Workflow - Reply To Outlook Messages with template text

I have pulled together the following workflow in Automator because my Scripting knowledge is non existent:

Problem:
It pastes the text in unformatted, losing all paragraphs, bold, underlined, italics, etc.

The workflow does work when pasting text between documents like word-to-word, text-to-text, etc and it just seems Outlook specific.

As a workaround I can modify the workflow leaving the document and reply email open, allowing manual pasting of the text into the email but this defeats the purpose of using the Automation feature.

Q - Is there any was of changing this with a Script?

Once the workflow works the next stage would be to modify it to open and copy the text of a DTPO document.

Why would you copy the content to the clipboard before getting the content? I don’t understand the order of the actions.

Word’s automator actions do not copy rich text (i.e., formatted) AFAIK.

DEVONthink already has a command Data > Send by Email so is a workflow needed?

Hi Korm,

Your right it does noted to be in there, just left in from my testing different workflows. The following still produces the same problem:

I checked out the DTPO Data-Send By Email and that just attaches the text, rather than pasting it into the body of the email.

With Automator not copying rich text. Is this a system wide Apple thing or just Word? I’m confused because Automator will copy rich text from say document 1 and paste it into document 2 in the same format with no formatting problems, its only pasting into the body of an Outlook email where the formatting is not being applied.

Maybe it’s an Outlook thing – I don’t know about OS X Outlook.

Did you know there are other ways to send a selection of text by mail? There is an Apple Mail service – “New email with selection” – that operates on selected text in any application that supports Services. The service is configured in System Preferences > Keyboard, and appears in the services menu on the menu bar (DEVONthink > Services) or in the contextaul menu.

There is also a share sheet to send the selected text by Mail:

Yes – I know you want to use Outlook. Just saying …

Hi Korm,

The “New email with selection” is a handy feature for new emails.

This is just for reply emails though. I’ve tried the using the “record” feature within Automator and failed.

If its possible to fix the problem with AppleScript I’m thinking it could be inserted like something like below and also used to get text data from DTPO files?:

I’ve been looking for weeks on the net with no joy so not expecting a quick fix.

For testing purposes, I created this workflow. In this case “Get Content…” returns rich text. There is probably something else amiss in your workflow. No time over here to debug it.

Hi Korm,

Thats the strange thing. It works between word-word, text-text, word-text, text-word but just not word-OutlookEmailBody or text-OutlookEmailBody.

Appreciate no time to debug but in theory would it be possible to have AppleScript solve this?