Formatting Your Message In preparing an announcement for Chatech distribution, the following procedure can help you design a spiffy page. Unless you find pleasure in grief and despair, do not write your announcement in Word and expect to then successfully import or copy it to the body of your email. Word and Outlook are not compatible and paragraph, font and other typographical markings and alignments get lost in translation. There is a way you can use Word effectively. How that can be done is explained later. But first try this approach: Use Outlook or Outlook Express to create a new email message. Be sure your email message area is set to accept "Rich Text". To make sure, click on the "Format" tab at the top of your page options (the tabs start with File, Edit, View, Insert, Format, …). Having clicked on "Format", click next on "Rich Text (HTML)". This setting will let you chose your desired fond characteristics throughout your page such as type (e.g. Arial, New Roman, etc), size, color, bold. Italic, etc., as well as centering text or moving it to the right or left - just as you would in Word. You can even insert pictures, such as organizational logos (jpg or gif image files). Be sure to follow the suggestions about the composition of your meeting announcement. And be sure to use the Spell Checker. For the title of your email, use something pertinent but brief such as "American Rocket Society Meeting". Send your email to chatech@chattanoogaengineersclub.org. Do not include any other recipients in your distribution. Sometimes using Word is convenient because it lets you spell check as you go along and it lets you send your announcement to others for review and comment. If you decide to take that route then follow these steps: Compose the announcement in Word. Once you are satisfied with it and have gotten all the reviews you are going to get then copy your Word text and paste it into Notepad (you can use the Alt/a combination to highlight your entire text then right mouse click to get the menu with the copy option). Putting your stuff in Notepad will get rid of all of the corky delimiters that Word puts in and that screw up an Outlook email presentation. But it will also remove all the unique font characteristics (bold, size, type, etc) and alignments you had chosen. That's the price you have to pay. Now go to Outlook or Outlook-Express and "Create Mail". Go to the Menu at the very top of your new email and select Format, then select "Rich Text (HTML)" as explained in an earlier paragraph. Having done this, go back to Notepad, copy all of your text and paste it into the body of your Outlook message. Since you have formatted your Outlook message to "Rich Text", you are now able to add all of the text highlighting features you had originally - including bold, color text, different fonts, font sizes, center, etc, etc. In other words, it is only when you work in Outlook, set the format to Rich Text and start typing or bringing in a plain-text composition that you can then decorate the message the way you want.

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