Count Selected Items in Outlook

The modern Outlook status bar no longer shows the number of selected items. So some folks suggest that you select items and simply press Enter in order to trick Outlook into thinking you want to open all of them. And if you have more than four items selected, Outlook supposedly will pop up a warning that opening X number of items could take a long time.

But what happens if you accidentally agree to open them, or if the instance of Outlook doesn’t warn you, as in my case? Then you’ve wasted time opening emails and failed to get your answer.

No, it’s never a good idea to rely on an operation’s side effect; it could be eliminated in the next version!

What I do instead is surprisingly simple.  I just call the Count property of Selection.  This returns the number of selected items. I call the property with a message box that’s wrapped in a subroutine, which I link to a button on the Actions Menu.

This is all you need:

Sub CountItems()

MsgBox ActiveExplorer.Selection.Count & " items are selected", vbOKOnly, "CountItems() Message"

End Sub

It would be nice if there were an easy way to add a link to this on my shortcut menu.