Getting MS Office applications to play nice can be a challenge. It seems that every time a new version comes out, things that worked fine before no longer do. We’ve been hesitant to upgrade to the newest version of Office because of the fact that, in the 2007 version, it did not seem possible to get Outlook to use a custom HTML email template on replies and forwarded messages. For the sake of consistency, it’s preferable to have the same look appear on all outgoing messages, regardless of whether it’s a new conversation or part of an existing one.
So, we set out to find out if the 2010 version of Outlook was any more flexible. At first glance, it seemed that it was similar to 2007 – you could paste an HTML file inside the stationery folder on the hard drive and you could then use that from within the list of “themes” shown. Still, our replies and forwards were left out in the cold, so a solution had to be found.
