the process of printing a document or email for granted.

But when we can’t print out an otherwise unimportant email then all of a sudden that print job takes on much higher priority in our lives.

Other times we are able to print out a much needed document for an important meeting and rush to grab it, run down the hall, plop ourselves down at the conference table and then start passing out copies only to discover that our print job appears discolored, grayed out or lighter in appearance than normal. We curse and say that we will never use that printer again. But later we find out that the problem was never with the printer but with problem with Outlook, particularly with Outlook 2007.

In Outlook 2007, there was a bug discovered related to color categories and printing which resulted in darker colors being printed lighter than normal.

Outlook allows the user to be able to assign Color Categories which adds another dimension to organizing your data or, in the case of email, organizing your email contents. Color Categories give your end users the ability to categorize their emails, contacts or appointments. Folders can then be created based on those categories and then filled with email messages which fit those categories. (Unfortunately IMAP accounts are not supported.)

Now let’s get back to the dark colors being printed much lighter than otherwise expected problem.

There is a hotfix available from Microsoft to correct that problem. The hotfix is dated September 24, 2008 and is described in the Microsoft Knowledge Base article 957909.

An Administrator should be able to download and install the hotfix. As an administrator, make sure you are careful as the Registry will need to be touched. Always make sure that a backup of the Registry has been performed prior to any edits made there.

Once the hotfix has been installed it stills need to be enabled. After stopping Outlook you can then follow these steps to enable the fix:

1. Start Registry Editor by clicking on Start, click on Run, and then type regedit in the Open text box.
2. Hit Enter or Click on OK. You may be asked for an administrator password.
3. Locate and then select the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice12.0OutlookPrinting
4. After you select the subkey then from the Edit menu select New and then click DWORD Value.
5. Type PrintDarkColors, and then hit the ENTER key.
6. Right-click PrintDarkColors, and then click Modify.
7. In the Value data box, type “1”, and then click OK or hit Enter.
8. On the File menu, click Exit to exit Registry Editor.

Printing from Outlook has some nice features such as the capability to print even-numbered or odd-numbered pages. You can select which pages to print using the Number of pages option from Outlook. And by using the browser view for email message you can print any page you choose.

One of the nice features of Outlook 2007 is the ability to print sections of an email message. Service Pack 2 (SP2) is required in order to get this functionality. The only nuance of this feature is that you need to open the email message in a browser window. Once in a browser window, you can then print the sections or pages of the email.

To print a section of a message you can use the following steps:

1. From the Actions group, on the Message tab, with the message open, click on “Other Actions and choose “View in Browser”. (You may receive a security warning. If so, click OK or hit Enter.)
2. Select the section of the email message that you want to print. Make sure that you are selecting the section of text that is presented from the web browser window.
3. In the browser toolbar, click the arrow next to the Print button, and then select Print.
4. Under Page Range, click Selection, and then select Print.

Another reported printer problem that can occur when using Outlook is that print jobs will take what seems like forever. This can happen sometimes when using network shared printers. End users have reported long print times from ten to fifteen minutes for small documents of ten to fifteen pages.

Print messages will start off with “Connecting to Printer” and then repeat themselves until the print job is complete. A brute force workaround is to copy and paste from the email message to a word editor and then print from there.

One possible explanation for why printing from Outlook is slow is that too many temp files have been created over time. A workaround is to search for “Outlprnt##” files within the Application DataMicrosoftOutlook folder (usually found in the Windows or %USERPROFILE% folder) and then delete those files. Make sure that you keep the original “Outlprnt” file that does not contain a number suffix.

In summary, printing from Outlook can be made easier for you and your end users once all the solutions and workarounds are known for any problems which might occur.