I can’t even remember when it started happening, but for some reason my Outlook signature–the text that appears at the bottom of every e-mail I compose–has extra line breaks. It’s like someone turned on double-spacing without asking me. Even though the signature looks correct (i.e., single-spaced) in Outlook’s signature editor (and even in Word, where I added some hyperlinks), the mystery line breaks appear whenever I create a new message.
Fortunately, I finally stumbled on a solution (with a little help from Microsoft, believe it or not). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the problem turned out to be the wrong kind of HTML tag in the signature: ‘paragraph’ instead of ‘single line break.’ But because I couldn’t see any of the underlying HTML, I couldn’t correct the tags. Luckily, there’s an easy fix. (Note that I work in Outlook 2003–not sure this applies to other versions.)
1. In Outlook’s Tools menu, click Options.
2. Click the Mail Format tab.
3. Click Signatures.
4. In the Signature box, select the signature that youwant to modify, and then click Edit.
5. Place the insertion point after the last character in the line.
6. Press Delete, and then press Shift-Enter.
7. Repeat Steps 5 and 6 for each line of text.
8. When you have finished with all lines, click OK three times.
Presto! No more extra line breaks in your signature. And good riddance!
