Posted by Jim at April 21st, 2005

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had to fix a problem someone was having with Microsoft Outlook.

Well, I finally figured out the solution. This is good because Microsoft never did call back.

Here’s the problem: You’re supposed to be able to click on the “To:” button when you’re writing a new email in Outlook and then see a list of all the people in your address book. Unfortunately, this was not happening. The list clearly existed because a scroll bar was there, but you couldn’t actually see anything. Clicking where a name normally would be didn’t make anything visible.

Interestingly, the same problem occurred when you opened the address book in Outlook, but if you resized the address book all the names appeared. Of course, the dialogue that appears when you press “To:” does not resize–no chance of an easy workaround there. Worse, the lack of an address book makes Outlook useless.

When I called Microsoft, technical support led me through the process of making Outlook recognize the path to the email file and then to the address book within that file. I was leary of this approach as it seemed obvious to me that it was some sort of problem with the part of the program that handled the graphic user interface.

We’ll never know for sure because of the nature of the solution:
Upgrade to the most recent Office XP service pack.

People might reasonably ask why I didn’t think of that immediately. I’ve been kicking myself on that one for much of the afternoon. It’s generally one of the first things I try.

It’s a basic rule of system administration. If something doesn’t work, upgrade to the most recent version and try again. Remember it. It will save you some time.

That assumes, of course, that you don’t manage to completely screw up your system in the process.