Text wrapping (Office 2000 SP1)

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There doesn’t seem to be any way to stop Outlook from wrapping email lines at a certain point (inserting a new line character?). I tried setting the value in the option dialog to zero but Outlook insists that I must choose a number bettween 30 and 132. So I have it set to 72.

>Automatically wrap at 72 characters when sending in front of them ):

No you never got to it. I had a problem running the beta updater. It
didn’t work. So I downloaded the full beta, reinstalled it the other
day
and ran it. Things seemed to be working OK. But I just opened it and
went
to the master log page. The run I did a few days ago is not listed
there.

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1. My setting is 76 characters (default) and I don’t have this problem. It looks to me like yours only wraps slightly. Have you tried going back to the default? Have you tested sending emails to yourself using the wider characters (76), then changing it to 72, and opening your received email? Just a thought.

2. >>are caused by the way people forward there mail and there’s nothing you can do about it. Likewise those hateful little envelope attachments.

3. Looks to me like your sample DOES wrap to fit the display window or your setting. Otherwise, it would not drop like it is, it would just continue to the right beyond your display. Make sense?

Hope this helps, though I doubt it’s what you wanted to hear! Maybe next time.

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My example was just a sample of a common break. The breaks can range all over the place. You have probably seen some newsletters where the format is done at something like 55 or 60 character lines to eliminate predatory wrapping.

No, it is NOT wrapping to fit the window. If I maximize the view window, it will still look exactly the same because a break character has been inserted.

I think the problem could be solved by the sending email client not adding extra line breaks to text emails if the sender didn’t put line breaks in. Then the receiving client could add the line breaks appropriate for the receivers tastes and view window. Of course, there may actually be some technical reason on why line breaks HAVE to be added. Maybe something to do with MIME specs or SMTP. Or maybe lines will get truncated if this isn’t done. Or maybe there is some lowest denominator like Unix that require this.

But I still don’t like it and think it just causes a lot of readability and forwarding problems.

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How nice that Outlook XP does edit the file for your viewing and tells you about line breaks that have been inserted.

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I can edit received files now. I’m not clear on what you say about telling me that line breaks HAVE been inserted. What value is that, since it is after the fact? I don’t want to Outlook to put in any extra line breaks of its own PERIOD.

As to, Office XP, I have a copy of the Pro version sitting here unopened. I’ve read so much that seems bad or annoying about it that I am thinking of sticking with O2K and wait to see what happens with Office.net.

Woody has essentially said that if O2K is working, don’t go to OXP. A number of others have written negatively about all or part of OXP. For instance:

Chris Prillo of Lockergnome recently wrote:
now I have an extreme dislike for Outlook 2002
(also known as Outlook XP). Word 2002 seems wonderful, Excel 2002
seems wonderful, PowerPoint 2002 seems wonderful. Outlook 2002, on
the other hand, is a piece of [expletive deleted]. The team took a
step backward with this one in so many ways. Message windows now
have unnecessary padded borders; the status bar does not reveal
the URL underneath the cursor in HTML messages; the mouse wheel
does not work within the address book; a garish information window
is displayed within the preview pane; etc. I use three email
accounts, and while it’s cool that Outlook 2002 checks all three
at the same time, it drains resources and causes me to miss
keystrokes when it’s filtering the incoming messages. Ugh. No way.
I’m not living with this.

Serdar Yegulalp of the Windows 2000 Power Users Newsletter says:
Amazingly, it wasn’t activating Office XP that was the headache. It was little things that drove me crazy.

OFFICE XP HEADACHE #1: Those screaming yellow warning notices in Outlook which serve no good function whatsoever.

By default I use plaintext as my email format of choice. I can’t stand HTML- or rich-format emails. They’re a pain to read, and people use the most ridiculous combinations of colors and fonts imaginable. (Another great example of how, just because you CAN do something, it doesn’t mean you SHOULD.) Outlook 2002 insists on slapping a silly, yellow-dialog notice at the top of every plaintext email I opened up, warning me that this message contains — horror of horrors — LINES THAT WRAP! I need to know this?

Worse, when the message opens up, the dialog appears at the top of the message a second later, shoving everything else below it down and disrupting my reading. After five minutes of this I was ready to uproot the screen and throw it out the window. And, even worse, there’s no way to disable these asinine warnings. They’re there for life.

Frustrated, I rooted around in Google’s newsgroups archive and found a solution — it involved taking a hex editor to one of Outlook’s .DLLs and hacking the darn thing! This I did, and the annoying messages finally went away. Being able to disable this stuff somewhere would have been really nice, but evidently they never found such a simple feature worth including!

OFFICE XP HEADACHE #2: Useless features, useless prettiness.

And I mean thoroughly useless features. Consider Outlook 2002 again. Why do we need to have an address bar (reminiscent of the address bar in IE) at the top of the program? There’s never anything in it I need to know about; I don’t use URLs to go to my Outlook store. But there’s no way to get rid of it. You can push it out of the way temporarily, but every time I restart the program, there it is again.

