Newsletter Design using Microsoft Word

Hello:

I know this is going to be a weird one; but my company insists on using Microsoft Word to create a newsletter mail merge document to send to 200 or so "clients." They use Microsoft Access for their database. I wrote some CSS (embedded not linked) and HTML and put everything in tables because I know certain Microsoft email applications do no like DIVS.

When Mail Merging the document through word, everything looks fairly good, when viewing it in Outlook, but it looks really strange when viewing in other mail clients: (gmail, hotmail, yahoo, comcast etc) some of the css and html are ignored and do not even appear.

We also have access to a 3rd party newsletter company called listerv Maestro, which i think would display properly but for some reason they do not want to set it up to work with this.

My question...finally is what would be the best way to have all the content appear. When I get newsletters from other companies they are usually sliced images with incredibly detailed title tags. Should I build it this way or is there a better way. Don't forget Im using Microsoft Word to send it out.

anybody there

Microsoft Word is the worst possible choice they could insist on. Yes it will look fine in Outlook because the funky XML code they use is supported. You'll grow old before you figure out how to make it display properly in other 3rd party mail clients. My only suggestion is find a way to convince them not to insist on Word.