Hacks and Gadgets by HJL

This evening I tried installing the latest version of Internet Explorer. I didn’t have any problems with the installation, but quickly discovered that upgrading from IE6 to IE7 apparently breaks HTML copy and paste from Outlook XP (2002) into Microsoft Word.

I typically use that feature to select text and graphics from HTML e-mail and paste it into Word documents for editing and formatting.

After installing IE7, text from the copied selection within Outlook can still be pasted into a Word document without any problems, but any images in the selection turn up as empty picture objects. So I end up with text, and blanks where the images should be.

This might be related to new browser security settings somewhere, but I don’t have time to sort it out at the moment and a quick online search doesn’t turn up any obvious fixes. However, uninstalling IE7 apparently does restore the old IE6 HTML handlers used by Outlook, which fixes this problem. I think Outlook just uses the latest version of the HTML layout control on the system.

I don’t have a pressing need to upgrade to IE7, as these days I mostly run Firefox, making extensive use of the tabbed browsing feature. However, some sites require Internet Explorer, and others don’t print well in Firefox, so I still regularly use both. I was looking forward to tabbed browsing in IE, though.

If anyone knows how to fix the image copy-paste behavior, I’ll give IE7 another try. I’m done with it for now.