1 Introduction - Microsoft Outlook VBA

Microsoft Outlook can be used as the main tool for handling online sales processes for companies like Amazon or eBay. This book shows you how to automate essential procedures using Outlook VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). In doing this, it provides an introduction to the subset of the VBA programming language, environment, and API most useful for handling emails.

An application, PackerLite, is used throughout to illustrate the best VBA principles. PackerLite automates the production of packing slips and address labels for Amazon sellers. It does this by extracting details from Sold It! Messages. After adding further details, it prints out all the necessaries for sending Amazon items to customers.

You can download PackerLite from:

Microsoft Outlook Tutorial Support

After importing it into Outlook, you can begin to simplify your selling process. Serious Amazon sellers can save several hours of tedious work each week using this little application. Even if you have no interest in Amazon selling, it is a useful example for processing any emails.

This book describes in detail the Outlook manipulations and VBA coding you need to program repetitive tasks associated with emails. It goes quickly through VBA basics, and focuses on the objects and methods necessary for mail processing. VBA has a very large number of objects in its environment; this book leads you to the objects needed for handling emails.

There is also an introduction to the Rules Wizard, which can manipulate emails in simple ways. This may make VBA unnecessary for some tasks, but its limitations are pointed out and you are shown how to use VBA to overcome them.

You learn how to do the following essential and useful tasks:

• Organize customer emails into folders using automatic procedures.
• Produce packing slips, labels, and associated advertising for all your Sold It! emails with one click of a button.
• Achieve high quality feedback from customers by optimizing your sales process.
• Learn just-enough VBA to program great macros to alleviate the tedium of having to do repetitive processes by hand. You’ll learn enough to create your own macros for selling in other arenas.

The version of Outlook considered in this book is Microsoft Outlook 2002. But the information is applicable to any version that supports Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), including Microsoft Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Outlook 2000.

To read on: get the Outlook VBA Tutorial.