There are some prerequisites to making a custom message form work. Before you start designing, work down this check list:

1) All people using the form -- both senders and recipients -- work inside the same organization and use Outlook for mail, not Outlook Web Access, but the Outlook that comes with Office.

2) You have permission to publish a message form to the Organizational Forms library on the Exchange mail server. Or, you are dealing with a small enough group of users that you can get each of them to publish your form to their own Personal Forms library.

If you have those, then you can tackle your task #3. I'd do it by putting come in the form's Open event handler to populate a list or combo box with the names of the file attachments. You can then have a command button on the form to do whatever you need to do with the file that the user selects. Remember that the only thing you can do with an attachment in Outlook is save it as a file. Once you save it as a file, you can use techniques appropriate to that type of file to work with its data. For a text file, a good choice is the FileSystemObject library; see http://www.outlookcode.com/d/vbscript.htm#fso .
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Configuring Microsoft Outlook 2003
http://www.turtleflock.com/olconfig/index.htm
and Microsoft Outlook Programming - Jumpstart for
Administrators, Power Users, and Developers
http://www.outlookcode.com/jumpstart.aspx


"SFC Charlie Cox" wrote in message ...
Here in Kuwait, we are moving all kinds of cargo in and out of theater (as
you might imagine).

I took over this post a few months ago and found that I was quickly mired in
paper (creating, processing, storing, etc...)

One aspect of what I'm trying to change seems like a wonderful candidate for
a custom outlook message form.

Here's the parameters:
1. The email body contains several defined fields that I have already set
up and it works ok.
2. Clients need to be able to attach a few files of different types to the
email - I've been able to get that to work as well.

Here's where it gets weird:

3. I have a command button that needs to do the following:
a. Open a file picker type control that lists only those files attached
to the email.
b. Once the file is selected, the targeted file is opened and parsed
according to logic already developed (though tremendously inefficient I'm
betting), with the data from each of the fields on the email form appended to
each line of the parsed file.
c. Once done, the file needs to be saved as a Tab delimited text file and
attached to the message form.

I can provide samples of the text files, the forms as they exist to date,
and the parsing logic - whatever you need.

To someone who can help me with this I can offer only my thanks and probably
a Certificate of Appreciation from my Col and a Command Coin.

--
SFC Charlie Cox
595th/1189th Call Forward NCOIC
"Ex Chaos Ordo"