Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Message Editor, it's Word but it's not...

In earlier versions of Outlook there was an option to “Use Microsoft Word as your Message editor”. This meant other applications, like MindManager & SnagIt, which had Word integration also worked with e-mails. I often used MindManager “Send Topic to Word” and SnagIt “Send Capture to Word” while composing email messages, just like any other Word document.

Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 uses the HTML parsing and rendering engine from Microsoft Office Word 2007 to display HTML message bodies. There has been some flack about this as Word 2007 isn’t as good at rendering HTML as the old I.E. based rendering engine. That aside, the Message Editor does have “Word’like” features, even uses Word 2007 components if installed (see table in extended post), but crucially it’s NOT Word.

It’s also the only editor as there is no longer a “Use Word…” option. This means applications that integrate with Word will not find the Outlook 2007 Message Editor and integrate with email anymore.

Both Mindjet & TechSmith are aware of this and I expect they’ll integrate the new editor with their applications in future updates. You can still copy/paste to the Message editor but it’s not as elegant. Something to consider if you are planning to upgrade to Outlook 2007.

The Outlook 2007 Message Editor functionality with & without Word 2007 installed.

Feature	Without Word 2007 installed	With Word 2007 installed
Message thread shading	yes	yes
Panning through threads on Tablet PCs	yes	yes
Hit highlighting for Instant Search	yes	yes
New and improved fonts	yes	yes
Smart Tag recognition	yes	yes
New Save as options	yes	yes
Quick Styles gallery	yes	yes
Themes	no	yes
Auto-formatting of bulleted and numbered lists	no	yes
Auto-formatting of tables	no	yes
Proofing tools	no	yes
SmartArt drawing, charting, and diagramming tools	no	yes
Captions	no	yes
Equation Builder	no	yes
Word Art	no	yes