Also, who decided it would be a good idea to change the style of the menus? The older menu styling system looked fine; the new menus just look distracting. No option to go back to the older menu style, either.

OFFICE HEADACHE #3: Obtrusiveness.

Word 2002 is the backseat driver of word-processing programs. It has suggestions for every third word I type, every paste action, every stupid little thing imaginable. I wanted to tell the program to shut up and let me work without having it hang over my shoulder, so to speak. The one piece of good news is you can disable these options, but they require a certain amount of rooting around and unchecking of boxes in the Tools | Options menu.

OFFICE XP HEADACHE #4: Compulsive reorganization.

Outlook 2002 has a lot of this. A lot of stuff has been reorganized, making it harder for me to find out how to set mail options for a given mail account. The new way this is done is ridiculously complicated and cryptic now.; I selected Tools | E-mail Accounts and got a wizard, which instantly raised my hackles. The one change that was for the better was the ability to set up different groups of accounts for send/receive actions, but finding it was a pain.

All of that said, I should say that there have been a lot of other changes, many of them positive. I like the ability to have a running word count in the toolbar, for instance (in Word 2002), and Outlook 2002 polls multiple mailboxes simultaneously instead of one at a time (much faster on a high-speed network). But man, the headaches were enough to make me kill most of a bottle of Excedrin in one go.

There’s a lot more of this type of criticism floating around the net.

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LOL!

That’s why you’ll find me running 97, 2000, and XP. You can only use Outlook 2000 OR XP, not both as you can with the other programs.

I use Outlook 2000 because I hated Outlook XP. Luckily, you CAN go right back to 2000 should you choose by uninstalling XP and reinstalling 2000.

Other things that annoy:

Word’s *takeover* settings. See my *recommended settings* at my site. Oh, and the *new* Mail merge wizards sucks big time. VERY confusing.

If you do choose to install more than one version–the biggest deal is that you MUST install to different folders. Don’t be afraid to try XP out, but don’t bother with Outlook.

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I know I am one of the crazy ones who won’t give up WordMail…

I tried to go to XP (except for Outlook) and WordMail won’t work. Outlook 2000 doesn’t seem to be able to handle Word XP and I kept getting error dialogue boxes.

I wasn’t willing to go to Outlook XP and wasn’t willing to give up WordMail so I am back to Office 2000.

Cheers,
Russ

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correct, wordmail only works with the same versions of outlook and word. wordmail in office 2000 was horrible and slow, i disabled it immediately, but it’s much improved in office xp and the outlook editor has some limited word editing features, like autocorrect, suitable for those who still despise wordmail.

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I actually don’t have too many problems with it. Probably just luck. Outlook doesn’t shut down properly from time to time, but there doesn’t seem to be any harm done…

The funny thing is that after I attempted to install XP, before I did the restart, I could’ve swore that Outlook was starting Word XP for wordmail. The menus were the new style, etc. Then once I restarted, I got the conflict message. I wonder if the conflict is purely artificial?

Russ

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more likely that something, like a reg setting or a dll, wasn’t unloaded and replaced until the reboot.

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Address bar: slide it right, just until the white lines disappear (not all the way to the right) and you won’t have ot look at it. You can’t get rid of the bar completely, since it provides access to the folder tree if you dont show the folder tree all the time.

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I use Outlook 2000 SR-1 in CW mode.

The number-of-characters setting will be ignored (and the lines will not be wrapped) if you change the encoding from None to Base64. I haven’t tried Quoted Printable. I switched to Base64 for a while to resolve very rare problems with other mail servers failing to decode the occasional Word doc attachment. I switched back because a lot of autoresponders, including tech support systems, could not handle the encoded messages. “Your Mileage May Vary”

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I don’t understand these options and the right-click help in Outlook for these is useless. Is there any more detailed explanation of what these options are and how they affect things?

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In short, they are techniques used to push 8-bit data through a 7-bit (pure ASCII) world, and to exceed the line and message length limitations of earlier SMTP standards.

RFC 1521 (very large document) has more detail, particularly in Sections 5, 5.1 and 5.2.

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short version:
mime, none= recommeded for greatest compatability

quoted printable = no line breaks but causes problems with some programs that don’t wrap lines in windows. it’s used in HTML messages.

base64 = not sure if it causes problems for anyone. it might be the cause of = signs at the end of lines, as seen in some non-MS mail programs.

uuencode = not really needed much, except with some unix based systems. avoid it unless you know you need to use it and why.

as with most of the settings in all programs, stick with the defaults unless you know *why* it needs changed. making changes just to see what happens can cause problems for people you send to.

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Thank you! This was most helpful. I have switched to quoted printable and did some testing. No line wrapping, which is what I wanted. We’ll see if anyone has a problem with this as I send emails…

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