Opening a Word document in an email window

[Guest]

Opening a Word document as an email attachment always messes up the numbering
on the Table of Contents. But if I "save as" and download the document to
open directly through Word, the TOC is unharmed. Is there a way to avoid
this happening every time I send someone a document?

 

[Graham Mayor]

You have answered your own question. It is bad practice to open e-mail
attachments directly.
If you are saving the document as an html e-mail then be aware that html
does not support pages so you would be hard pressed to have a TOC that
included reference to pages.

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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

Thanks -- but it's hard to believe there isn't a better answer than "you
should know better". I can't hold the hands of everyone that I have to email
documents to on my job -- sometimes dozens in a day to any number of people,
usually several for any given mailing. These are review drafts of sales
proposals, which are usually ultimately emailed to the client. Is it wrong
to assume that Microsoft has been aware of this glitch for years? Is it
wrong to expect that there must be a fix for it somewhere? This sounds like
a helluva way to teach people not to open email attachments -- mess up their
files even if it's a legit mailing? I'm willing to bet that the vast --
repeat, vast -- majority of MS Outlook users who receive Word documents via
email open those documents right from the email message... if ever there was
reason for a fix, this would be it.

But -- I guess I must be among a tiny fraction of users who are bothered by
this, since the issue isn't even dealt with in MS Word or Outlook Help.

Limping along,
Bugsy

 

[Graham Mayor]

You have absolutely no control whatsoever over how the users handle your
documents. Even having a different printer driver than the one you used to
create the document will cause realignment because Word formats to the
capabilities of that driver-
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm .

If you put formatting in the body of the message, then you can be certain
that anyone concerned about what is being uploaded to his PC will have their
e-mail reader set to view only in text format, thus wasting all your effort.

If you want to be sure that the documents arrive and are viewed exactly as
they are posted, then the best way is to send them as PDF format
attachments, for which you will need extra software to create the PDF files.

Microsoft's security patches are making it ever more difficult to open
attachments directly from e-mails. With luck they will block this function
completely as it will save a lot of grief out there. Better too when posting
Word documents to zip them as some mail systems will corrupt uncompressed
Word documents as you will see if you read a few days worth of messages in
this group alone.


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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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