I was having some e-mail conversation with a jkOTR reader and fellow Tablet PC owner over the past few days and after several correspondences, I got the following question in a note: "How are you inking your e-mails?"
It hit me that although Outlook 2003 (and 2007) natively supports inking, a user could actually disable it without realizing it was disabled and here’s why: in order to ink your e-mails, Word has to be your default e-mail editor. Hmm…not very intuitive, is it? If a Tablet PC owner decides not to use Word as the e-mail editor, they may not realize they’ve just decided not to ink their e-mails as well!
Regardless of whether this is intuitive or not, it’s a simple fix. In Outlook 2003, just click Tools, Options, Mail Format for the checkbox to enable Word as your default editor. Once you’ve applied that change, you should see a pen icon in the toolbar that you can tap at will to change from text entry to ink entry in your e-mail. There’s nothing like inking a handwritten note on a Tablet PC!
-kct
JK~
Good job on posting interesting reviews and UMPC info! I tried the swap to using Word 2003 as my email editor and it did not enable the ink. Do I need to close and restart the application?
Thanks,
~DP
HP tc1100
DP, first of all, who’s JK? ;) Make sure Outlook is composing the e-mail in HTML format as well. Rich Text and Plain Text won’t allow for inking.
Kevin~
Sorry for the mix up. Thanks for the help. It finally worked.
Regards,
~DP
How do you do that in Outlook 2007?
gabo, I looked for a similar setting in Outlook 2007, but don’t see one to use Word (or not) as your e-mail editor. Perhaps it’s no longer an option, but then, that would mean you need Word to use Outlook, which I don’t think is the case. You can, however, set your e-mail format to HTML, Rich Text or Plain Text in Outlook 2007. I have mine set to HTML and the ability to ink e-mails works just fine.
From what I’ve seen ink emails are enabled out of the box with Outlook 2007. I know I didn’t do anything to enable it, it just works.
Hi JK,
I’m on vista / office 2007 with ink enbaled on Word, but outlook’s “Ink” ribbon icon is shaded out.
Not sure how to enable ink here…
Thanks,
Sam
I have Windows XP Prof and Outlook 2007 on a tablet. It is set to HTML. Does NOT have an option to select Word as default editor that I can find. My inked email is not working. Do you have any other settings I should check?
I’ve used this fine with Outlook 2003 on an older tablet, this new one wont work.
Please email your response.
thanks.
Cecilia