As far as I am aware, the in-house built front end for our help desk ticketing system, doesn’t have a way to include a signature. This means that as I update and close tickets in the office, I often find myself opening a new, blank email, copying my signature, and pasting it in the notes field on the ticket. I know, I know — I’m embarrassed.

No more, am I going to consider this acceptable, especially for someone that uses PowerShell for as many things as I do: it’s. always. open. Today was the day I fixed this forever, and it took a whole two minutes.

I needed to first determine where Outlook (2013 on Windows 8.1) looks for my signature. I traced it down to C:\Users\tommymaynard\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures. In that path there are three files named Standard — the same name used for my Signature in Outlook, when I open the Signatures and Stationary dialog. There is a .htm version, a .rtf version, and a .txt version of the signature. Simple decision: I decided I would make use of the text file.

Since I was going to use this in my profile, I didn’t include anything inside the function, but the simple command I wanted to run. Based on the function below, all I need to do is enter Get-Signature, or its alias, and my function will copy the contents of Standard.txt to my clipboard. From there, it’s a quick paste into the help desk ticketing system, and done.

Set-Alias -Name sig -Value Get-Signature
Function Get-Signature {
    $SigPath = 'C:\Users\tommymaynard\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures\Standard.txt'
    Get-Content -Path $SigPath | Select-Object -First 4 | clip
}

If you’ve taken a look at the function, you’ll see that I only choose the first 4 lines of the signature file. This was because there was a blank line beneath the last line in my signature, that I wasn’t interested in copying (or manually removing from the file itself).