Applies To: ■ PoliteMail Desktop □ PoliteMail Online □ PoliteMail O365
Version: ■ 4.9 ■ 5.0 ■ 5.1+
You might think that anything you copy from Word and paste into Outlook should look the same, right? After all, both products are made by the same company! Unfortunately, it's not that simple as Word and Outlook basically speak two totally different languages. Pasting into a PoliteMail Template might only exacerbate the challenge because the Template will force the pasted content into its structure.
This makes copying and pasting from Word a far from exact science. That said, in our experience you will want to take the following steps to ensure the best chance of success.
1: Check your Outlook settings.
From within Outlook, go to your Settings > Mail > Compose and Reply > Cut, copy, and paste.
You will see two settings here that determine how Outlook will handle the formatting of content pasted into it, one for pasting from emails and the calendar, and the other for pasting from other applications.
- We recommend setting all of these to 'Keep source formatting' for consistency. At the very least, set 'Pasting from other apps' to 'Keep source formatting'.
Starting in mid-2024, Microsoft changed the default paste option from "Keep Source Formatting" to "Merge Formatting".
The idea is that this way when you copy and paste content, it will now automatically adjust the formatting to match the surrounding text in the destination document, rather than keeping the original formatting of the copied text. However, if you have already formatted your text in Word just the way you want, this will likely remove some or all your hard work and merge your formatting in Outlook in with it.
2: Paste into a temporary Outlook message first.
Even if you use Ctrl-A to select all, copy it, and then paste it, not everything copies over into Outlook. For example, line heights are not carried over to the clipboard when text is copied from Word. As a result, if you try to paste it directly into a PoliteMail Template that has different line heights (say, for titles and subtitles), it will not display as intended.
- For the best results, then, paste the content from Word into a temporary message in Outlook. An initial conversion to an email-compatible format will be done, and you can correct and adjust anything you need.
- Now, copy and paste components of this temporary Outlook message into your PoliteMail Template. This will start a "second conversion" from Outlook content to Outlook content, and the components that were missing in the initial paste from Word will be retained this time.
We suggest copying and pasting a bit at a time at first, to make sure things are working as you intend. For example, you could start with just your big headlines and work down to body copy.
