Tips and tricks for Shared Email Templates

Useful pieces of advice for working with Shared Email Templates

Discover handy tips and tricks to maximize your benefit from working with Shared Email Templates in Outlook.

More tips and tricks on our blog

Pasting text from other sources can break formatting

Pasting text from an external source into your template can make HTML inconsistent and break formatting. To fix this, select the text of your template and click the Clear formatting icon on the toolbar:
Here is the Clear formatting icon.

Then format your template anew.

Another solution is to collect and edit your templates in Outlook and connect an Outlook folder to Shared Email Templates.

Create templates from the selected text

Sometimes it might be handier for you not to compose your templates from scratch but to create them when writing replies in Outlook. For this, select the text that you want to convert into a template and click the New Template button in the lower-left corner of the Shared Email Templates pane:
Create a new template from the selected text.

The selected text will appear in your new template:
The selected text in the new template

Turn your Outlook drafts into templates

If you want to create templates for email messages that should have rich text formatting, you might find it easier to link your Outlook folder with ready-made drafts to Shared Email Templates and use those Outlook drafts as templates. Find the detailed tutorial here: How to use Outlook drafts as templates

Use team and profile properties

If you often add certain pieces of information to your templates, put your profile, team, and mailbox properties to use.

For example, you need the following text in your template: "Thank you for contacting the Sales Team. My name is Jessica Johnson. I'm marketing manager". To get such text, incorporate a team property "DisplayName" ("Sales Team"), a profile property "FullName" ("Jessica Johnson"), and a profile property "Position" ("marketing manager") into your template.

Besides the predefined properties that the add-in offers, you can always create your own custom properties. This is our guide: How to use team, mailbox, and profile properties

Construct your emails and templates with template shortcuts

Template shortcuts are small text units that can be used as building blocks for your templates and emails. To learn more, visit this page: How to create and use template shortcuts

Use properties in shortcuts, and vice versa

You can add your profile or team properties to shortcuts:
A property in a shortcut

This works the other way around as well: you can use shortcuts in your team and profile properties. At first, create a shortcut, add a new property, and use the shortcut in it:
A shortcut in a property

Then compose a new template and use this property there:
A property based on a shortcut in a template

Insert the same value into different places in your email message with the ~%WhatToEnter macro

Suppose that you want to have the same text in a few places in your email message. In this case, you can use the ~%WhatToEnter macro a few times in your template and enter the required value only once.

For example, you need a certain phrase, say, "Price list 2022", in the message body and in the Subject field. Start creating (or editing) your template and, when inserting the ~%WhatToEnter macro into the necessary place in it, select Text field and fill in the Window title and Default value fields like in the screenshot below:
Enter Window title and Default value.
Click Insert.

Then right-click the ~%WhatToEnter macro placeholder that has just appeared in your template and select the Copy Macro Text to Clipboard option:
The Copy Macro Text to Clipboard option

Put the cursor below the text of your template, click the Insert macro icon, choose Fill Subject from the Select macro menu, and insert the ~%WhatToEnter macro text that you copied into the Fill Subject line field:
Enter the copied macro text.

As a result, when pasting the template into an email message, you'll have to enter the value for the ~%WhatToEnter macro only once ...
Enter the text.
... and the text of interest will appear in all the required places:
The same text inserted twice