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Outlook 2010 Is Broken… Twitterers Try To Fix It

Jeremy Muncy — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:14:50 +0000

Even though Microsoft’s Outlook is viewed as the standard email client, it has some problems. Specifically, Outlook doesn’t render HTML correctly, which drives designers insane.

So what is Microsoft doing about the problem for the upcoming release of Outlook 2010? One word, nothing. Sigh, you’re killing us Bill.

Do you wish Microsoft would use IE to render HTML in Outlook 2010? Tell us.

Microsoft has confirmed that they plan to continue using the Word rendering engine to display HTML in Outlook 2010. (Please keep in mind that EVERY OTHER mainstream email client currently used anywhere uses a web browser to render HTML.)

For those of you asking, "What’s the big deal?" Remember Outlook 2000? It used Internet Explorer to render HTML. To help jog your memory, check out the image below from the Email Standards Project.

Based on the image above, you can see that Outlook is NOT evolving with the web – they’re de-evolving.

The ESP have put together a very well designed website entitled Outlook’s broken – Let’s fix it. The site is really quite nice, it consists of a rolling wall of tweets, which shows the design community’s real-time response to Microsoft’s continuing stance on HTML rendering in Outlook 2010.

At the time of this writing 21,107 have joined the cause, and it’s growing very rapidly.

Below is the site’s description of their cause…

Microsoft have confirmed they plan on using the Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position, no background images and lots more.

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and Microsoft wants your feedback. It’s time to rally together and encourage Microsoft to embrace web standards before it’s too late.

Let’s use Twitter to send a clear message to Microsoft.

Join 21,107 others asking Microsoft to improve standards support and make sure you include fixoutlook.org in your tweet. We’ll pull together every tweet that includes the link here to give Microsoft a unified message from the community.

Microsoft has become aware of the Twitter campaign, and "appreciates the feedback". William Kennedy, Corporate Vice President, Office Communications and Forms Team, addresses the issue in a post on the Outlook Team Blog…

"Microsoft welcomes the development of broadly-adopted e-mail standards. We understand that e-mail is about interoperability among various e-mail programs, and we believe that Outlook provides a good mix of a rich user experience and solid interoperability with a wide variety of other e-mail programs. There is no widely-recognized consensus in the industry about what subset of HTML is appropriate for use in e-mail for interoperability. The “Email Standards Project” does not represent a sanctioned standard or an industry consensus in this area. Should such a consensus arise, we will of course work with other e-mail vendors to provide rich support in our products. We are constantly working to improve our products and the experience that they give to our customers."

icrosoft sees and hears complaints… but still has no plans of fixing the HTML rendering problem at this time.

To add your input on the Outlook situation, simply click the button below, or have the http://fixoutlook.org/ in your tweet.

Microsoft has no foreseeable plans to fix the HTML rendering issues with Outlook. Will this cause you to switch to an alternate email client, if you haven’t already? Leave a comment below if you plan on switching from Outlook.

Writers May Have Some Trouble with New Word

Michael Stelzner — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 17:03:30 +0000

Have you had trouble opening Word files lately?

If you’re like me, you get these Word docs that end with .docx and can do nothing with the file.

This makes it real hard to operate as a writer or editor of white papers.

For the first time in many years, it seems that Microsoft if forcing those of us with older versions of Word to upgrade.

What gives Bill?

If you are on a Mac, here is the link to a converter that allows you to open these new Word files.

If you are on a PC, download the compatibility pack by clicking here. NOTE: I have heard one person tell me this messed up their existing older version of Word, so proceed with caution.

I understand that Word 2008 for Mac comes out in about a week. Anyone seen a beta on this?

Those of you using Word 2007 for the PC, let me know if it is worth the upgrade.

Comments

Generate Date-Time for Podcast, Vodcast, or RSS Feed from MSOffice

Dan Rahmel — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 20:02:08 +0000

The RSS date/time format is a pain to create if you are building the XML for your RSS feed in a text editor.

To make things simple, I created a single line of VBA code that would generate a properly formatted RFC 822 date string that can be used in your RSS feed file.

To generate a string for the current date-time, follow these steps:

1. Open any Microsoft Office application.

2. Open the Microsoft Visual Basic development editor (in Word, it is available through the Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor menu).

3. You should see the Immediate window at the bottom of the screen. If not, select the View > Immediate Window menu option.

4. Enter the following code into the window (all on a single line) and press the Enter key:

? format(Now(),"ddd, dd mmm yyyy hh:mm:ss") & " GMT"

5. You should see the properly formatted date and time for the present moment appear on the line below. Simply copy the text and paste it into your RSS feed file!

6. If you want to format a particular date/time, you can use code such as:

? format("12/25/06 11:59:59","ddd, dd mmm yyyy hh:mm:ss") & " GMT"

In the XML file for your RSS Feed, Podcast, or Vodcast, you can add a publication date to an item like this (see line):

Interview with screenwriter Jack Sekowski http://www.cvisual.com/film-techniques/film-interview-jack-sekowski.asp<;/link> http://www.cvisual.com/film-techniques/film-interview-jack-sekowski.asp<;/guid> Interview with screenwriter Jack Sekowski that also includes free download of a produced script "Who's Your Daddy?" Arts/Movies/Filmmaking Thu, 01 Jun 2006 09:27:21 GMT

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Dan Rahmel has made significant contributions including authoring over a dozen books (e.g. Nuts and Bolts Filmmaking from Focal Press), working as an Art Director and an Electrician in Hollywood feature films and television. He is the founder and webmaster of http://www.cvisual.com. Visit today for Free scripts, Free templates (script, storyboard, etc.), film glossary, and general know-how.

Microsoft Word Generates Clean HTML for Blogs?

Robert Scoble — Wed, 17 May 2006 18:56:55 +0000

Awesome. One Microsoft team heard my pleas for clean XHTML. By the way, the new Word 2007 has the ability to post to blogs built in. Joe Friend has been writing about it.

Lots of Microsoft program managers push back and say “normal people don’t care about HTML quality.”

That might be true (although we all hate it when our pages don’t display right on all browsers, or when they are slow to load) but the influentials who write reviews and tell their friends (or set up their computers) do care about such things.

One guy told me “but we have 10s of millions of users already, so why should we care?”

Well, you woulda had 10,000,001 if you had clean HTML.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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