MyCorollary

My friend who is setting up a school called VIBGYOR HIGH here in Bangalore, India, needed to send invitation emails to parents. He asked me to help him in doing so. He showed me the contents in the word document which had a logo, formatted text (bold, italic, numbering etc). He didn’t want to send the word document as an attachment to the email instead he wanted the contents to be displayed as the email itself.

Probably the simplest way to do this is to create an html page, copy the contents and paste from the html page into the email and send the email. Creating an html page from a word document is also an easy task, just save as web page. MS Word gives you three options as
- Single File Web Page (*.mht, *.mhtml)
- Web Page (*.htm, *.html)
- Web Page, Filtered (*.htm, *.html)

Choose the default and save the word document as web page. Copy the contents from the new html page, paste it in the email, write the recipients and send it.

Anyway, just for curiosity, I thought of making the word document’s content as a stationary so that it can be further utilized if required. Here is what I did to achieve this …

1. Saved the word document as web page. I chose the third option which is the ‘Web Page, Filtered’ since in the first two, MS words adds lot of tags which I didn’t need. I wanted to keep it a simple HTML page with only HTML tags. Changes are much easier this way. This could be just my comfort level so suite yourself. Idea is to get a HTML page which works fine.

2. Copied the html page along with all the images required by the page to the folder ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery’. This is the default location where all the stationary documents are stored. Double check the html page by opening it in the browser and see if everything is okay like all images are displayed properly. If not, adjust accordingly.

Now to use it in the Outlook express
- Open Outlook express.
- Click on the down arrow beside the ‘Create Mail’ button and ’select stationary’ option. You should see it listed in the list with the name of your web page’s title.
- Select it and enjoy.

To use in MS Outlook …
- Click on the new email.
- Click on the down arrow of the options button and click on stationary.
- Go to Personal Stationary tab and then click on theme button. You should see it listed in the list with the name of your web page’s title.
- That is it.

You can create more generic email templates / stationary for different types of people you communicate to and have fun.