Written by Philip Roy | 26 October 2010
Posted in Office

I've tried hard to like Apple Mail. But despite the superb integration it now has with Microsoft's Exchange server, I've never managed to enjoy using it and have always used Microsoft's Entourage email client, both at work and at home. Thanks to the kind folk at Microsoft, I got to upgrade my Office apps to Office 2011, including moving from Entourage 2008 to Outlook. And in this first part of a two part review (the second part will focus on Word, PowerPoint and Excel) whilst some aspects of Outlook appeal, I find myself wishing for Entourage back again, mostly due to this new email client having many frustrating interface issues...most notably, the introduction of The Ribbon!

For a few years I used a product called Claris Emailer as my email client. It was never actually released here in New Zealand (my brother purchased it in the States for me) but I liked the interface compared to other applications at the time, such as Eudora. By the time I had started work at a university that used Microsoft Exchange, Claris Emailer was dead and it was difficult to find a good email client. Notably, an Outlook client for the Mac didn't exist. But then a miracle occurred...briefly. Outlook 2001 for Mac (see here and here) was released, but the application never advanced in feature set and certainly never reached parity with its PC equivalent.

Outlook was then replaced by Entourage, but without the ability to integrate with the Exchange server. Even when that eventually came in, Entourage never truly matched the feature set the PC Outlook application had. So much so, that I remember a fairly recent version of Office finally bringing in the ability to set up an 'Out of Office' message...something that had been a standard activity on the PC for years. For someone who worked 4 days a week at the time, it was staggering that a mail client from Microsoft, couldn't handle something so basic as creating an Out off Office message for their email system!

But that has all changed with the introduction of Office 2011. A completely re-written office suite from Microsoft, that sees Entourage disappear to be replaced by a new Outlook for the Mac, which like many other aspects of Office 2011 for the Mac, is meant to bring Microsoft Office closer to the PC than ever before.

Office versions

There are in fact now two versions of Office for the Mac. I find this a really odd thing to do, given that the only thing that differentiates the offerings is Outlook and extra tech support. So the "Home and Student" edition includes Word, PowerPoint and Excel, plus 90 days of tech support. The "Home and Business" edition adds Outlook and 275 more days of support. Kudos on the fact that both editions appear to allow dual installation (Home and...).

But why even sell a version that is missing Outlook? It seems to suggest that a student doesn't need an integrated email client that includes calendaring on the Mac. It's a pretty bizarre message to send to those contemplating Office ("hey guys, you might not need email") or is this waving the white flag at Apple Mail and iCal? But only for students?

And why do students only get 90 days when others get 1 year of tech support? I appreciate that the strength of Outlook is in its integration to Microsoft's Exchange server, but hey, it works pretty good with POP accounts too....and IMAP accounts! Why omit just one app to differentiate the two editions?

I think the answer might be (sadly) so that you can charge $160 NZD more! The student edition has an RRP of $219 and the business edition $379 NZD. For a company like Microsoft that probably wants people using their email client with their exchange server, asking $160 more for the privilege to do so seems strange. Want everyone to use Outlook? Then give it to everyone for one price!

The DVD that was sent to me by Microsoft came with the standard review information for journalists, a lovely MacBook sleeve (thanks PR company!) that I gave to a colleague at work and curiously, a booklet and sheet on how to sell the product to people. Now I'm not trying to suggest that I somehow got my hands on confidential material (everything in the document was blatantly obvious) but I did feel a bit odd reading about how I should be selling this product to people. "50% of Mac buyers are new to the Mac, so they have likely used Office for Windows before"...well, OK, they may have used Windows (not really a plus in my book) and Office (if they have used the ribbon in the PC version they may have been driven insane like me) or in fact they may not have. Also, familiarity is great, but I want to know why a Mac user should want to use this product...and I'd like you to try and avoid discussing Windows as part of that argument!

Installation and upgrading

The installation process is very easy. The DVD contains a standard installer as opposed to some previous versions of Office installs that have had a drag and drop option....

The installer recognises the fact that you have a previous version of Office installed and will let you take the settings from that previous version (note that this doesn't import mail etc at this point, just your personal identity information)if you want...

