Word Styles in relation to Outlook e-mail text

[Guest]

In Word 2003, my default paragraph style is Body Text. This is the same
paragraph style I would like to have as the default for new correspondence in
Outlook. I'm using Word as e-mail editor.

I have seen the recommendation that Word's default paragraph style should be
Normal for Outlook to work properly. But this seems contrary to the advice
generally given users of Word, which is to keep Normal pristine and make
modifications to derivative styles.

I also get the impression that Outlook contemplate adding formatting
manually, including inserting blank paragraphs. Am I looking for a closer
harmony between Word and Outlook than exists circe 2003?

 

[Graham Mayor]

Given that many (if not most) of your potential recipients will have their
mail readers set to plain text viewing, it hardly matters. Furthermore
e-mail texts if not plain text will be html. Html has different formatting
requirements to word document. If you are posting Word documents as
attachments, then you can format them any way you want. The recipient may
still not see them as intended - see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Formatting/TextReflow.htm
If you want your recipients to be sure of seeing the document in the way you
intended, create it in Word, convert to pdf format using additional software
(some of it free) and post it as an attachment.

--
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Graham Mayor - Word MVP

My web site www.gmayor.com

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[Guest]

There are reasons for using styles besides appearance. I prefer to avoid
hitting Return twice, if once suffices.

 

[Robert M. Franz (RMF)]

There are reasons for using styles besides appearance. I prefer to avoid
hitting Return twice, if once suffices.

Hmm, but I doubt this will make a differnce to a text-only reader (I
mean, whether your style is setup with a larger spacing before and/or
after wouldn't affect him, would it?).

I don't know enough about Outlook, but I'm sure it has templates as
well. So you could setup an email template which starts with a line in
"Bodytext", and maybe even set it up so that each time Outlook is
triggered to create a new mail, it creates it from that template.

2cents
Robert

 

[Joe McGuire]

I think srdiamond is concerned about formatting his e-mail text, not
attachments. I spent a lot of time working on this over the past few years
and could find no useful guidance anywhere, even in this august forum. I
finally got it all figured out about a year ago. Sadly, it was so
convoluted I can't remember what exactly I did.

I ended up using Word as the e-mail editor with html, creating signatures in
Word but saving them in html. Yes, there is a sort of template. I think I
created a template in Word using all the styles I wanted that I called
E-Mail and then saved it in the Stationery folder (usually c:\Documents &
Settings\myname\Application Data\Microsoft\Stationery) in html. I can open
the html file and edit it with Word, adding or changing styles, etc. I also
created different signatures using Word and saved them in the Signatures
folder (usually c:\Documents & Settings\myname\Application
Data\Microsoft\Signatures), as html. You have to carefully coordinate the
styles between Stationery and Signatures. The end result is that "Normal"
style when I compose e-mail uses exactly the font I originally specified for
e-mail, not whatever style is in Normal.dot. And if the recipient is using
e-mail or html the formatting will be as I intended. Of course it they
recipient gets everything only in text, I can't control that.

There may well be a better way to do this--and for the highly-touted Office
suite that is supposed to wonderfully streamline our productivity there sure
ought to be one! If there is one it seems to have been well hidden. Sorry
for the rant, but notwithstanding the considerable strengths of the Office
components in their own right, how they relate to each other seems to be
quite vague.