Convert outlook templates to mail.app

Microsoft was nice enough not to store anything that they do in an open format which leaves us with the huge pain of converting their crap to work on our systems. Mail’s templates are pretty bad but at least its just html and you can easily put it into any mail application. Here’s what you need:

• Outlook
• Microsoft office
• Office application for Mac
• Mail (OS X)

Starting with the oft file

The oft file format is what outlook uses to store templates. Basically it’s html by Microsoft! If you open it and look at it using a plain text viewer you’ll see jibberish and snippets of html and content mixed in. Great, so now you have your proprietary and disgusting template from outlook, open it using outlook. Now select everything in that email and copy it. Open off office and paste it in.

Pasting into office

If after copying and pasting directly from the outlook window into office if the format changes then I’m sorry, you have no hope. If it did past in correctly congratulations! Save it as a .doc or .docx whatever works for you and whatever you can open on your mac office application

More copy and paste

Now goto your Mac and open up the doc you created from the oft file. Select all, copy and paste it into a mail window. Congrats! You have put a oft file into mail.

Automatically converting a bunch of oft files

I don’t know of any way to automatically convert multiple oft files. If I did I probably wouldn’t be in such a bad mood.