Trail Blazer Why you should NOT paste MS Word into a Trail Blazer email

There is a great temptation to create your emails in MS Word and then paste them into Trail Blazer.

PLEASE DON'T!!!!

Ok, I need to get a little technical here so bear with me.

When you send an HTML email (an email with nice formatting) you are sending more than just nice text. You are sending a bunch of HTML code. You didn't write it, but it's there just the same.

So for example. Let's say you have an email that just has the following line:

Hi, Everyone! Join us on Saturday for a huge water balloon match.

That's what you and the rest of the world sees. But here's what really is sent out to all your recipients:

<span style="font-style: italic;">Hi , Everyone!
 Join us on Saturday for<big><big> a huge</big></big>
<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 255);">water balloon</span>
match.</span>

Now it's not important that you understand the code above. You just need to know that that is what your email just sent out to everyone. On your recipients side their email program has 'decoded' the message and turned it back into the text you normally see.

Ok are you ready for the next part? If you type those exact same words into MS Word (with all the proper formatting as shown in that line) AND save the document as an HTML document, you will get the following code:

Start of the MS Word code:

<html xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml"
xmlns:o="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office"
xmlns:w="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:word"
xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40">

<head>
<meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta name=ProgId content=Word.Document>
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 12">
<meta name=Originator content="Microsoft Word 12">
<link rel=File-List href="Hi%20Everyone_files/filelist.xml">

<link rel=themeData href="Hi%20Everyone_files/themedata.thmx">
<link rel=colorSchemeMapping href="Hi%20Everyone_files/colorschememapping.xml">

<style>

</style>

</head>

<body lang=EN-US style='tab-interval:.5in'>

<div class=Section1>

<p class=MsoNormal><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hi Everyone! Join us
on Saturday for </i><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-size:16.0pt'>a huge</span> <span style='color:#0070C0'>water
balloon</span> match.<o:p></o:p></i></p>

</div>

</body>

</html>

End of the MS Word code

Get the idea? The text in the green box required 181 characters. The text in the red box required 22,273 characters.

So what's the fix to the problem? You would like to use what you created in MS Word for your mass emails.

Here are some options:

Create the email with all the formatting in Trail Blazer. To spell check, copy and paste the email into MS Word. Make the corrections in Trail Blazer. DO NOT COPY the MS Word document back into Trail Blazer.
Create the email in an HTML editor of your choosing. I happen to use NVU as it's free and fairly easy to use. As of 1/27/10 it's available at: http://net2.com/nvu/download.html OR http://trailblz.com/documents/nvu-1.0-win32-installer-full.exe To add the results into Trail Blazer, create a mass email. Click the Advanced tab in the lower left corner of the email writer. Paste the CODE from your HTML editor into this tab. Switch back to the Normal tab and you will see your formatted email.
Ok, you insisted on creating the document in MS Word. There are some web sites that will strip the extra code from an MS Word HTML document. YOU MUST FIRST SAVE THE DOCUMENT AS A WEB PAGE (html). After you have saved the document in HTML format, you can use this site to clean it up: https://word2cleanhtml.com/

This website will create cleaner code that you can then copy and paste into the Advanced tab (see item 2) in Trail Blazer's email writer.

Convert MS Word Documents Email

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Why you should NOT paste MS Word into a Trail Blazer email

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