Scrunched Text in Mail Message (Word 2003)

Topic

New Reply

(Edited by jscher2000 on 10-Jul-08 11:34. Changed spelling in subject line to be more understandable.)

I created a Word 2003 document. I then selected all the text and clicked on the copy icon. I opened up Outlook 2003 and pasted it into the body for the message. I then mailed it out. I received calls that the text is scrunched (see attachment). It does gone from left margin to right. When I created the attachment, I open the mail message that was scrunched, click print screen, pasted it into Paint application, select text and copied into a word document so you can see the problem.

Help!! Why does this happen???

Reply | Quote

Replies

As it only uses half the available horizontal space… might you have any Word columns or column breaks in your document?

When you paste from Word into Outlook 2003’s HTML editor, it will try to convert Word’s formatting to HTML tags. Apparently the reconciliation is not going well in this case, but it is difficult to assess the glitch without seeing the source code of the message, and perhaps impossible to know the real cause because it can be influenced by your stationery (which includes HTML formatting), your signature (which includes HTML formatting), your selection in your Word document, and the specific insertion point at which you paste.

Anyway, as you’ve learned, sometimes problems with Outlook HTML messages are not apparent until after you send a message, which can be quite embarrassing. Conversely, sometimes there are extra gaps during composition that go away after you send. As one precaution, I suggest always saving the message to your Drafts folder, closing it, and then re-opening it to see whether that causes any format changes. Sometimes I font paragraphs in a completely different font size or color when I do this. A second possibility is to formulate your highly formatted correspondence using an HTML editor and then applying it to your message as stationery.

Hope this helps (if only a little bit).

Reply | Quote

I attachmented part of the orginal file that was created in Word 2003 and pasted into the body of the e-mail message. See attachment.

Reply | Quote

Hmm, that doesn’t tell me anything. If you did a Ctrl+A (Select All) or equivalent, the problem portions from the perspective of formatting are more likely to be at the end.

If you repeat the original steps, can you replicate the problem? Of course, just email it to yourself.

If so, you could try copying differently, using a different stationery, different signature, etc.

If not, perhaps it was just bad luck. Stranger things have happened in the Outlook HTML world.

Reply | Quote