Rich Content and HTML in Instant Messages

As Rajesh mentioned earlier, Office Communicator 2007 R2 packs more than its name.  You can see quite a few enhancements in the Instant Message area as well.

One of these enhancements is the improved support for IM rich text and HTML clipboard operations. This enables copy/paste operations from a variety of sources like Word™, OneNote™, Excel™, browser etc. The pasted content preserves most of the formatting information such as font, table layout, indentation, orientation, background color, margin, and padding of the copied text. Some scenarios and examples are outlined below.

Rich text

Example 1: Copying an excel spreadsheet table and pasting into IM Input region preserves most of the formatting information.

Figure 1: Snapshot of IM window after pasting and sending a colored excel table with aligned text

 

Example 2: Copy-paste data from a word doc. Most of the rich style information is preserved when pasting data from Microsoft® Word™ including complex formatting as shown in the example below.

Figure 2: Snapshot of IM window after pasting and sending a formatted table from a Word™ document

HTML

Copying HTML text and pasting into IM input preserves a lot of the style/formatting information.  The pasted content looks pretty much like the copied content (Images/links/objects etc are filtered out). This is a greatly improved experience from earlier versions of Communicator.

Figure 3: Snapshot of IM window after pasting and sending HTML from browser

Error Messages

Error messages are shown just like in Office Communicator 2007™, with all the styling information preserved (except the text-color, which is a brighter shade of red).

Figure 4: Snapshot of IM window after pasting and sending large text

Keyboard Shortcuts

Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same as that in Office Communicator 2007. A few interesting ones are listed below.

Zoom the IM Input and History regions Ctrl + ‘[‘and Ctrl + ‘]’
Increase/Decrease Font size for selected text only in IM Input area Ctrl + ‘>’ and Ctrl + ‘<‘
Hide/Show IM Region Ctrl +’ w’
Show Emoticon Dialog Ctrl + ‘e’

Emoticons

The saved conversations preserve the text equivalent for the emoticons that were a part of the IM Conversation.

 

Figure 5: Emoticons are preserved in Conversation History (See text in the red rectangle)

Ink Drag & Drop

On a tablet PC, you can drag ink messages from the IM history region and drop it in the IM input region. In Office Communicator R2, ink copy paste is not supported via the context menu but the same can be achieved by drag & drop as demonstrated in the screenshots below.

 

Pooja Malpani
Published Wednesday, March 04, 2009 12:56 PM by octeam