Calling all Office 2003 beta users, the beta 2 refresh is now available on the Office update site. Use the Help->Check for updates menu in any Office beta program or visit the Office update site. The beta refresh is available for all users of beta 2 and contains many bug fixes. It's approximately 400MB total to update the entire suite.

If you have a later build of office, you'll need to uninstall it and revert to beta 2 in order to install the update. You'll need to install the refresh for all office programs; the older betas will not work in conjunction with the newer build.

Ask any Office beta user what their favorite improvement in Outlook is, and almost everyone will mention the reading pane as one of their favorite improvements. The right side position allows most messages to display completely in the reading pane, no scrolling required.

OutlookPower reader "Rseiler" brought up an interesting point after my last column: the reading pane in Outlook is wonderful, but many HTML formatted messages aren't properly formatted to fit correctly in the reading pane, including, ironically, the OutlookPower weekly mailing. My laptop screen uses 1024x768 resolution, and almost all of the HTML newsletters I receive are too wide to view in the preview pane without scrolling or resizing the width of the pane. A few newsletters are so wide that the only way to see the message without scrolling is by opening it. It's a problem faced by all HTML e-zines, including those published by Microsoft.

As consumers, there isn't much we can do to fix it on our side, short of adjusting the width of the reading pane or opening the message to read it. It would be better if the publishers changed how their newsletters are formatted, however, many newsletters use columns on the left and right side, and adjusting the design requires more than just dynamically sized tables. Determining the most frequently used width for the reading pane also affects the ability of publishers to provide us with newsletters that adjust to the width of the reading pane. In my opinion, I think they need to be formatted for a reading pane about 550 pixels wide.

Reading pane or reading "pain"?
[It's definitely frustrating. As readers of OutlookPower know, we've just finished our new format and now, this new version threatens to break it. There's no doubt we'll be looking into our formatting templates and probably changing some aspects of how our online magazines are formatted. When we do, you can be sure we'll give you the inside story on what had to be done (and yes, chocolate will be involved). -- DG]

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's coauthor of Word 2002: The Complete Reference (Osborne, 2001) and Beginning Visual Basic 6 Application Development (for Wrox Press). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.