Monday, November 24, 2014

What To Do When Outlook Will Not Start

The modern version of Murphy’s Law dictates, whatever that can go wrong, will go wrong at the worst possible moment. Most users would attest to the fact that Outlook online email client would go corrupt and refuse to open up in rare occasions when you really want it to work. The inoperability of the program compounds the issue since the user has no clues about what went wrong and cannot troubleshoot it effectively.

The best solution when dealing with such an issue would be to adopt a systematic approach to solving individual issues with the online email client. This is the fastest way to troubleshoot the issue since you will be able to prioritize the easily solvable issues before moving on to harder issues. Instead of following methods recommended by online scams, here’s what you have to do.

Corrupted Navigation Pane: the most common issue
  • Click on the Start menu and then click on Run. 
  • From inside the Run window, click on the text box and type in outlook.exe /resetnavpane and press Enter. 
  • If you are using Windows versions higher than Windows XP, click on the Start menu and type in the command into the Start search button. 
  • Doing so will automatically reset the navigation pane and restart Outlook. 
Turn off Compatibility Mode In Outlook
  • Click on the Start menu and then type in Outlook.exe in the search field. Alternatively, you can navigate to the destination folder itself.
  • Right-click the search result and then click on Properties. From inside this menu, click on Compatibility tab and then disable the Run this program in compatibility mode for setting.
  • Close the Properties window and then Restart Outlook.
Deleting the Outlook PST file

This method should only be opted if you are unable to recover the PST file and nothing else seems to work. Doing so will delete all your Outlook data, which means, you should try this method as the last resort.
Click on the Start menu and then again click on the Run menu.
Inside the Run window, type in %appdata%\Microsoft\Outlook and press Enter.
This will open up the Outlook folder where the configuration files are stored. Click on the files and then press Delete.

Although Outlook is a reliable software, it is always advisable to keep back-ups of the data. This way, you will not lose important emails if there are issues with your Outlook email client. Try to make these changes only if you do not care if your data is corrupted and refrain from falling for online scams that promise to troubleshoot all issues with your computer.