How in the Tech

Compact Outlook Data Files for a Speed Bump

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 18, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Microsoft Outlook

Continuing with my email theme for this week, I’m back today with a quick tip for Microsoft Outlook. Outlook stores all of your email, contacts, calendar events, and tasks in a Personal Folders file or .pst file and over time it logically grows in size. If you are interested in a slight speed increase, and really who isn’t, take a moment right now and compact your .pst file.

Compacting is very similar to the concept of defragging your harddrive. You see, as you delete email or remove contacts you introduce open chunks of free space inside the single .pst file. It’s not difficult to see that over time that your Personal Folders file can become horribly inefficient – both from a storage space and performance perspective. Regularly compacting your .pst file is a great habit to form and here is how it is done.

1. From inside Outlook navigate to File->Data Management.



2. From the Account Settings dialog select the desired Personal Folder, you may have a few depending on how many accounts are configured, and click Settings.



3. In the Personal Folder dialog click Compact Now.



4. Depending on the size of the .pst the compacting process may take a few seconds or upwards of a few minutes. The Compacting… dialog will disappear when it’s finished.