Creating HTML Signatures on Outlook 2007
Posted by merill | Filed under Tips
Outlook 2003 had a nice feature that allowed you to create a signature from an HTML file. This went missing in Outlook 2007 and a google search for Outlook 2007 signatures brings up a number of posts with people asking for help on how to do this.
ScottH posted a tip that showed you how to do it but it involved editing an obscure html file, the location of which varied from XP to Vista.
The solution is quite simple really and left me scratching my head as to why I didn't think of it before. All you need to do this is the humble copy and paste.
Using a browser open up the html file that you want to embed as your signature, highlight everything and copy/paste it to the signature window in Outlook 2007.
Here is a step-by-step on how to do this.
1. Create your signature using Google Pages. Browse to 
http://pages.google.com (create an account and log-in if you don't have one)
2. Click on the Image button and upload the image that you want to include in your signature. Format the rest of your signature and Publish it.
3. In the resulting page, highlight any part of the page that you want to include in your signature and Copy it.
4. Switch to Outlook 2007. In a new message, on the Message tab, in the Include group, click Signature, and then click Signatures.
6. On the E-mail Signature tab, click New. Type a name for the signature, and then click OK.
7. In the Edit signature box, paste in the signature that you copied from Google Pages.
March 13th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
Man, that hurt…………… how didn’t I think of it before. Thanks
March 15th, 2008 at 4:31 am
Yes but…this pnly works if the link you are putting in your sig is a static one – Im trying to put a link in that changes each time,,isnt working.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
doesn’t work if you use a table to space your name, title, logo and contact info.. any solutions?
March 23rd, 2008 at 6:58 am
My current signature does have a table. The way I got this to work is by doing up the table in a word document and then copy/paste it into the signature.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:14 am
What about for moving HTML text, such as a marquee. I still haven’t been able to get this to work. Any ideas?
May 8th, 2008 at 12:32 am
Humungous gratitute, I was racking my brain & even downloaded two free programs trying to get a signature with a marquee & image to work.
July 4th, 2008 at 9:46 am
If you save your html file to an mht using your browser, then you can copy and paste from it and this way you avoid the google step
July 14th, 2008 at 4:51 am
Html Attribute for <MARQUEE …> — Marquee Slide Image and Text —
http://html-lesson.blogspot.com/2008/06/marquee-slide-image-text.html
July 24th, 2008 at 2:33 am
I am able to get an image to appear in my sig file, but… i have a special requirement. The image I am actually call is a .asp page that dynamically generates the image and shows the number of days. hours and minutes before an event. To see what I mean, go to http://www.customerthankyoucards.com/countdown.asp. This asp spits out the current time until the next event. if this file is called as an email, each time it will update the image. but OL2007 wants to embed it into the email rather than linking to the .asp page and calling it again each time. Is there some way to force it to link rather than embed?
August 24th, 2008 at 1:13 am
site page is gone, replaced by google sites,
Can someone tell me how to do a mybloglog signature in that one, Outlook 2007
September 7th, 2008 at 12:53 am
It’s simple why ScottH did’t use the simple Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V. It’s a different solution. When you use a HTML file as signature you can host images in a internet server and your e-mails’s size decrease. If you puts images inside e-mail, size increase. Beside, with HTML signature you can implements any HTML event that you desire. Diferent solutions for diferent problems…
Cheers
October 1st, 2008 at 11:52 am
I cannot get it to paste the image only the text…
January 29th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
this is all well and good if your doing one signature that’s static, and doesnt include any detailed formatting, i need to do this for a number of employees, and as MS has screwed us by removing the ability to just drop a .doc file in the signature folder of each users machine, im now going to have to go through this fart on, whilst physically sat at each persons machine… what a JOKE!!!
Im continually astounded at how stupid Microsoft are, not only have they removed this “file drop” functionallity they also removed the “advanced edit” button on the signature editor, which used to fire up “word”…. maybe because people would realise that outlook is in fact….. Word, they are the same program with a different skin.. what a whole load of b&*%$cks
The day MS fall, we can all finally get on with our work.
rant over
February 3rd, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Shit Man !!!
How dumb of me to not think of that..:)
Thanx to You
April 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am
Ur an idiot the purpose is to have a dynamic signature which pulls an image from a server so you can change it in one place and have it replace all the signatures in one shot
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:36 am
I still can’t get this to work, I get the text but not the background image. If I separate the two it works fine, but it won’t keep the image if the text is overlaid.
April 28th, 2009 at 2:02 am
This is good info. However, I would like to see if anyone knows if we can use Outlook to point at a html file on a server. This is the setup:
There are images that will be changed from time to time in every user’s signature that will reside on the server.
I would like to have an html file on the same server for each user, and just tell Outlook to look at that file to pull the entire signature.
This way, I would only have to change the html files in one place. If a user changes his/her name or number, I can make the change for them on the webserver, and it the changes will reflect immediately in Outlook the next time they send a message. I have 300 users, so I realize I will have 300 files, but it’s much easier that having it all spread out.
Thanks
April 28th, 2009 at 7:56 am
@apwalsh this recommendation was for setting up a personal signature. For your scenario I would recommend using a batch file to create the signature when users login to the domain. The batch file can pull the image from a central location and update it on the user’s profile.
This is how our corporate signatures are created at my workplace.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:19 am
Actually, after fighting through all these workarounds, there’s an even easier one available. Just save the .html file as a .htm file (with the associated files) directly into the Outlook 2007 signatures directory. For some reason, you won’t see the images in the Options dialog box, but when composing emails, everything looks perfect!
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923576
May 7th, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Tried almost all solutions on the web.. but none work the way i want to.
This is how i tried to do it:
1) make new signature in outlook 2007.
2) find the file that outlook creates.
3) pasted my own html code in the correct place (somewere near the bottom after all the crap code outlook puts in).
4) opened outlook and made a new email.
5) attached the signature.
6) picture goes all wacky (gets really small, while it originally is 600px wide).
I don’t have a clue why this happens.. All sizes and entire style is defined to the pixel in the html code, but oulook seems to FAIL at showing it they way it’s supposed to look.
Any thoughts?
May 12th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
[...] This is how it should work in Outlook 2007 (did not test it yet): Easy: Creating HTML Signatures on Outlook 2007 Harder: Email Signature Etiquette with Outlook [...]
May 12th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Hi,
I’m having what may be a very basic problem. I only want to put the text of my signature beside my company logo. With Outlook 2003 I simply created this using a text box in Word, but now I do this, copy and paste from the browser and it reverts to pasting the text below the image. Is there any way to resolve this?
Thanks.
May 15th, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Wow easy! If you have a website, upload the html file you want as you signature file, select the area, copy and paste in to your signature edit area. done
another way, if on vista this is the path: C:\Users\Home\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures
not sure about XP but there is one. not hard to find I’m sure…
anyway… just edit the .htm file. Copy and paste your html code over that.
Can’t believe Microsoft for not making it simple!!
May 19th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Daniel Murray..
i think that only works if your email will be read on explorer but not on outlook…
can u try another simple thing??
what my problem also is..
i want that under my name there is a moving text
eg.
Just Kidding
like that??
thanks a lot..
June 6th, 2009 at 5:27 am
I have not found a great solution yet, but I can tell you that since Outlook 2007 is XML based and the older versions are not, for some reason without the XML, Outlook will not embed the image. But if you copy and paste the signature like mentioned above, then look at the signature HTML file on the computer, you’ll see there is a ton of XML. At that point, the image address is actually readable. If you have a central system managing your email signatures like we do, you’d have to create one signature file for Outlook 2007 and then another for all the rest.
Hopefully that helps someone.