What’s the 1st thing you do at work every day? Even before coffee, it might be open Outlook to view email. You might be very interested in seeing a daily cash & equivalents balance, for instance, from within Outlook and without opening FRx.

I’ll explain how to view an FRx report from within Outlook, like this:

Overview: first we’re going to choose a report in FRx, generate it in an HTML format, then use a new folder in Outlook to point to and view the report. Here are detailed instructions.

First, in FRx:

1. Choose a report. (Might want to clone it to create a new catalog.)
2. Change the output to HTML.
3. Be sure the check the ‘Worksheet options’ boxes (in the lower right hand corner) for ‘Print headings’, ‘Print format rows’, and ‘Print underscore rows’.
4. Drop down the ‘File name’ box and note the location of the file.
5. Generate the report for an appropriate period.

Now move to Outlook:

1. Left click the Mailbox folder, then navigate to File>New>Folder, and you get the Create New Folder dialog:
    
2. Give the folder an appropriate name (I’ve used FRx BS in this case(!)), let it default to Mail and Post Items, and click OK.
3. Back in Outlook, right click on the resulting folder and go to Properties.
4. Click the Home Page tab, click Browse, and navigate to the location of the .HTM file you just created in FRx, select the file, then click ‘Show home page by default for this folder’:
    
5. You may get an annoying message along the lines of ‘could not obtain offline settings’. Just ignore it, click OK, then you may need to actually click Cancel to get out (!), but don’t worry the report is already there.
6. You’re done.

Generate the report in FRx to refresh daily, weekly, or monthly as needed. If you have the FRx Report Server installed, this can be automated.

I tested this using Outlook 2003 on an exchange server and FRx 6.7.

This is a hero-maker!