Why Use Word for Reading and Writing Emails?
Why was this design bad? Well, having two different rendering engines led to differences in the way emails looked at compose time vs. receive time, especially when dealing with East Asian features like vertical text. So much for WYSIWYG. In addition, authoring emails within Internet Explorer (when the abovementioned “Use Microsoft Office Word 2003 to edit e-mail messages” was turned off) was frustrating due to the lack of features contained within that authoring experience.
In Office 2007, we made a big change to the reading and composing experience within Outlook. We fully integrated Word as the core renderer and composer of emails. That’s right, we use only Word to read and write emails for all message formats. Why, you might ask?
The main reason is that we wanted to provide our customers with a consistent end-to-end user experience when composing and reading emails. Using Word to read and write emails allows for a truly WYSIWYG experience with Outlook 2007. In addition, Internet Explorer, at least prior to version 8, focused on the rendering of HTML content and not on the content itself. Using Word allowed us to build richer reading experiences based on the content of emails. Lastly, from a maintenance point of view, the fact that Word and Outlook are part of the same Office umbrella makes releasing and supporting much less complicated.
The goodness of Word for composing emails
It’s no secret that in today’s world of fast-paced communication we are writing a whole lot more emails than Word documents. That begs the question: Isn’t an email just a type of document? If so, why not bring the goodness of Word authoring to email?
With Outlook 2007 and WordMail, you have all the power of Word for emails as well as for documents.
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