Outlook for iOS Gets Rich Text Editor

News via Twitter Reveals New Editor

A February 26 tweet from the redoubtable Ross Smith IV reveals that Microsoft has given Outlook for iOS a new rich text editor.

Welcome as the news is, it came as surprise because Microsoft didn’t issue an Office 365 notification. The feature is listed as Microsoft 365 roadmap item 54805 “rich text options” with a “rolling out” status. There’s no word (and no roadmap item) to say if Outlook for Android will receive similar capabilities.

New Editor Brightens Outlook for iOS Messages

In any case, although you won’t be tempted to write the next great chapter of your book with Outlook’s text editor, this is a nice step forward that allows senders to highlight and emphasize important points in their messages.

When you compose a new message, the rich text editor is accessed by clicking the A/pencil icon in the menu bar just above the keyboard. You can then apply three styles to text (body, subhead, and title), create bulleted and numbered lists, add clickable web links, and make text italics, bold, underlined, or a combination (Figure 2).

Of course, a new text editor won’t do anything to improve the quality of your writing, but the text might look more attractive than the simple formatting used to date.

The screen shot was taken using Outlook for iOS 4.27.0 (available in TestFlight). No doubt the new editor will land on a device close to you sometime soon.

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