Hello,



First off I want to apologize in advance if I seem unnecessarily frustrated. I'm having a pretty difficult week slapping this signature together for the company that I work for as an intern. It is extremely frustrating because I am someone who knows AS2, AS3, HTML, XML, CSS, PHP, and some Java. I don't think that I'm too shabby at finding my way around new languages and programs... but I'm finding that I can't seem to do much about insanely old programs with options that are completely inconsistent with every guide I've managed to Google.

So, let me start with the simple task I'm trying to achieve before I start getting in to my tangent:
I'm trying to create a signature that is an image which links to a website.

So yes, I'm basically trying to achieve the same affect as this:


Fancy, right? Not really. And that's the issue. This should be so simple it's insane, but I have run in to roadblock after road block.

Now, the important details:

• I'm using Windows 7 32-bit
• I'm using Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 as a part of the Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003
• Being at work, I have almost zero access to host the image externally, and even if I resorted to something that isn't blocked by our firewall, like my personal host or photobucket, it would be against company policy to host it anywhere but on each individual's hard drive.

Okay... So, now there's the situation. Let me go ahead and move on to what I did to create this effect via Microsoft Outlook 2003's signature editor.

I began with the Mail Format of Rich Text, rather than Plain Text or HTML. [screencap] Since this was the default that my office email was set up with, I figured I would keep it the same since the signature I'm designing is for many people who are much less tech-savvy than I am, and I'd rather not have to send them overly complicated instructions on tweaking different features of their outlook to make a temporary signature work. So that's all well and good. Here's what happened:

I go in to the Signature panel and decide to create a new signature. I don't have a template to work from, so I elect to start with a blank signature. [screencap] I'm a little surprised because at former places of work, I've always used newer versions of Outlook. This doesn't seem to have any option to "Insert Image." The options are actually limited to Font, Paragraph, Clear, and Advanced Edit. [screencap] So clearly, the first three options aren't going to help me with adding an image. I decide then to right-click because at this point I've read that this is how many users have added their own images to their signatures. No such option exists (but I would later discover that it does if I change formatting--but I digress). [screencap] My princess is in another castle.

So, naturally, I click the Advanced Edit button. It gives me a little warning telling me that I'm about to use an editor outside of Outlook. It doesn't allow me to specify what this editor will be, of course... It just opens up Microsoft Word.

"Whatever," I figure. "I can still make this happen in Word." And I got very close. It wasn't difficult to insert an image there, nor was it difficult to set the URL to the website I needed it to go to. I saved it as a .rtf, saved my signature, and assumed everything was hunky-dory.

Wrong.

It turns out that when I take this approach, the link only works for some people. Others are left to click until their fingers fall off, and no website will appear for them at all. In both working and non-working instances, a 6-point bounding box appears when it's touched, as though the user can go ahead and start scaling the image like it's a piece of crappy Microsoft clip-art from the mid-to-late nineties. Of course, they can't, but that's besides the point. It's being selected, but nothing is happening. Property inspection reveals it is a "Picture (Metafile)."

Yada yada yada. Some of the older guys in my office are having a hard time making it work. My boss has no issues with it. I can use the link when I completely open an email with the signature, but it doesn't function when I try to do the same with the email displayed right in Outlook to the right of my screen.

So, obviously there are formatting issues here. I assume that HTML would be the safe route to go, even though the company I work for is most definitely an Old Boys' club, and acronyms like HTML immediately mean "virus" and should never ever be set as their default formatting.

Whatever. I try it anyway. This time, I switch my mail formatting to HTML and I go back in to the Signature editor, and, this time around, I come to find that when I right-click in the body of the editor, I am given the option to insert an image. I do so, but lo and behold, there is no option to add a URL or make the images properties reflect a hyperlink.

So, I try the good old fashioned route of raw HTML. I temporarily host the image on my server, and I hammer out a good old fashioned string of A HREFs and IMG SRCs.

The code... doesn't parse, because the signature editor is still a word editor of some kind. So, I try templates. I try making "Advanced Edit" files that aren't RTF, but HTML... I try just about everything, and nothing I have done has yielded successful results.

At this point, I'm tempted to send out an email blast and tell everyone how to insert an image and URL right in the body of each and every message they make for manual use. Stupid? Very much so... but I'm at my wits end.

Please help me. What in the world haven't I tried? How can I make this work? My sincerest thanks in advance to those of you who offer whatever assistance you can with this laughable issue.

Thanks again,
DMeer

First, try to simplify your posts for faster responses. this issue is fixed in more updated versions of Outlook. (I'm sure you know this) the HTML coading for 2003 doesnt work well when adding hyperlinks. Never did. Even with Outlook 2010, that has this feature, sometimes will display certain websites over others.

Below is best practice to adding an image to 2003:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...001124650.aspx

To add a hyperlink:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ou...003082185.aspx

I still recommend finding a copy of Outlook 2007 or 2010 as they have a more functioning WYSISWYG interface.

Best Regards,

We are having the same problem, but understood we cannot use the advanced edit.
So we create the signature, right click, add image, enter the image path and enter the hyperlink for one site. Is there a special way to enter two hyperlinks in this path to have it open both links when they click on it? With office 2007and above we can section out the hyperlinks, but we have several company sites still on office 2003. Any help is appriciated.