New Outlook for Mac
This is a quick summary of my experiences with New Outlook for Mac and, quite frankly, it’s really extremely disappointing.
Background
I wasn’t sure what release I was on. I was using the older version and one day I opened it up as usual and it just said “Next time you open the application it will go straight into New Outlook for Mac”. I really like to plan for these things so I had to drop everything I was doing and go into backup mode. Backing up took me about 1 hour.
The Good
- The best thing about the updated version is the look and feel. It looks smooth and is a pleasant workspace to spend time in.
- When I opened up the program it had deleted all “On My Computer” folders (I did have a backup though). Then a pop-up appeared to restore them, this took about 30 minutes and was moderately successful. See “The Bad” below for more information.
That is all the good I have.
The Bad
Sigh. Where do I begin?
- I was disappointed to see that it didn’t migrate all my “On My Computer” files across, this was a bit of a nuisance but I did have a backup.
- There are no Rules, none, anywhere. There was an item on the menu bar but nothing worked on any account. This function, at least for now, is useless.
- I receive emails from universities that use embedded security certificates. I could open the email once but that is it. After that, the email was locked and unreadable. No other action could be taken on the message such as delete, reply, forward, move etc. I investigated further and could see those messages, without problem, in Thunderbird, webmail and iOS email applications. So, this just seems to be an Outlook issue.
- There is no export feature, the items under the File menu were just greyed out no matter what part of the program I was in.
- Moving a message actually copied it, so it was now in two places. This has never been the case with Outlook before, move meant move, now it means copy.
Every time I opened the program I found a new problem and barrier to getting my work done.
Recommendations
New Outlook is clearly not in a fit state to be released right now. If I found these errors what atrocities are beneath the hood? Thanks, Microsoft but no thanks.
Summary
Microsoft has been working on New Outlook including “On My Computer” for virtually 2 years now, maybe longer. Looking around and facing all these issues is just a waste of my time dealing with them. I wish they would just get their act together and tidy up these errors or missing features before releasing another version. How much longer?
Many users say Microsoft actually can’t be bothered with Mac users and puts them down the priority list. Whether or not this is true I don’t know but it certainly feels that way.
Maybe I need to just drop Outlook and use something like Thunderbird.