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Engineering25 May 20264 min read

Yes, Outlook on Windows still renders email with Microsoft Word

By EmailArt team

If you design email as though it were a webpage, Outlook on Windows will humble you. The desktop client still uses the Microsoft Word engine to render HTML — a decision made in 2007 and never reversed.

What Word can't do

  • Flex, grid, and most modern CSS layout
  • Background images on anything other than the body
  • Web fonts loaded via @font-face
  • SVG (it just doesn't render)
  • Padding on inline elements in a way you'd predict

What that means for signatures

Tables for layout. Pixel widths. Inline styles. PNG (or JPG) for any graphic you can't fake with a coloured table cell. It's not pretty, but it's the only path to a signature that looks the same for the recipient on a corporate Windows laptop as it does for the designer on a MacBook.

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