Word for HTML rendering? Absurd. That’s like having a bag of dog poop used to hold down your table cloth for a picnic on a windy day.

Ah Google Apps sound so good; hopefully, we’ll see MS go away someday or whittle down to a has been in the world of IT. Listen to your customers. Listen to your users. Hey, just for fun, go to the MS site that describes the incompatibilities of Outlook 2007 – read the comments from developers. And, not much from MS in terms of – we’ll fix it. We hear you. We love our customer. Not. They love your money.

I can see things getting worse.

That works perfectly! I’ve been searching for an answer for at least and hour and your method worked the first time I tried it.

Thank you very much!

1) Create your nice html signature file with any html editor.
2) Save it as something.html, then open the same file with MS Word
3) Within Outlook 2010, create a new signature with some name and leave the window open.
4) Go back to Word, where your signature is being displayed, copy and then paste it into the signature editing box in Outlook.

That’s it! It worked for me (Windows 7 64 bit + Outlook 2010)….

What you do is create a blank one in Outlook 2010 and save it. Then find it on the hard drive, take your nice pretty one and rename it to the same thing as this Outlook one, then replace the Outlook signature file.on the hard drive. I can get into it more but I was equally frustrated at Outlook 2010 and this whole signature nonsense. On the old Outlook all you had to do was brows the hard drive for your signature file. The new one is complicated.

She was right! My office recently upgraded to Office / Outlook 2010 HOWEVER luckily the one SMART thing Microsoft did was they never remove the old Outlook in the upgrade process. I suppose they did this because of the whole archiving thing. Any smart person knows that you never delete any email message, even the spam ones. You should always keep EVERYTHING as evidence even if it’s utter junk email. Keeping the old Outlook does come in handy if you need to go back to old archives. Obviously when I upgraded to Outlook 2010 I disabled the email accounts in the old Outlook.

Anywase… back to the solution:

1. In the old Outlook (mine was 2004) disable all the auto send/receive options so that you only send an email message when you want and not automatically when you hit “Send”

2. Disable the provision where the Old Outlook will check for messages automatically every certain amount of minutes. Make sure the old Outlook NEVER checks for messages automatically.

3. Re-establish your email account onto the old Outlook

4. Copy your HTML code (for me it was from Dreamweaver)

5. Create a new email message in the Old Outlook and switch to the SOURCE tab

6. Paste your HTML code into the message

7. Send the email! If it’s a newsletter you’ll have to also get the address book but that’s another issue altogether.

In conclusion I never use the old Outlook other than to send these HTML emails but it works. Shame on Microsoft for taking something that was so user-friendly and messing it up. Would it be so hard to allow us to copy/paste out HTML into Outlook 2010???

Since I can wip something up in seconds in dreamweaver I quickly made up a simple but nice html signature ready to insert into outlook.

2 hours later…. After reading all the useless threats of “How Tos” insert html into outlook 2010 I realised that no-one really knows how, yet they do post methods that just dont exist.

Over the last 2 years Microsoft have really got on my nerves with the nonsense they release. Its like showing a kid a new toy with pretty pictures and amazing glowing things, then they pick it up and it breaks within minutes… This is the new Microsoft…

Its time this useless company move out of the way and let a real team of developers and strategic researchers prove that we are advanced in technology !

This constant upgrade of desktop images over functionality has got to stop….

“Tim Dawson said:
“[click here to] Read this issue online if you can’t see the images or are using Outlook 2007.”

- Quoted from the official Microsoft Xbox newsletter.

Even your companies own marketing teams cant send out appealing newsletters using the tools you are providing. “

I think it’s easy to associate any/all Microsoft employees with the company itself, thereby assuming they’re all bent on the destruction of good design and development. But I think it’s safe to say that there are some good people there that want to make a difference. I haven’t met any of them personally, but from the post above it looks like David Greiner has talked with a few.

In my personal opinion, I would’ve liked to seen the FixOutlook.org site really make a difference in Microsoft’s stance. It’s just downright ugly to see MS Word as an HTML rendering system. *UGH* And to think that they better supported CSS 9-10 years ago is a huge laugh. I’m not sure what they were thinking on that one. So my final answer, yes, Microsoft is wrong for still planning to use MS Word for HTML emails. Period.

It’s hard to say. Ultimately, there is no short-term solution – at least, not a feasible one. Microsoft will continue to treat its products and the market the same way it always has: by relying on the masses of its technically-unsavvy end users to support whatever “Microsoft standard” it feels it should be enforcing. To be fair, none of this really matters for most of their products.

They’re really not the only evil, though: every major browser rendering engine has a different interpretation (however minor or major) of standards. In any case, I think that FixOutlook.org is really just a glimpse at a much larger, more abstract issue. I don’t particularly think that Microsoft will respect the view of a small developer audience (compared to its end users in general) unless they start catching major heat (eg more than angry bloggers and small organizations), but I do think it’s worth voicing, especially if it helps you sleep at night.