Sending MS Publisher Document (or PDF) as Body of Email

Question

I'm helping a friend create a single-page email newsletter for their work and they have a great design in MS Publisher. Is there any way to insert this as the BODY of an email (not an attachment), where the images and text are decent quality and hyperlinks still work (text & links are on-top of images, so I can't separate them). We tried Publisher's built in "Save and Send" ("Send Current Page"), but that completely messed up the layout and images. We also tried converting to PDF (which looked great), then converting that to HTML using Adobe Acrobat, but again that looked really messed up.

I considered something like creating an image of the newsletter and adding an image map, but email clients don't seem to be able to consistently render them. Plus I'd like a solution that my computer-illiterate friend could use in the future when sending out new issues without my help.

Anyone know if it is even possible to do this while preserving links and keeping the text on top of images, in a way that will work across different platforms?

Also, if it matters, Microsoft Outlook will be used to send the actual email out and a large number of the recipients (but not all of them) will be using Outlook to receive it.

Solution

In Publisher 2010, there's a tab called "Mailings" just for this.

You want "Email Merge", where Outlook opens and you can select the recipients, filter them, exclude, save a list, and then click okay to return to Email Merge pane.

Now, you can add some data fields that will come from Outlook to make it seem personalized (switch over to the Format ribbon to make those new fields look right).

Finally, you go back to the Email Merge pane and flip through the previews (you might want to move a data field so everyone looks right). "Save As" your project name, then Merge (Create Merged Publication).

Now you can just send the emails, or use Preview's Design Checker (warns you of potential problems, allows you to make suggested changes), then send the emails. Pick a subject, options (BCC), hit send.

This can be done all from within Publisher.

Comments

[Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007]

Have you tried a regular copy (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C) and paste (Ctrl-V) from Publisher into a new Outlook email?

[scae]

@techie007 Funnily enough, I didn't think to try that. Unfortunately, the layout is still slightly messed up and if I try to move things around to fix it it all goes to pieces. Thanks though, so close!

[Woodrow Barlow]

this would not preserve links