/ Printing Partial Emails in Outlook

Printing Partial Emails in Outlook

I use Microsoft Outlook 2003 for email and frequently receive email replies that are replies to replies etc and all the messages from start to finish are shown. How do I get to print only the most recent reply without including all the previous ones? Celeste Stewart

I had to borrow my husband’s laptop which has Microsoft Outlook 2003 installed on it to make sure that the steps for selective printing in Microsoft Outlook 2003 are the same as they are in other e-mail clients such as Windows Live Mail. Indeed they are! So, this solution should be fairly universal to other users who want to print only the most recent message for printing.

The Print Dialog Box

Whether you’re using Microsoft Outlook 2003, Outlook Express, or Windows Live Mail, the Print dialog box is nearly identical consisting of a General tab and an Options tab. Normally, you’d go to File > Print, use the Control + P key combination, or click on the printer icon in order to bring up the Print dialog box. From there, you’d click Print and your printer would print the current document, in this case an e-mail message. However, this isn’t a normal situation, so let’s slow down.

Selecting Text

First, open the e-mail that you will be printing. Scroll through the message until you find the most recent reply and use your mouse to highlight the text that you want to print. Once the text is highlighted, then use the File > Print command to open the Print dialog box. In the General tab, look for the Page Range area where you will find: All, Selection, Current Page, and Pages. Since you want to selectively print the highlighted text, choose Selection. Click the Print button and your e-mail will print the e-mail with only the text that you selected.

What about the Headers?

I was a little concerned about the header information and whether or not it would be printed. The header information contains the To, From, CC, BCC, Date, and Subject lines. In most cases, you would want this information to print along with your selected text. No worries, it did. By using the Selection option, you are able to selectively choose the text to print while also printing the header information which helps identify and timestamp the message.