It's the time of year for sending holiday greetings to friends, loved ones, and business colleagues. If you've waited too long to send personalized greetings via snail mail (or if you're too cheap to spring for cards, like I am), you can fill the bill with colorful Outlook stationery and a quick mass email.

Get pre-made stationery

 

The easiest way to create holiday email stationery is to download an online package from one of the scads of websites that specialize in email stationery. My favorite site at the moment is CloudEight Stationery, but there are hundreds of good sites offering Outlook stationery. Thundercloud.net offers all sorts of stationery, some for a price, and some for free. Using prepackaged stationery saves time but limits your options since someone else's idea of attractive stationery may not be the same as yours.

 

Make your own

 

You can create your own stationery for Outlook by creating an HTML page in your favorite editor and then placing that page in the folder that contains all your other Outlook stationery. The location of that folder varies between different versions of Windows, so do this to find it:

 

 

  1. Click the Start button.
  2. Choose Search (or Find).
  3. Enter the name of a piece of existing Outlook stationery (such as "Sunflower," for example).

 

That will track down the exact location of your stationery files.

 

Once you've found the stationery folder, the simplest way to build your own stationery is to edit a piece of stationery that already exists. If you locate the stationery folder the way I described above, you can open the file for editing by right-clicking the name of the file and choosing Open With-->Microsoft FrontPage. You can also use Word to edit your stationery files, but if you have FrontPage, you'll get better results.

 

Use someone else's custom stationery

 

If somebody sends you email on stationery that you find especially attractive and you want to use it yourself, just do this:

 

 

  1. Open the message and choose File-->Save Stationery to use the design yourself.
  2. Once you've saved a piece of stationery, you can use it by choosing Actions-->New Mail Message Using.
  3. You can then choose your stationery from the menu, or choose More Stationery and look through your stationery collection.
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