Sending an editable Word document as an Entourage or Outlookdocument

[Sol Apache]

I have been developing templates in Word for a client but this time around
the templates are to be emailed to people as Entourage or Outlook documents
which can be edited in Word by the recipients.

This is something I have not done before. I have generally avoided doing
things for email and web.

The document I created using Word 2001 (Mac) looks really good when opened
in Web page preview (except that the top picture which is edge to edge in
Word shrinks by several centimetres left and right in Explorer), but it
looks dreadful when sent as an Entourage document. For instance the document
consists of a large table with invisible borders, but in Entourage all the
borders are black and the formatting is generally askew.

The client¹s client has sent us an example document as a word.doc (created
on a PC) and it sends beautifully as an Entourage document. I have tried
amending the client¹s word.doc and that still works fine in
Entourage. The setup and formatting of my Mac-created non-working document
is generally the same as the client¹s OK-in-Entourage document.

What can I be doing wrong? Can this send as email feature only work on
PC-created documents?

I hope I don¹t sound too confused (though I am!). I hope that someone can
understand what the problem is, and how to fix it.

Thanks for any help




Sol

 

[Jim Gordon MVP]

Hi Sol,

Word 2001 has File > Send to Mail Recipient (as Attachment)
Word 2004 has File > Send To Mail Recipient (As HTML) in addition.

The second option creates emails that look nice in Outlook and Entourage.

If your goal is to send Word documents than can be edited, then it would
be best to send them as .doc format, or to make a zip file of the .htm
and the accompanying folder (if any) that results from saving a Word
document as a web page. Send the zip file as an attachment.

-Jim

 

[Sol Apache]

Hi Jim
Thx for your reply. The document was sent as html but the format did not
work properly when opened in Entourage, even though in web page preview (in
Word) and as .html in Safari, it looked fine.

When created and sent from a PC the email formatting does not fall out and
looks OK in Entourage and Safari.

Guess this might be a feature which does not work properly on Word for Mac.

Thx

Sol

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Sol:

Well, Microsoft would argue that the feature "works as designed". The rest
of us would complain that it doesn't do what we require, which makes it a
bug

Entourage makes and displays a very cut-down version of HTML, basically
designed only to enable users to add colour and fonts to emails.

Microsoft Word 2004 on the Mac produces and displays relatively
full-featured HTML similar to the level Safari can display correctly.

On the PC, HTML emails are normally produced for Outlook by Microsoft Word.
Word 2003 on the PC produces an extended version of HTML that meets or
exceeds even the capability of FireFox and Internet Explorer.

FireFox and IE6 on the Mac will display a Word document saved in HTML by PC
Word almost perfectly. Safari will come close. Word on the Mac will do
nearly as well as Safari. Entourage is simply not up to that level.

Cheers

Hi Jim
Thx for your reply. The document was sent as html but the format did not
work properly when opened in Entourage, even though in web page preview (in
Word) and as .html in Safari, it looked fine.

When created and sent from a PC the email formatting does not fall out and
looks OK in Entourage and Safari.

Guess this might be a feature which does not work properly on Word for Mac.

Thx

Sol

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John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410