Teaching Word 2003 to be a bit nicer about HTML formatting for e-mail.

I am posting to the blog via e-mail using Outlook 2003 and I “use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail messages”. By default, that often creates a mess, because Word injects massive amounts of junk into the formatting, including their own processing instructions and a bunch of other things I just don’t want. However, you can teach it to be quite a bit more defensive about HTML formatting and then it actually produces very plain and simple HTML. Before I started blogging using Outlook five days ago, the “use Word” option was the first thing I always switched off in any fresh install of Outlook and so I don’t even know whether the option I discuss here is something that’s new in Word 2003. Anyways, I find it useful, so I blog it.

In Options/General, behind the “E-Mail Options …” button you’ll find the following dialog. I am using the following settings and if you look at the (unedited) HTML source for this Weblog entry, you’ll find that there are no more Microsoft Office oddities (except some unused 'class' attributes that I can live with):