When you create business documents, you take care in making sure that they're formatted professionally in order to make the right impression on colleagues and clients. Why should e-mail messages be any different?

All of us have sent e-mail messages that we've formatted a certain way, only to discover later that the extra spaces, fonts, or backgrounds that we've used didn't appear correctly to the recipient. Sometimes it seems as if there's no way to predict how a message will look when it gets where it's going, because everyone seems to use a different e-mail program. However, you can regain control over your messages if you learn a few e-mail formatting tricks.

In the information that follows, Microsoft Office System expert Stephanie Krieger shows you how to use both Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 and Microsoft Office Word 2003 to format e-mail messages that look as professional as any of your paper documents. Most important, she shows you how to keep that formatting intact when you send messages over the Internet. You can also learn more about the differences between e-mail format types and how to use tables to keep your design elements under control.

Make e-mail formatting work for you with help from these resources.

• Personalize your e-mail messages with Outlook options (Article)
  Use Outlook options to create and format professional, consistent e-mail messages.
• Use Word to format professional e-mail messages (Article)
  Format e-mail messages with some of the same tools that you use to format Word documents.
• Insert a table into an Outlook message (Article)
  Use tables to keep your message elements where you want them.