Outlook Uses Word 2010 As Rendering Engine
Back in 2007, Microsoft made the decision to change Outlook’s rendering engine from HTML to Word. Although this change was not well received by the general public Microsoft Office using public, Microsoft have no plans to move away from using Word and return to using HTML in the next release of Outlook.
The strength of public opposition to the transition to use Word as the rendering engine was such that a Twitter campaign was created to urge Microsoft to start using HTML again: see http://fixoutlook.org/. Microsoft’s official response included this excerpt:
First, while we don’t yet have a broadly-available beta version of Microsoft Office 2010, we can confirm that Outlook 2010 does use Word 2010 for composing and displaying e-mail, just as it did in Office 2007. We’ve made the decision to continue to use Word for creating e-mail messages because we believe it’s the best e-mail authoring experience around, with rich tools that our Word customers have enjoyed for over 25 years. Our customers enjoy using a familiar and powerful tool for creating e-mail, just as they do for creating documents.
Microsoft emphasize the point that you don’t have to be a professional web designer to include snappy graphics, as Word 2010 tools such as SmartArt and Charting tools can help with those.
