I’m not one for highly controversial titles. But today Outlook wasted a couple of hours of my life. Instead of posting big explanations I think I’ll rather let the pictures do the talking:
Original Design:
Firstly, I need to present what the original design looked like. Basically I took a snapshot of our currently in design website and dumbed it down significantly to the point where it seemed sensbile to use for email use, the result is this.
I highly recommend you load the link, your browser should display it correctly permitting you have a half-decent browser (Firefox works, Internet Explorer 8 + 9 works, 7 should, Chrome, Safari etc should work).
What Outlook thinks of this:
So here is what Outlook thinks this should look like:
Hmm. I don’t think so.
Dumbing it down:
… to the point where Outlook can deal with it reulted in this. A far cry from the original design, but what can you do?
And the reason why… Microsoft opted to use the Microsoft Word HTML renderer in recent versions of Outlook instead of the previously used Internet Explorer, citing reasons like improved security. Well of course you’ll have improved security if the renderer can’t really do anything.
The general rule, is if you can design it in Word, it will work in Outlook.
Another option you could have tried is to get the layout set in Word, save to HTML, clean it up and test.
But yes, Outlook stuffs us all around at some point.
Btw, GMail ignores empty table rows, even if they have a height specified.
(Yeah, I know this is an old post, but I somehow missed it)
Love your blogs, keep them coming!