So today, a co-worker of mine came up to me and asked if I knew how to clear the entries saved by Outlook's AutoComplete feature. Don't know what I'm talking about? It's basically where you go to start a new email, type the first few letters of the persons email address, and you get a drop down list with all the entries of people you have sent to in the past. Well, if you do a search on Microsoft's Knowledge Base, the only articles that come up are the ones that tell you how to delete a specific entry. That's all fine and dandy if you had mistyped a single entry you need to remove, but what if you want to remove them all? You go through this manual procedure to get rid of them all?? No. There has to be a simpler way. Entourage for the Mac has this feature. Why doesn't Outlook. Well, I'm not here to say why its not in Outlook, but I have found a workaround. If you take a look at this article, it has a section that states:
How to Back Up Outlook Settings Files
If you have customized settings that you want to replicate on another computer by using Outlook, you may want to include the following files in your back up as well as the personal folders (.pst) file:
- Outcmd.dat - This file stores toolbar and menu settings.
- <Profile Name>.fav - This is your Favorites file that includes the settings for the Outlook bar.
- <Profile Name>.NK2 - This file stores the NickNames for AutoComplete.
Bingo! There it is, note the last item, "<Profile Name>.NK2 - This file stores the NickNames for AutoComplete.", this is the file that stores the AutoComplete cache for Outlook. Rename this file, and we should no longer have anything come up when starting to type and email address in Outlook. Note the following instructions should be accurate for Windows 2000 and XP only, and should work for both Outlook 2002 and 2003:
- Close Outlook. If it is open, we won't be able to rename the .NK2 file later.
- Make sure you can view hidden and system files, and file extensions. Open My Computer, click Tools, then Folder Options.
- Click the View tab, and under Advanced settings, make sure "Show hidden files and folders" is selected. Uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types". Click OK.
- Double click your hard drive, typically C:.
- Double click Documents and Settings.
- Double click your user name.
- Double click Application Data.
- Double click Microsoft.
- Double click Outlook.
- Locate the file ending in the extension .NK2. Typically its Outlook.NK2, but can vary depending on the name of the profile you use in Outlook. The full path in my case is C:\Documents and Settings\Jowie\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.NK2.
- Right click this file, then click Rename. add "old" at the end of the NK2, in my case, the full file name is now Outlook.NK2old. Hit enter on your keyboard.
- All done! Close the window with the list of files.
Open up Outlook again, start a new email message, and start typing in the To: field. Nothing should come up in the drop down list. After you are done working in Outlook and close it out, if you go back to the folder with the .NK2 file, you will see Outlook will have created itself a new one, and the file size should be very small. My old .NK2 file was a little over 700kb! The new one is only 2kb after sending one test message. Oh, and if you want to turn off AutoComplete in Outlook, take a gander over at this article. In the workaround section, it tells you how to turn off the feature.