Default Email Text Alignment

[Adriana115]

Hi, I somehow reset the default email text alignment to "Center" instead of
"Left" so everytime I go to email someone I have change the format to "left"
because it automatically goes to "center"

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks,
Adriana

 

[michaelsi]

Hi Adrianna
I have the same problem and have found no way to fix it.
Plain text messages are aligned 'center' when received, or replied to. New
HTML emails start as 'center' aligned. Though annoying, at least this can be
changed.
Does anyone have a fix to this?
Outlook 07
XP pro
Thanks
Michael

 

[AliasJ]

Plain text messages are aligned 'center' when received, or replied to.

New HTML emails start as 'center' aligned.

I can recreate this behaviour by
1. creating a new message in OL2007,
2. focusing the cursor in the message body area by clicking in it or
tabbing to it,
3. selecting the "Format Text" tab from the ribbon in the message,
4. opening the styles pane by clicking the expand button in the lower
right corner of the "Styles" ribbon box,
5. right-clicking on the current style ("Normal," in my case), and
choosing "Modify" from the context menu,
6. clicking the "Format" button in the lower left of the "Modify
Style" dialog and selecting "Paragraph..." from the sub-menu,
7. changing "Alignment" listbox selection to "Centered" and clicking
"OK,"
8. selecting the "New documents based on this template" radio button
near the bottom instead of "Only in this document,"
9. clicking OK, and
10. closing the new message (without saving changes -- this doesn't
matter).

All new messages now start with the message body aligned center.

Theoretically, then, if you follow this procedure, but change the
alignment box from "Centered" to "Left," you should get the desired
results.

I am not entirely sure this is going to work for you, though, because
when I tried to reproduce the problem with the steps above, I did not
see a change in the way plain-text messages were displayed.

Hope this helps, though.

 

[michaelsi]

Hi AliasJ
Thanks for that. Now, at least, new messages start aligned left.
Much appreciated.

However those pesky plain text messages are still aligned center and all
attempts to change the syle of plainj text lead to greyed out boxes.

Somewhere in msOffice there has to be a file that can be edited to change
this annoyance. But which one is it?

Thanks AliasJ

Michael

 

[AliasJ]

Okay, I think I've found the answer.

As you may know, OL2007 uses Word (or a "stub" of Word, if you don't
have it) to display and edit messages. Hopefully you have Word;
otherwise I'm not sure how to fix this.

There is a template on which E-mails are based, and it includes all
the styles for all the types of E-mails (plain text, RTF, HTML). By
default, on XP, at least, it is located in:

[system drive letter]:\Documents and Settings\
[your username]\Application Data\Microsoft\Templates

You may not see these folders when looking in an Explorer window,
depending on whether you operating system is configured to hide
"system" folders. In this case, you can just type in the location in
the Address bar of an Explorer window (not Internet Explorer, mind
you, we're talking about Windows Explorer).

The template file in which we are interested is called
NormalEmail.dotm.
Do not double-click it, because this will create a new document BASED
on the template; we want to actually change the template.

A lot of this is going to be very familiar from the fix you did on the
HTML formatting.

1. Right-click the file and select "Open." If Outlook is open, you
may get a message that the template is locked for editing. Cancel,
close Outlook, then try again.
*Is the cursor centered in the document area? If yes, we're on the
right track.
2. Click the down-right arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the
Styles section of the ribbon to open the Styles panel.
3. Right-click "Normal" in that Styles panel and choose "Modify" from
the context menu.
4. Click the "Format" button in the lower left of the Modify Style
dialog window and choose "Paragraph" from the drop-down menu.
5. Change Alignment to Left and click the OK button.
6. VERY IMPORTANT -- click the radio button near the bottom of the
form for "New documents based on this template."
7. Click OK.
8. Close Word, saving the changes to NormalEmail.dotm.
9. Open Outlook and create a new plain text message or open one from
your Inbox -- any luck?

If not, there is actually a style in that Word template called
PlainText. In order to see it in the Styles pane, you have to click
the "Modify" link label in the lower right of that pane and choose to
see all styles from the dialog that opens. Then you'll see way more
styles in the Styles pane, and you can follow the steps above to
change the PlainText alignment to Left. PlainText is based on the
Normal style, though, so in all likelihood just changing Normal will
cascade down to PlainText as well.

I hope that this gets you where you want to be!