Is gmail just too good for Publisher?

September 9, 2009 10:42 AM

I made a not-awful email newsletter in Microsoft Publisher. Now I want to send it via Gmail. Help!

The only publishing/image software I have on my work computer is Microsoft Publisher (2003). My work email is through Google Apps, so my work email is essentially gmail. Usually I love this, but I'm having trouble getting gmail to cooperate with Publisher.

I made a newsletter that I want to send in the body of an email. Simply copying and pasting the whole document doesn't work, as I lose all the formatting. I tried setting my computer's default email client as gmail so that I could choose to send the document as an email, but this doesn't seem to work.

posted by lunasol to computers & internet (7 comments total)

The best way to do this that would both preserve your original intent and be least annoying to recipients (though still annoying) would be to create a PDF of your document using software like CutePDF (don't install the Ask toolbar) and then attach the resulting PDF to your e-mail.

In the interest of reaching the widest audience, you should also paste in the text message you wish to get across as the body of said e-mail.
posted by odinsdream at 10:45 AM on September 9

If Publisher has a "save to RTF" option, you could try saving the document to RTF, opening the RTF, copying the text, then pasting that to Gmail. Gmail uses "rich formatting" which at lease sounds like it may be the RTF format.
posted by ignignokt at 11:21 AM on September 9

In my experience, the easiest way to do this is to set up your gmail account in Outlook and use Outlook instead of the gmail client, at least for these messages. PrimoPDF is another free PDF creation software to consider if you want to go that route, which will preserve content and layout as odinsdream mentioned. Of course, now that gmail supports copy/paste of images, you might consider just constructing your newsletter within the gmail client and going with a very simple layout.
posted by notashroom at 11:25 AM on September 9

...create a PDF of your document...

This.
Doesn't Publisher have a "Publish to PDF" option?

The problem with going with RTF is that a lot of people have their email clients set to read as plain-text. Or block images, at the very least.

Go with a PDF attachment.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:05 PM on September 9

What email software do you have installed on your work machine? If you have Outlook or Outlook Express, you can configure these to send via gmail's outgoing SMTP server, and these should integrate fairly nicely into Publisher.
posted by reptile at 1:07 PM on September 9

I don't think Pub 2003 has the direct PDF export that later versions have. When faced with this problem I use Print2PDF. It's pay software, but you can use it indefinitely if you can ignore the nag-screen.

You might also consider exporting the newsletter as HTML. I can't offer any insights into how you'd go about doing that though. (I'm in treeware, not software)
posted by lekvar at 2:05 PM on September 9

Thanks for all the good suggestions. I tried several of them, to no avail, so then I just sent it to a coworker with Outlook, who put it in the body of an email and then sent it back to me. I sent it out to my list like that, but apparently some people had trouble viewing it.


...Back to plain newsletters.
posted by lunasol at 9:06 AM on September 11