Image Quality Loss When Using MS Word Mail Merge (MS Word 2003)

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For my job, I design promotional fliers in MS Publisher, Adobe Illustrator, and InDesign. I then import them into MS Word so that I can use the mail merge function to send them out to large e-mail distributions list I have. My question for you is that why is it that from when the message is in MS Word getting ready to be sent, to when the message is received in the recipients inbox, there is a large loss of image quality? The images, color, and even text appears grainy and sub-par. Do you know why this is or how to fix this problem?

Thanks,

James

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Welcome to Woody’s Lounge!

How do you import the fliers? Do you copy and paste, or do you insert each page as an object?

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I have tried several methods all resulting in the same loss of quality. I have tried the “select all, copy all, and then paste all into word,” I have tried export/import methods, and lastly for the Adobe Illustrator/InDesign I have created them PDF and then exported the PDF into MS Word format which has been the best quality, but there is still a significant quality loss.

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I hope that someone else can shed light on this…

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There could be a connection with Word’s setting in the Web Options dialog, since it is composing HTML-format messages. Try adjusting the “Use PNG” setting and the image resolution setting. The latter seems to be changeable to any number you like, but I didn’t test whether it would affect an outgoing message.

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Thank you so much for that suggestion, that was definatly the root of the problem, however now I have some more work to do because the changing of the settings to get better image quality has cause the file size to increase from around 200KB up to 900KB which is to large to send to 3500 recipients.

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one other thing…why is it that my links seem to deactivate once the message is merged and sent out? I send test copies to myself every time and it seems that even though the link works when the message is in word, as soon as it is sent the link doesn’t work anymore.

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Regarding the links, if you right-click the message body, is the word BLOCKED in there? We had a thread on that earlier this year, possibly on the Outlook board, but it seemed to only affect some people or links internal to the message itself. I can’t recall whether there is a fix.

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When you say “right-click the message body,” do you mean when it is in my inbox in outlook? If so, no when I click on the purple text where the like is embedded I do not get a “BLOCKED” message, I get the standard Outlook right click options.

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Oops, I missed a step. Right-click and choose view source. Then you can look for your <a href= tags and see whether the URLs have been blocked or corrupted in some manner.

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ok I can get into the “view source” to view the HTML code but I must say that I dont know how to read it, maybe I wasnt looking hard enough but I didnt see anything that started with <a href= in there.

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It can be difficult to search HTML because line breaks are legal inside tags. If you search for just <a you should be able to find the beginning of each link. If you don’t find any links, well, that could be the problem!! However, I’m not sure why they should break. I can’t replicate your process on my system.

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ok so I found all the <a href tags and then the link follows, but there is no blocked next to it. However the links are still not active when the email is sent.

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Your comment implies that you checked the links while you were composing the message. If you check the links in the received message (send to yourself for testing), do they look any different? Do they go missing?

By the way, I’ve noticed that Outlook 2003 sometimes blocks links. This information appears in the same notification area as the note about blocked images. At least it appears when you do not use Word as your mail editor, I don’t know how it works with Word as your mail editor.

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I have found a way to get the links to be active, but when I do, it drastically alters the format of the message. When I go into “options” and click the “general” tab, and then click on “web Options” I have found that if i check the box under the “browser” tab that reads “Rely on VML for displaying graphics in browsers,” the likes will be active but I loose the desired format and graphics of my message.

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I would also suggest you look at ways of doing the mailmerge in the native tools and produce PDF attachments instead of Word/HTML versions of the email. InDesign allows mail merge and I would be surprised if Publisher didn’t.

If your text is being converted to a graphic by Word then the file sizes are always going to be bigger and less consistent than you can achieve from a PDF version of the same.

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