Getting started with Shared Email Templates

Empower your email communication in Outlook 365 - 2019

Shared Email Templates for Microsoft Outlook was created to save your time. With this tool, you can use your templates in any Outlook, whether desktop or online, including Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, and Outlook on the web. All templates are stored in a sharing cloud-based service, so you can easily share them with your colleagues. Simply install the add-in, sign up, create teams, and start sharing your templates with your teammates. If you have security concerns, just encrypt your team templates with your own team password.

Find Shared Email Templates cheat sheets here:

Cheat Sheets

Shared Email Templates for Microsoft Outlook: A quick start

Video: How to install, start, sign up, invite colleagues, and create teams

How to install, start, sign up, invite colleagues, and create teams

Watch this video to easily add Shared Email Templates to your Outlook, create an account, invite your work mates, and create teams.

Run time: 03:15

Requirements

Check the system requirements for Shared Email Templates.

How to install

For step-by-step instructions, choose your Outlook:

How to start

To learn where in the ribbon Shared Email Templates sits, choose your Outlook:

How to create an account

Here's a detailed guide for you: Create and manage a company or team account.

Shared Email Templates pane in your Outlook

You can open Shared Email Templates in your Outlook:

  • When reading an email.
  • When replying to an email.
  • When creating a new email, an appointment, or a meeting.
    • Note. If, because of issues with the deployment of add-ins at the side of Microsoft Office Store, you can't find the Shared Email Templates button when reading emails, please remove the add-in and add it anew in your Outlook Online.

      If you open Shared Email Templates when you're reading an email, you can't insert a template—it's simply not possible. To enjoy the full functionality of the add-in, open its pane when replying to an email or when creating a new email, an appointment, or a meeting.

      This is the Shared Email Templates pane:
      Shared Email Templates in your Outlook

      1. Enter any text into the search box to look for that text in the names and contents of templates and folders. Click Aa to make the search case-sensitive. Also, you can select some text in the message body, click the magnifier icon, and get the list of items that contain this text. Don't forget to cancel the selection in the message body before pasting a template. A search for selected text doesn't work when you're reading an email.
      2. Take advantage of the Selection mode to select several items and copy, move, or delete them at once.
      3. Select a view: All Templates, Favorite Templates, My Templates, Team Templates, Shortcuts, Mail Merge (you can use Mail Merge only if this feature is included in your subscription plan), or Signatures. An admin of a company or team account can hide My Templates, Mail Merge, and Signatures.
      4. You can add any template to Favorite Templates by right-clicking it and selecting Add to Favorites.
      5. The default personal folders are Favorite Templates and My Templates. You can create new subfolders for your templates. An admin of a company or team account can hide My Templates.
      6. Shared templates are stored in teams. You can invite your colleagues to your teams and share templates with them.
      7. You can link an Outlook folder with your drafts to Shared Email Templates and use drafts as templates. Linked folders are marked with a blue letter 'O'. The Linked Outlook folders feature is deprecated.
      8. You can create or import datasets and insert values from them into templates. Datasets are marked with a corresponding icon.
      9. You can use template shortcuts to construct your emails and templates.
      10. To insert a template into the message body, select the template and click the Insert button. This button is unavailable when you're reading emails.
      11. When you delete a template, it gets to the Deleted Items folder marked with a recycle bin icon. Deleted personal templates get to the Deleted Items folder in My Templates. Deleted team templates get to the Deleted Items folder in the corresponding team.
      12. To secure privacy, you can encrypt a team when creating it. Encrypted teams have a key icon.
      13. These are template action buttons: Insert (it's unavailable when you're reading emails), Edit in browser, Edit, Add to favorites, Copy to, Move to, Delete, and Help.
      14. Select a template to see its content in the preview pane.

        Tip. To change the height of the preview pane, hold down its upper border with the left mouse button and drag up or down:
        Change the height of the preview pane.

      15. Click this button to create a new template.
      16. Here is the Handle shortcuts button. You'll need to click it if you use shortcuts to create your emails.
      17. By clicking the three dots, you open the More menu. From this menu, you can go to your profile, sign out, open the Shared Email Templates app in your default browser, view logs, ask us a question, get online help, access cheat sheets, or see the version of the product you use. If you are an admin of a company or team account, there is also the Manage Account option available to you here.
      18. This icon shows that there are unread notifications waiting for you. Click it to see everything you missed.

Shared Email Templates app in your browser

You can open the Shared Email Templates app in your default browser right from the add-in pane in your Outlook by clicking Open in Browser.
The Open in Browser button

The Shared Email Templates app looks like in the screenshot below.
The Shared Email Templates app in a browser

  1. Here you can find All Templates, Favorite Templates, My Templates, Team Templates, Shortcuts, Mail Merge (you can use Mail Merge only if this feature is included in your subscription plan), and Signatures. If you're an admin of a company or team account, Manage Account is also available to you here. An admin of a company or team account can hide My Templates, Mail Merge, and Signatures.
  2. After selecting a template, you'll be able to see its content on the right. You can start editing the template if you want to.
  3. By clicking the plus sign, you can create a new template, folder, mail merge campaign, or signature.
  4. If there are unread notifications, you'll see this icon.
  5. Click the three dots to open the More menu.

Responses

Chris Church says:
May 13, 2023 at 12:05 am

I'm having a recurring issue where I have the Shared Email Templates pinned open to any new email but it constantly asks me to sign in which is annoying. Is there a work around for this?

