Outlook 2003 adds extra line feeds in pasted text

Question

This is driving me nuts: every single time I paste some text from Word or Wordpad into Outlook 2003, it ads extra blank lines. For example, if I paste:

-----------------------------------
Outlook 2003 is about to drive
me nuts with this extra line
monkey business
-----------------------------------

it becomes

-----------------------------------
Outlook 2003 is about to drive

me nuts with this extra line

monkey business
-----------------------------------

So far the only way is to edit by hand, which is a serious pain in the behind.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

This problem also occurs when copy and pasting text from one cell to another within the same excel sheet!

Answer 1

Unless you need to preserve the formatting coming from Word/Wordpad, you can paste the text as plain-text using Ctrl+Alt+V to "Paste Special", then select "Unformatted Text".

Of course, you would select "Unformatted Text", not "HTML Format" as I had selected in the screenshot.

Answer 2

Outlook 2003 does this if your message format is set to HTML (looks like it's interpreting the newlines as </p> instead of <br />). To circumvent this, just set your message format to Plain Text (Format -> Plain Text), paste in your text, then change back to HTML straight after.

A bit of a kludge, but the quickest way to get round it if you use HTML composition by default.