BlogOffice

Emailing with Word

Over the weekend I was finishing up a proposal for a client that needed to be sent snail mail as well as email. I prepared the document in Word (thinking print) and emailed a copy to myself to check the format. I'm glad I did a test run first because the format of the email came through all funky. They bullets in the doc (I'd used the auto bullets) had too much space between them; other line spaces disappeared entirely, and the header graphic sat right on top of the tagline, which is straight colored text. It would be nice to have a cool formatted document show up in the recipient's Inbox looking as great as it would look coming off their printer, but that wasn't the reality I was dealing with.

My fix was to make a copy of the doc and adjust the formats for the email that had to go right away (which involved sending about six rounds of test messages to myself); then print and mail the original fine-looking version. To preserve the formats and get the copies to all the team members for review (and filing), I simply sent the Word doc as an attachment.

Oh, for that beautiful future day when we can truly do it once and send it perfectly in many different mediums... :) k