8th October 2001
How many times have you been in the middle of typing a message in Outlook Express, only to have a change of heart? "If only I had chosen a different piece of stationery when I started writing this e-mail." Hey, that's okay - you can switch it on-the-fly in just a few seconds. Click Format | Apply Stationery | and then choose whichever one you want. Remember: this can only be done to HTML messages. You can change a message type through the same Format menu. Flip between text and HTML at will, understanding that you'll lose the formatting each time. Here's something else I bet you didn't know about Outlook Express messages: you can drag & drop them from your Inbox onto the desktop. Big deal? Yeah, well... open one of those newly-created EML files in Notepad and you'll find yourself face to face with a plain old text file. That's right! No conversion is necessary. You can even change the FILENAME.EML to FILENAME.TXT and any text-viewing application will be none the wiser. Unfortunately, I haven't found a way to do either of these tricks in Outlook (although they'd come in handy).