The text around my images doesn't wrap when I receive mail in Outlook. Can someone help?

Unfortunately, Microsoft does not support the standards compliant method of using only CSS to present design within Outlook 2007 and 2010. Specifically the "float: left;" style in this example is not supported. The lack of support for float actually affects more than images. it is a driving factor in the reason why we still use HTML tables for creating emails.


There are 2 potential solutions depending on your level of comfort with writing HTML directly instead of using the editor.


1. I'm comfortable editing the HTML code myself:





You add the old school HTML attribute of align to your image tag. You'll end up with something like this: <img src="sample.jpg" align="left" alt="sample" />


2. I am not comfortable editing the HTML code myself:


The solution here is exactly the same way we add columns to an email, HTML tables. The first step is to insert a table.





Most likely I will only want to include a 2 column table with 1 row.





I can then either drag and drop my image into one of the table cells or insert a new image from the image gallery. I can use the opposing cell for my content.





You'll notice that the text does not wrap below the image. That is one of the limitations with this solution, but hopefully a problem that you can mitigate based on the design of your email template.

I'm not 100% happy with either of these solutions. First, the reason our company purchased Blackbaud's services is because we don't have anyone particularly skilled in HTML. We were assured by sales that this was the perfect reason for purchasing Blackbaud products, because our designers and writers wouldn't have to learn HTML. So now, it's very frustrating when we contact the help desk with a problem, and the solution is to learn HTML.



Second, inserting a table within a table would be a fine solution if we didn't want color filling in the row/cells. With this approach, there's a white line where the two cells are separated, which looks cheesy.



When this problem came up again today, I ended up going to the help desk, and fortunately Jordan was an awesome problem solver for us. He used Andrew's solution from above (align="left"). While it may be considered outdated, it worked, and my email looked professional and clean.



My request to the solution teams at Blackbaud is to come up with a fix to this bug so that, when I select the image and hit left align, the html automatically updates with this line of code. As Andrew mentioned, there are many, many businesses and individuals who use Outlook, and our business can't afford to disregard those potential donors.



As the customer, it's not my responsibility to figure out HTML, or to have to call the help desk every time I want to have text wrap around an image. I get emails every day from other vendors, and their emails look polished and professional. Shouldn't Blackbaud's products be able to accomplish the same thing?