Today I had the dubious pleasure of trying to update everyone’s email signature to our new company standard. To make things easy, everyone uses Microsoft Office and as a result, MS Outlook.

You would think as a result of this conformity that a simple task such as unifying signatures would be easy – get everything right on one machine and simply copy the signature files over to everyone else, changing the name and email address displayed.

WRONG.

In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I use Office 2007 where editing signatures is *ok* at best, others use 2010 which uses the same methods and as such were completed fairly swiftly – albeit with several drawbacks/difficulties in using the system:

Why the hell can’t the editor window resize?!

Why don’t images of exactly the same size line up correctly?!

Then it came to updating the Office 2003 machines. I almost took a hammer to them.

I think that it may have been one of the most technically difficult/frustrating things I’ve ever done.

The built-in editor has no rhyme or reason to what it does, the Word-based editor looks great – until you try and use what you’ve created. HTML/RTF that you create in the MS Word-based HTML editor does not render in the same way as that EXACT SAME HTML/RTF in the WORD-BASED HTML renderer in Outlook!

It doesn’t display your images in the editor so you don’t know if they have been included or not.

It loses font formatting at will.

It adds random text boxes that take forever to find let alone remove (well, it did it once).

Overall if there is any way in which you can avoid creating email signatures in MS Outlook then I beg of you, for the sake of humanity, do so.

The spawn of the devil

If you really must

Then after much effort it is possible to create what you need to. Copying and Pasting sections of what you need/the correct font formatting and then editing in the built-in editor seems to work – just don’t rely on the Word-based editor for anything other than image additions.

Whatever you do, do not try and edit the HTML/RTF code itself – it won’t work. Outlook has a mind of it’s own and doesn’t like being tampered with.

Default font colour for the email itself, you say?

“No, I don’t think so, Mr Outlook 2003 user. Why should you need to set a default font colour to anything other than the 16 we’ve provided here?”

“You should ignore the fact that when composing the email you can use custom colours and as such create any colour you like – you won’t want a custom colour as a defult.”

Hmmm.

Oh and one other thing

No matter what anybody says (Americans) the word ‘colour’ is NOT spelled ‘color’, it is spelled ‘colour’. Stop being lazy and use the full word!

Google Chrome, when I set you to use English (United Kingdom) as my default dictionary, I don’t expect to have to add the word ‘colour’!