WordArt is still supported… in Microsoft Outlook!

While at work today, debugging a weird edge-case where some emails to Outlook have some unexpected padding, I learned something weird: Microsoft Outlook still (kinda) supports WordArt. Wait, what’s WordArt? If you’re too young to remember: when Microsoft Office ’97 came out, it shipped with a feature called WordArt. Basically, these were a somewhat-customisable set of on-demand clip-art-esque text styles that you could apply to your own text. Most of these were as unhinged as PowerPoint’s more-“exciting” transitions… and were overused by exactly the same people, in exactly the same ways. The ease with which you could make use of these wacky designs meant that, for a while during the late 1990s, you wouldn’t see a poster advertising a school disco nor the front page of a GCSE essay that didn’t feature at least one1 of these colourful eccentricities. They gradually got phased-out and replaced with more-tasteful tools, but if you used them back in the day then images like the one above…