Outlook Formatting Woes: Replying to Email Sent from a Phone

You have probably experienced this scenario:

On your desktop Outlook you open an email that a coworker sends you from her phone.

Unformatted email

You notice that the formatting looks sparse, but you don’t think much about this until you start to compose your reply. Your signature looks different than usual, you can’t format text, or change fonts… even doing something simple, like making a word bold or italic, is impossible as a good portion of the ribbon is greyed out and unselectable. What is going on here?

Email response with no formatting options visible

When your coworker emailed you from her phone (or tablet), most likely the formatting of the entire email changed over to Plain Text. This means minimal to no formatting and no images, even for your responses to her email.

How to Fix

Want to hear the good news? You can fix this in two clicks.

Important: first, be sure that you are replying in a popped out message pane. We talk about this Pop Out view a lot in Outlook Essentials training, and how it opens up a whole new world of opportunities in the Outlook ribbon. This button lives right above the Send button in the Reply preview pane.

Pop Out button

Okay, are you ready for the two steps?

  1. Go to the Format Text Tab
  2. In the Format group, change the selection from Plain Text to HTML by pressing the HTML button.HTML Button

Go back to your Home and Insert tabs, and you will see that all of your options have returned. Happy day! Heads up though, if your signature is set to automatic, you may need to reinsert your signature to bring back the formatting in the signature.

Options returned to the ribbon

I hope this tip prevents some frustration for you in the future. No exercise files today, unless you would like me to send you an unformatted email from my phone to test out this setting… if so, you know where to find me!

Excel Text Formulas

We usually think about formulas in Excel in terms of numbers, but there are also a handful of formulas and functions for text.  The good news is, these functions are not only incredibly useful, they also happen to be user friendly! (we are looking at  you, complicated nested IF formulas)

Perhaps you have inherited a list of names in all lower case or all caps that you want to return to proper case… or vice versa, the list is in proper case and you long for a list in all caps (no judgement). Here is a quick way to transform that list in to the text case you want.

Follow along with the attached document NameList.

Let’s do Proper Case first as our template:

  1. Click into cell B2
  2. In the Formulas Tab, Click on the “Text” Function buttonText Button
  3. From the drop down list, select PROPER.
    Proper Command
  4. In the Function Arguments Box, Click in the white space next to text.Function Arguments
  5. Click on Cell A2 (or type A2)
  6. Click OK
  7. Double click on the autofill handle to carry the formula all the way down.

Autofill Handle

Nifty!

Results

Now try lower and upper case.  Follow the same instructions, but instead use the Text formulas for LOWER and UPPER in cells C2 and D2 respectively.

New Power Users:

Congratulations to the newest WSU Microsoft Office Power Users!

  • Ellen Abbey
  • Ross Powell

See the full gallery at wichita.edu/poweruser