Outlook is changing text format to justified with hyphenated words

[KirkO]

I have created an email campaign and sent a "test" email to myself. When I open the email campaign, the text format is suddenly changed to "justified" causing some words to be hyphenated where they shouldn't be. The bulleted paragraphs are also misaligned. I am only seeing this text format issue in Outlook but not Gmail or Yahoo as I've also sent test emails to those two and they look fine. Is this only an issue for Outlook users? Is anyone else having this issue? 

[KirkO]

Hello @KirkO ,

This is an issue we've seen occur sporadically with Outlook in the past, but we're not finding anything that would be causing that from our side - especially as it affects people who use both left-aligned and justified alignment for their emails. You may want to reach out to Outlook's support to see if they'd have any further insight, if their system is forcing the emails' text blocks to be less wide, or if there's some kind of setting in your specific version of Outlook that can be toggled / changed.

As far as our troubleshooting info goes, depending on the version of Outlook, it will provide us insight on what might need to be changed on our end versus Microsoft's. When it comes to older versions of Outlook that MS doesn't support anymore, our hands will be tied as far as making any changes. However, if it's a modern version (e.g. 365) that they still support, then having that troubleshooting info can help our devs will addressing what we can on our end. 

[William_A]

Hello @KirkO ,

This is an issue we've seen occur sporadically with Outlook in the past, but we're not finding anything that would be causing that from our side - especially as it affects people who use both left-aligned and justified alignment for their emails. You may want to reach out to Outlook's support to see if they'd have any further insight, if their system is forcing the emails' text blocks to be less wide, or if there's some kind of setting in your specific version of Outlook that can be toggled / changed.

As far as our troubleshooting info goes, depending on the version of Outlook, it will provide us insight on what might need to be changed on our end versus Microsoft's. When it comes to older versions of Outlook that MS doesn't support anymore, our hands will be tied as far as making any changes. However, if it's a modern version (e.g. 365) that they still support, then having that troubleshooting info can help our devs will addressing what we can on our end. 

[VCR]

We're also having this issue! It's happening on some internal staff members emails, and we all utilize Outlook 365. I'm at a loss of what to do. When I send the campaign, it shows up with lots of hyphened words--but while I work within Constant Contact, those words never add a hyphen, no matter how close to the picture they are, they just drop down to the next line if there is not space. 

[user14010]

We are having the same issue. 

[KirkO]

Hi William,

Most of our clients use Outlook and there would be no way for us to find out what version of Outlook they have. Changing the setting on my (office 365) Outlook wouldn't solve the problem for the rest of our clients who may have different versions of Outlook. I think this should be something Constant Contact should look into and find a solution to prevent this text formatting issue from happening, no matter what version of Outlook a client has. 

[William_A]

Without any concrete data, or being able to reproduce the issue on our side with the versions of Outlook we can access, it will impede any ability to address it. If you have any information you can provide as far as contacts experiencing the issue, it'd go a long way. Otherwise, I'd advise reaching out to Outlook to see what insight they'd have, since the issue isn't occurring in other email clients (based on reports and testing).

[SallyM]

Same problem - which showed up for the first time today. I absolutely cannot abide words being hypenated. It is a long time pet peeve and this issue is extremely irritating! 

[William_A]

Hello @user57471 ,

Can you provide a screencap of what you're seeing? Is this occurring in multiple email programs / apps, or just one in particular? Were the line breaks manually typed out in the editor, or were they copied over from another source?

[user4097294]

 I have the same issue.  So incredibly frustrating!!!

[William_A]

Hello @user4097294 ,

I checked your most recent email and the text was explicitly set to justified, not left-aligned. When I test sent it as left-aligned it arrived in my inbox as such. When I test sent as justified, it arrived as such. Make sure you're setting the text's alignment to left, otherwise some email programs (such as Outlook) will end up hyphenating words with more than a few characters.

If you need guidance on formatting your text's alignment, make sure to check out our main article on formatting text. 

[user63718]

I am having this exact issue! I feel like all of the hyphenation makes my email unsendable becasue it is so hard to read. Is there any solution? It is happening on Office 365 and doesn't happen when I send to my gmail. 

[user3778989]

I am having this exact issue too and my text is all left aligned.

[Nick_S]

Hi @user3778989,

Thank you for letting us know. This issue appears to be specific to updates to the Outlook email platform. Please send an email to social_support(at)constantcontact(dot)com and we will investigate further. Please include your account username, the name of the email campaign where you've experienced this issue, the name of the operating system you're using (Windows/Mac), whether you're using a desktop client or the web client to view the email, the version of Outlook you are using, and a screenshot of the email in Outlook where you are seeing the alignment issue. We can bring this to our advanced support team, if need be.

[user132144]

I have also been experiencing this problem with the emails that we've been sending out. 

[SharonC9378]

This issue has also started occurring for us today on all of our e-comms. We use left-justify when we design our e-comms, however, Outlook seems to be converting the text to full-justify. 

On another post (https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Questions-Discussions/Outlook-is-changing-text-format-to-ju...) it had been suggested that Constant Contact customers should reach out to Microsoft/Outlook; however, since this seems to be a compatability issue between Constant Contact and Outlook, may I kindly recommend that Constant Contact reach out to Microsoft/Outlook to explore a solution? 

[SharonC9378]

I was trying to reply to previous posts about an issue with Outlook changing the justification of body text in e-comms, but the posts are locked so replies are no longer accepted.

I just wanted to share that I found the answer on a Microsoft discussion board to fix the issue:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/how-to-stop-outlook-from-changing-the/c20a...

I'm not sure why in the world Microsoft would have implemented the "Use Smart Justification" feature as it makes our e-comms look very unorganized (way too many hyphens) and difficult to read. I've submitted feedback to them in this regard, and would recommend that others do the same.

I hope others find this information helpful.