Various options on my Insert Tab and Format Text tabs within my Outlook new message are greyed out.

Not all options, just: Table, SmartArt, Chart, Screenshot, TextBox, WordArt, Equation & Drop Cap in "Insert Tab", and Styles within "Format Text" tab.

1. It is not because I am in the To or CC field. I am in the main email field. Similarly, I have HTML as the Format, and have tried Rich & Plain  this is not the problem.
   
2. I am running Outlook, Access, Lync, Infopath, Project & Publisher 2013, but Word, PP, Excel etc. 2010.
   
3. I have disabled Add-ins and also run in Safe Mode. This does not change anything.

Any idea how to get this working? I'm getting myself very puzzled...

• Edited by emshim Tuesday, May 07, 2013 10:37 AM

I have solved this issue: it was caused by having Outlook as 2013 but WORD as 2010.

I installed Word 2013 from my Office 2013 package and it has enabled the greyed out options. I assume Outlook uses Word options, and if Outlook cannot find the matching Word version to itself, it cannot offer the tools.

I assume this also goes for installing 34-bit and 64-bit versions, as they are saved into different folders - Outlook just isn't clever enough to recognise different versions of Word! :)

• Marked as answer by emshim Tuesday, May 07, 2013 10:56 AM

I have Outlook 2013 and Word 2013

I have the same problem

Evidentially  everyone has this problem

I guess it is a feature/bug that MS can't fix

terry

• Proposed as answer by MrGuinnss Wednesday, December 17, 2014 3:51 PM

Office 2007(Word, Excel) Outlook 2013 installed afterwards. 

Features such as Picture Crop, Insert, etc. were all grayed out and unusable in Outlook 2013, copying winword.exe to the folder containing outlook.exe fixed this. Thanks for the link!

• Proposed as answer by GPaGpa 16 hours 1 minutes ago
• Unproposed as answer by GPaGpa 16 hours 1 minutes ago

Office 2007(Word, Excel) Outlook 2013 installed afterwards. 

Features such as Picture Crop, Insert, etc. were all grayed out and unusable in Outlook 2013, copying winword.exe to the folder containing outlook.exe fixed this. Thanks for the link!

• Proposed as answer by GPaGpa Monday, April 27, 2015 3:25 PM
• Unproposed as answer by GPaGpa Monday, April 27, 2015 3:25 PM

my autocorrect options were greyed out in my Outlook 2013 when I have Office 2010. after I couldn't get several suggestions from my supplier to work, he suggested I do a very strange thing - which actually worked.

create a blank word document with the name winword in the same folder as your outlook program file, and alter the suffix to exe in windows explorer. restart the computer, and believe it or not, the options then become available.

I realize this is an old question, but I figured I would give a possible answer in case others stumble on this like I did.

When you install Office it will let you use Word, Outlook, etc. while the suite is still installing in the background. The install can take a while and during the install many options and functions of Office aren't available. Click the Windows logo in your system tray and see if an install is still in progress.