Copying and pasting text is something we all do several times a day, often without even thinking about it. You’ve probably noticed that there are plenty of occasions when you paste a nicely formatted paragraph or two into document only to find that the formatting goes astray and you need to spend just about as long fixing it as you would have spent manually typing out the text. This is not the case with Outlook Web App which boasts a surprisingly cool and feature-packed text editor — it’s available to Office 365 and Exchange Server 2013 SP1 users.
Paste some text and you’re not stuck to having to work with plain text — although you can do so if you want — just as with Word, you can paste in a number of different ways: As Is, Simple HTML or just Text. But there is much more than this. The editor also include basic formatting options that can be used to give text the look you need.
Other handy options include the ability to add alt text to images — great for accessibility purposes — and a table insertion tool which is very similar to the one found in Word.
Images and videos are handled intelligently, as are links to web pages. Images can be inserted with just a couple of key presses, and if you paste the link to a YouTube video, a thumbnail preview and description will be added to help with identification. Something similar happens if you paste a regular link — a rich preview is created so links are not followed blindly.
It’s worth noting that image pasting currently only works with Google Chrome, but there are plans to make the feature available to other browsers as soon as possible.
Further reading: Microsoft, Office 365