Hello Chris,

Thank you for reporting the problem. Once the add-in asks to sign in again, please do that and hit on the three-dots icon at the bottom of the add-in's pane then choose "View logs" from the list. Click on the Copy to Clipboard button and save the information from the logs in a Word document, then send it to support@ablebits.com. Thank you in advance.

Hello there,

When using my email templates, the subjects of my emails automatically change to the name of the chosen template - even if my templates do not contain a macro for this. Can you please assist?

Hello Caitlin,

One of the by design features of Shared Email Templates is that if the Subject field in your email is empty, it will be automatically filled with the name of the pasted template unless you use the ~%Fill macro to fill the Subject field with certain text or the ~%Add macro to add certain text to the Subject field.

Stephen Feehily says:
June 10, 2022 at 5:32 pm

Having some issues lately. Every time I try to use Shared Email Templates I get this message "Add-in error: The add-in couldn't be updated automatically. Please update it from the Office Store." When I click update it goes to the add-in page but no update is required. Then when I go back to Outlook Shared Email Templates has loaded correctly. But then it happens again, and again, and again, so every time I send an email that I need access to my templates I go through this rigamarole.
Any ideas?

Thanks.

Hello Stephen,

Thank you for your comment. Sorry to hear that you are having difficulties with our add-in.

Please click on the three-dots icon in the bottom-right corner of the add-in pane, choose About and send us a screenshot of the window you see to support@ablebits.com. Also, please specify what OS and Outlook version you use. We'll look into the issue and try to help.

Shelby J Vanderwilt says:
April 13, 2022 at 4:00 pm

I am trying to edit a template and I do not have editor access even though I am the one who created the account and manages it. I would also like to give someone else edit access but It will not let me. I assume that is because it's not recognizing me as the admin/editor?

Hi everyone,
a question fo you, please: I use your addon on Outlook (M.Office standard 2019).
Is it possible to save email and password to login more quickly?
Every time I accidentally logon/logoff the fields are blank, and that's a litte annoying... The checkbox "remember me" does not work unfortunatly.
(using it in the webmail [Office365] it works perfectly and saves the mail/password as you would expect)

Thank you very much

Hi Martìn,

Thank you for your comment.

Sorry, but autofilling of login and password fields is a browser feature. Since we have no control over this, we are not able to help you. Although, it is really odd that Microsoft hasn't implemented this possibility in their browser, in which Shared Email Templates opens in Outlook Desktop.

If you have any other questions or need further assistance, please feel free to email us at support@ablebits.com.

James de Berardis says:
May 4, 2021 at 8:36 am

Hi Guys,
I added it to our 365 tenant today and am already impressed by what it can do. We use a lot of canned responses and the guys have used signatures in the past. this is unfortunately un-fit and static. The macros in this are fantastic!

One question however, when will you integrate the user logins with OAuth /O365? I note one of the comments above having trouble with their login, SSO with 365 would make it much easier.

Hi James,

Thank you for your feedback.

About SSO. For us, it’s all about the security of your sensitive data. We have not implemented Office account-level SSO because we cannot afford to have permanent access to your inbox, OneDrive and SharePoint. That is why, every user should have their own account for Shared Email Templates, and when our add-on needs to access the currently opened mail item, OneDrive file or SharePoint item, we ask for a time-limited access token. So, you can be sure that the add-on does not monitor your data and does not share Office 365 access tokens between sessions, devices or web-services. Use end-to-end encryption (passworded teams) and be confident that we could never get any of your data, even in theory.

The user can now remember login/password, so they won’t need to enter the credentials on every add-on start or when accessing their OneDrive/SharePoint.

James de Berardis says:
June 9, 2021 at 7:44 am

Hi Eugene,

Apologies, I did not see your reply until today. Thank you for the very candid and open response. I appreciate your position and it does make perfect sense. I will pick up my evaluation of your product as i really do like the way it functions - especially how I envisage it working in our business.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond directly.

All the best,
James

Евгения Гекман says:
November 13, 2020 at 9:05 am

Hello!

I have used your application for Microsoft Outlook since last year. Last week, after the Windows update, the application began to require my e-mail and password (I have already forgotten both because they were never mentioned before). I tried to enter ALL of my e-mails to recover the password, but no reaction (wrong email). What should I do? Thank you!

Is it possible to reorder templates in a folder?

Katerina Bespalaya (Ablebits Team) says:
March 11, 2020 at 3:38 pm

Hello,

Thank you for your question. Unfortunately, it is not possible. We have not implemented this option considering possible performance issues and UI responsiveness slowdown. Sorry for any inconvenience.

José Lucas Mognon says:
February 7, 2020 at 1:32 am

Hi guys!

Just discovery what appear to be a bug on Outlook Shared Template Plugin: I can't login on the server (through outlook client and online, or even through https://email-templates.app/#/signin) when I'm connect via my OpenVPN client. The problem is promptly solved when I disconnect my VPN.... Could you please help me on how to solve that problem?

Katerina Bespalaya (Ablebits Team) says:
February 7, 2020 at 9:33 am

Hi José,

Sorry to hear that you are having difficulties with our add-in. One of our support service agents has just replied to you by email. Please send us the details requested in the email message. They will help our developers understand what's causing the issue and provide you with further instructions. Thank you.

Post a comment

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If you have any questions or issues with this add-in, please feel free to post your concerns in the comments area. As soon as we answer, a notification message will be sent to your e-mail. If you do not want to share your thoughts in public, please contact us at support@ablebits.com.