Making the Best Use of a Well-Organized Outlook Folder Structure

You may have spent some time in organizing the Personal Folders in Outlook to let you access various items easily and quickly. This does not happen overnight and you would have experimented with a few set-ups before finding one that did the job perfectly for you. Your colleagues and friends might be fairly impressed with your efficient folder structure, and might request your permission to replicate the same folder structure in their Outlook. Rather than having to create each folder one by one to resemble the folder structure that you have and then move the items into them, you could offer to share the Outlook folder structure that you have created with them. Let us see how you can recover outlook folder structure alone without the items so that you can then share it with your friends and colleagues.

The Outlook feature that we use here to replicate your folder structure is the Outlook Export feature and the Archive feature. Using these two features, we can create a PST file that merely contains the folder structure and no items.

To begin with we use the 'Import and Export' tool to export the current PST file into a new PST file. Remember to include all the subfolders so that the entire folder structure is copied into the new PST file. You can browse to the location where you would like to save the new PST file and give it an appropriate name. Once the export process has been completed, you can go to the main File menu in Outlook and click open this new PST file that you have just created. You will be able to recover outlook folder structure along with all the items just it were in the original PST file.

Obviously, you now have a PST file that is identical in folder structure to your original PST file. However, what your colleagues or friends want is merely the folder structure where they will be able to store their items. The next step is to remove all the items from the various folders. For this, we will use the Archive feature of Outlook to archive all items older than the current date. To do this, from the main File menu, click on Archive and then select the topmost folder. Click on Archive this folder and all subfolders. Next, you will select the option Include items with "Do not AutoArchive" and finally, in the box against the Archive items older than - type today's date. In effect, you are moving the items that are dated older than the present day into an Archive file; in other words, you are moving all the items out of the folders into another archive file. At the end of the archive process, you will not have any items left in the folders. You have thus managed to successfully remove all the items from the folders while at the same time retaining the folder structure. You can easily share this PST file with your friends and colleagues now, as it merely contains the folder structure and no other items.

You might want to note that in case of any damage to your original PST file, applications such as Advanced Outlook Repair from DataNumen should be able to recover outlook data and your carefully constructed folder structure.