Special Edition Using Microsoft® Office XP

Using Word as an E-mail Editor

Outlook enables you to choose Word as the default editor for composing new messages and reading messages received in Rich Text Format. In Outlook 97, this option was known as WordMail, and Office veterans remember its unfortunate tendency to slow down your system and cause data-destroying crashes. In Outlook 2000, the integration between Word and Outlook was much improved, but still far from perfect. With Outlook 2002, Microsoft finally might have gotten the integration between Outlook and Word good enough for most people to seriously consider using Word in place of Outlook's built-in message editor.

If you configure Outlook to use Word as its default editor, you have to deal with the following tradeoffs:

• On the ...