Excel table format lost in Outlook

[LarryK]

I am coordinating a high school car pool schedule and I'm using Excel to hold the rows and columns in a presentable format. Each week I update which parent is driving to/from school, on what day, students to pick up, etc. I then highlight the range of cells, Copy, then Paste into the message body of Outlook. The distribution goes to approx. 15 parents and students. The problem is when I view the message on my Android cell phone- All the Excel formatting (borders, font style, bold, etc) is gone and the text which was in separate columns is now stacked vertically in one column. Since I send a copy to myself it looks just fine on my desktop, just messed up on my cell... Before you think its my cell phone problem, last year another parent did the same format and method and I was able to receive his emails on my phone with the proper Excel formatting... But IF I forwarded that car pool schedule from my desktop Outlook back to myself, the format on the phone was screwed up as noted above. I have had one other person who occasionally receives regular (no formatting) emails from me complain that she receives my text stacked vertically which is very hard to read. Hope someone can determine whats wrong. MS Office 2010 Professional 64 bit. Win 7 Home 64 bit.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

It could be one of several things - the message is sent as plain text and lines are wrapping on the droid; it's being sent as RTF, the tables are fixed width. The missing formatting is symptoms of plain text and RTF - either it was sent as plain text or as RTF and the TNEF data is not available (RTF formatting is in the TNEF data)

Which paste format are you using? Excel 2010 has a command under customize ribbon / commands not in ribbon called "Mail Recipient". That adds a email header to the work sheet and you can send directly from Excel, no pasting. I'm not sure it will fix your problem though.

 

[LarryK]

I am using copy/paste method with Clipboard. I forgot to mention is on my Android I see an attachment called winmail.dat and then the stacked text. Clicking on the attachment comes back with a message that the phone cannot open the attachment. So is that a problem with the phone (missing an app ?) or something that Outlook is sending out in error?

 

[Diane Poremsky]

that means the message was sent using RTF format - only outlook can open it. the formatting is 'hidden' in the winmal.dat. You need to make sure you are using HTML format, not RTF.

 

[LarryK]

Diane, From your last reply, I'm not sure what needs to be changed from RTF to HTML.... While investigating, I found the following current settings in Outlook Options... MAIL> Compose Messages> "Compose messages in this format" HTML (this was selected) MAIL> Message Format> (the following selections were checked): Use Cascading Style Sheets for appearance of messages; Reduce message size by removing format information not necessary to display the message; (and) Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages. the last setting "When sending messages in Rich Text format to Internet recipients: Convert to HTML format is selected.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

right click on the email address of an affected user in contacts and choose Properties icon (looks like a sheet of paper) then choose Outlook properties. You'll get a properties dialog like this:



What does it have for the internet format? RTF here will override other settings. I would try deleting the affected names from the autocomplete list (or the contact group name, if you are using a group) - previous use of RTF will be remembered in the autocomplete cache. If you ever sent a voting message or possible a meeting request (and don't have the option set to use icalendar for internet address set in calendar options) the autocomplete file could be using rtf.

See Outlook is sending winmail.dat and especially the reg method at the bottom.

 

[LarryK]

right click on the email address of an affected user in contacts and choose Properties icon (looks like a sheet of paper) then choose Outlook properties. You'll get a properties dialog like this:

View attachment 776

What does it have for the internet format? RTF here will override other settings. I would try deleting the affected names from the autocomplete list (or the contact group name, if you are using a group) - previous use of RTF will be remembered in the autocomplete cache. If you ever sent a voting message or possible a meeting request (and don't have the option set to use icalendar for internet address set in calendar options) the autocomplete file could be using rtf.

See Outlook is sending winmail.dat and especially the reg method at the bottom.

Diane, THANK YOU !! That solved it. Not really sure how that setting got changed but it was *my* email address that had RTF set on the email properties, so it affected any email copies I sent to myself as To: CC: or BCC: