How to speed up your MS office e-mail: Stop using Word as the editor

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On older Windows PCs, Word takes as much as a minute to load, consumes nearly all the PC's available memory and slows down all operations, including mouse-based word selection and even such a simple act as typing.

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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

How to speed up your MS office e-mail: Stop using Word as the editor

Aug. 21, 2002

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   If you use Microsoft Outlook, I've got good news for you. You can easily speed up your Outlook e-mail operations and make them safer and more stable.
   My secret? Change one setting in Outlook's options.
   Outlook is superb. It's very powerful -- I consider it the most useful program Microsoft ever created -- and it's relatively easy to use. (I'm not referring to Outlook Express, the monopoly e-mail software that Microsoft and most Internet Service Providers force on Windows users. I'm talking about Outlook, the heavy-duty personal organizer that does e-mail and much, much more.)
   But Outlook has a singular flaw. Microsoft knows about this flaw, but isn't likely to do anything about it, largely because it has encouraged Outlook users to install and use Outlook with the flaw intact. Microsoft does not admit errors. It merely creates new ones.
   So it's up to you and me to fix this. It's easy to do.
   Here's the problem. When Outlook was created in 1996, Microsoft figured Outlook users would want to read and write e-mail using a powerful word processor. Of course, to Microsoft, that meant they'd want to use Microsoft Word.
   But Microsoft didn't simply add a function to Outlook that allowed users to specify Microsoft Word as the e-mail writer and editor. That would have been OK, in a way. What Microsoft did was nonsense. It made Microsoft Word the default e-mail editor for Outlook.
   Let's get this clear. Microsoft made it impossible to install Outlook using the installation defaults and do your e-mail in any normal way. Instead of snapping an e-mail message up on the screen, Outlook users saddled with the default installation -- as, alas, most users in offices almost surely are -- are stuck with a long wait before they can write, read or reply to e-mail. On older Windows PCs, Word takes as much as a minute to load, consumes nearly all the PC's available memory and slows down all operations, including mouse-based word selection and even such a simple act as typing.
   Newer PCs are less affected by Word's incredibly slow response time, but they're just as likely to suffer from another weakness. Microsoft Word practically invites crashes. Using such a slow and untrustworthy program as the Outlook word processor makes crashes and lockups inevitable. Crashes while you are playing Myst or surfing the Web are annoying enough, but crashes while you are reading mail are all but inexcusable.
   An even worse problem is Microsoft Word's attraction to hackers and virus writers because of the way it runs its own mini-programs, called macros. With Word as your Outlook message editor, you're no longer running your word processor behind the scenes, away from your mail program. You're running it right at the point where messages come into your Windows PC.
   But are you really stuck with this nonsense?
   Not at all. You can force Outlook to use its own word processor instead of Microsoft Word. The word processor built into Outlook is fast and works just like Microsoft Word in all the basic ways. It doesn't have all the fancy stuff Word's got -- no thesaurus, no autotext, no mail merge and so on -- but it uses the same spell checker and has the same "feel."
   Here's how to restore sanity to Outlook. I'll describe the method I use with Outlook 2000. If you are using Outlook 98 or Outlook 2002, your menus might be slightly different. (If you are still using Outlook 97, upgrade to a newer version immediately. Outlook 97 is badly designed.)
   Open the "Tools" menu in Outlook. Then click the "Options" menu and look for "Mail Format" in the tabs across the top of the window. Click the "Mail Format" tab. Look for "Message format" within the window.
   It should show a checkbox alongside an option that says "Use Microsoft Word to edit e-mail messages." Click inside the checkbox to remove the checkmark. (If you change your mind later, simply click inside the checkbox to restore the checkmark.)
   That's all you have to do. You don't even have to rerun Outlook or reboot Windows. My guess is that you'll be so happy with the improved speed and stability -- not to mention the increased safety from virus attacks -- that you won't miss the thesaurus and other Word functions. But if you do, you can change the options and get Word back as the editor with a couple of clicks.