Outlook email signature craziness

Email signatures are really useful but creating them and getting them to appear correctly can sometimes be troublesome. For example, sometimes you may create a beautiful email signature only to discover it comes out double-spaced when you compose a new email. "Why's that then," I hear you cry. Well, you may be interested to learn that this double-spacing madness occurs because of the way Outlook interacts with your signature editing application, probably Word or Frontpage. Normally, when you type ENTER at the end of a line while composing a signature, a <br> tag is inserted. This is HTML code for a line break. But some applications insert a <p> tag, HTML's paragraph tag, instead. And Outlook interprets a <br> tag as a line break plus an extra line space. Heck!

So now you know why your once perfectly-formed signature goes a bit loopy when you start using it back in your Outlook application. Thankfully there's a really easy way to avoid all this HTML craziness: use SHIFT-ENTER instead of just ENTER at the end of each line while creating your email signature. Problem solved!

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Since the days of yore (whenever that was) Outlook has allowed you to add a signature at the end of each...
• Anonymous
  October 02, 2005
  I too tell people about the "Shift-Enter" tip in Outlook
  
  The other tip I'm constantly repeating, is the handy use of "Shift-Enter" when you need to insert a "Return" into an Excel text field!