Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
Outlook is designed to be a single-instance application. There's an unwieldy trick to get more than one that may, or may not, be useful.
I need to open more then one instance of Outlook at the same time with a different profile on each instance. Can this be done?
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Yes and no. But most probably no.
Outlook is a single instance application so for any user session you can have one - and only one- instance of outlook running.
There is a 'trick' you can play. Windows XP will allow you to stay logged in as one user while logging in as another. Select Logoff and then Switch User. The first account remains logged in while the second account logs in as well. Each of these users can have their own copy of Outlook running. The caveat of course is that they must be different user accounts on the machine.
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Article C1978 - June 2, 2004
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
Create some accounts on youre pc then in the run prompt type runas /U:\ "%outlookdir%\outlook.exe"
is youre hostname
the account name
%outlookdir% is the full path to youre outlook installation
the more you make you might need to create a new profile if you have not opened outlook before
Posted by: Kevin at May 5, 2009 1:34 AMI have a user that cronically has multiple session of outlook open at one time. Yesterday she had 32 individual session open. It there a way to only allow one at a time?
Posted by: Bill Siebert at October 8, 2009 5:22 AMBill
You can also open up multiple instances of different calendars, there is even an overlay mode.
I found a really easy-to-understand write-up on this here: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/outlook/subscribe-add-google-calendar-ical-outlook-2007/
Posted by: Baxter at October 13, 2009 9:29 PMI think the following will not allow different profiles, but it is a neat trick;
Posted by: Nigel Shepherd at November 22, 2009 11:26 AMTo open several Outlook windows with one click, just copy the following content into a .txt file (named eg Outlook3noTile.vbs -the .VBS tail is important!)
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.Run "outlook.exe /select ""outlook:Calendar""",1,false
WshShell.Run "outlook.exe /select ""outlook:Inbox""",1,false
WshShell.Run "outlook.exe /select ""outlook:Contacts""",1,false
Wscript.Sleep 15000
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
You can open multiple instances of Outlook by removing the /recycle from the short-cut you use
IE: "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\OUTLOOK.EXE" /recycle
right click the shortcut>properties and in the 'Target' box, remove the /Recycle part and select 'Apply'
Posted by: James at July 7, 2010 7:52 AM