WordMail – Part I
My last blog post series was about building blocks and backwards compatibility. In this series, I'll cover how Word is used within Outlook. We typically refer to the experience of using Word within Outlook as WordMail. In my next few posts, I will talk about what to expect from WordMail, improvements in the reading and search experiences, and, lastly, tips and tricks composing emails with WordMail.
Why Use Word for Reading and Writing Emails?
Previous versions of Outlook used two rendering engines. By default, Microsoft Internet Explorer was used to display emails and Word was used to author email. For those of you who are familiar with previous versions of Outlook, you may be aware of settings, shown below from Outlook 2003, that enable/disable Word as the composer of emails and the reader of Rich Text 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. Take a look at the screenshot below:
You'll notice that within WordMail you have access to the same core ribbon commands as in Word. In addition, you have access to other Word-related features like the Minibar. And you will be able to add rich content to emails, just like you would in a Word document. For example, you can create an email with SmartArt and Charts, as shown below:
Essentially, a lot of the blog posts that we have written on the Word Team Blog are applicable to composing emails with WordMail.
Do I need to buy Word 2007 to Use Outlook 2007?
The short answer is no. Outlook will still function without Word, although some features may not be available. For more details, check out the following white paper.
Next Time
In my next post, I am going to talk a bit more about the specific improvements we made for reading and navigating emails within Outlook. Let me know if you have any specific questions or comments that you would like me to address here or in future posts.
Zeyad Rajabi
