When I composed emails in Outlook and wanted to include some URL links or code snippets in the email body, I had to click multiple times or adjusted the style of the email body. It was not very efficient. I was hoping that I could use markdown for these kind of content in the email body. But unfortunately, Outlook doesn’t support markdown natively. I could not seem to find a usable add-in or extension which can do it too. So, I created one for myself. Here is a screenshot of it.
It works both on the desktop and in the browser.
The source code and the instruction of how to use it are in this GitHub repo. An Office add-in consists of some static web resources such as JavaScript, css and html. It can be hosted with any static web hosting service. There is a document which talks about deploying an add-in to an Azure Storage static website. I choose to host it with the GitHub Pages. There are several advantages with GitHub Pages, such as it’s easy to support both the custom domain and the SSL cert.
It seems Office AppSource doesn’t allow individual developers to submit apps. It requires a Partner account which I don’t have. So to use the add-in, it has to be sideloaded in Outlook.