Help! -- "please make sure you have the rich text editor on"

[Zoidberg]

My wife is trying, in vain, to use a specialty web set-up for her Tupperware sales. The site is (obviously) geared towards Windows users. One thing that keeps coming up as a gotcha against using one of their brochure-style templates is, every time she tries to use a set-up, it tells her "please make sure you have the rich text editor on". We've tried Firefox, Safari, Opera, OmniWeb, and Camino. I even found an old copy of IE and tried it there.

When we search their online help, we get this lovely bit of advice.

Rich text editing is supported by Internet Explorer 5 and higher on the Windows platform only, Mozilla Firefox 0.6.1 and higher, Mozilla 1.3 and higher, and Netscape 7.1 and higher. Unfortunately, neither Safari nor the Mac version of Internet Explorer currently support rich text editing. If you would like to use the rich text editor on your Mac, we highly recommend that you install Mozilla Firefox, a free web browser that runs on both MacOS and Windows and also offers a number of other great features, including tabbed browsing and an excellent pop-up blocker. For the Mac download, look for the words "Free Download" and click the link "Other Systems and Languages." If you decide to use a browser which does not support rich text editing, you can still format your notes using HTML. See How do I format the text of a note? for more information.

Can someone decipher that, or does anyone have any experience with this? The only info I can find via Google search is how to add this feature to your website, but nothing on how to actually "make sure you have the rich text editor on".

[M A V I C]

If they are using one of the common ones, it should work in Firefox. It may need to be turned on somewhere in the settings of the web site she's using.

[Zoidberg]

Follow-Up: Tupperware hates Macs. This from one of their techs who replied to a similar query on their (non-searchable) forum:

Unfortunately the rich text editor in Oracle's Collaboration Suite (the software we use for your my.tupperware e-mail) is only supported in Internet Explorer. So if you're using Firefox or Netscape or Safari you won't be able to switch to rich text mode.

In other words, Tupperware sales people who use a Mac are SOL if they want to use the marketing email templates. (Basically these are the fancy catalog-page style emails. There's a way around it but it adds to the work.)

One finger salute for Tupperware, eh?

[M A V I C]

Most MLMs are this way. They also think that automated emails are "autoresponders."

[ArtP]

I use a email thingee called Constant Contact to send out emails to a mailing list for a friend that puts me thru similar hoops. You just have to learn the HTML tag equivalents (like < b > for bold text, etc). It's not so bad after you get used to it.

[Zoidberg]

ArtP,

It's not the HTML -- she knows that -- it's the pre-established imagery & catalog style of the site. Her stopgap will be to go to our neighbor's house and logon there to do it (it's webmail) but it's still a "no one uses Macs" commentary that peppers the tech support pages that's the pisser.

/Z