One of the things that is really disappointing is that the installer makes no effort at cleaning up previous versions of Microsoft Office. OK, I appreciate that there are settings and (what Microsoft refer to as) identities that need to remain to be imported later, but there is no attempt to remove previous applications, libraries, fonts etc. You end up with two Microsoft Office folders in your Applications folder and (as far as I can tell) all the old files associated with Office 2008 or other versions.

This means that after you first launch the new Outlook (to be discussed in a moment) and then go into the "Microsoft User Data" folder in the "Documents" folder, you have a mix of old and new files. I've highlighted some below that are obviously old (they have the word "Entourage" or "Office 2008" in them), but some of the others look like they can be deleted also...

Going back to the installation process, Outlook on first launch will realise that you might want to import old emails and old accounts and gives you the option to do so...

You'll then see some familiar (if you've set up Entourage and imported emails before) screens about what you might want to import, including options such as importing a PST file from the PC version of Outlook...

It's great also that the importer realises that you may not want all content imported, so you can choose what comes through, be it messages, contacts, tasks etc...

My Outlook import took over 25 minutes on my Mac at work with an Exchange account. But I need to point out that (a) I had about 8 years of emails archived within Entourage and (b) I was rebuilding spotlight indexes around the same time (I had just run Onyx a few minutes earlier)....so the machine was on a bit of a go slow. At home, the import (with far less emails archived) took around 5 minutes. In both instances, it appears that the import was a complete success.

Now it was time to take a look at the new Outlook 2011.

Look and feel - The dreaded Ribbon and interface inconsistencies

Microsoft's response to Exchange users on the Mac has been fairly erratic over the years. I've always said that Microsoft products on a Mac are a "version behind" in comparison to their PC equivalents. At the same time, the Mac and PC versions of Office are not released on the same release cycle, so products with different timeframes will have differing features. For someone like me that works in an environment that uses Microsoft Exchange, having an email client as part of the Office suite that is closer to Outlook on a PC should ultimately be a godsend. But let's remember...Microsoft is now really the second company to bring in better integration for Microsoft Exchange on modern Macs. Apple was the first with their release of Snow Leopard and at this stage, there may not be enough reason for many to move away from an email, calendar and contact system that comes free with all Macs in favour of Outlook 2011.

One of the first disappointments for me when starting Outlook is that it appears to be similar in look to the new iTunes 10...a sort of white-washed interface that has done away with candy stripes or anything that sometimes allows you to determine objects as different. Whilst the interface is certainly clean, I am finding it perhaps too sanitised.

To explain better, take a look at the following two images. The first is two emails listed in Outlook...

And then 3 songs in iTunes 10...

There is some slight horizontal striping within iTunes that allows the user to distinguish one row/item from the next. In Outlook there is nothing, and I have found myself sometimes looking at a page full of email subjects and thinking I am looking at a page in Word. It just looks like a lot of text in one big white space, and whilst date columns etc help to indicate this is a list, visually nothing has been done to help with that process.

So let's move on to the Ribbon and the Toolbar. First, you need to understand which is which. In the image below, you can see the top of my Outlook application. At the very top, is the toolbar, that starts with a small set of icons. The toolbar can be hidden (collapsed) and is customisable...but the amount of things you can add to the toolbar is limited. Below that is the Ribbon. This too can be hidden, but in what I consider to be a staggeringly bad move, it is not customisable in any way...

The Ribbon first appeared in Office 2007 on the PC (see below) and as someone who also has to use Office under Windows quite a bit, I've grown to loathe it. However one thing it appears to have over its Mac counterpart is the small Office 'globe' that you see in the top-left of the image. This small button in fact gives you access to many menu items. On the Mac, you need to go up to the Mac's standard menus.

So why is the toolbar and ribbon such an issue? Take a look at the Mac image above again. On the toolbar, there is only one icon that I really feel I'd ever want to use...the print icon. I could easily hide that toolbar if and that's a big if I could move the print button to the ribbon. Of course, I can't. I can't seem to do anything to the ribbon. And the buttons available to me to add to the toolbar are so limited, I'm stuck and need to keep the ribbon displayed.

So unlike in Entourage, where I could move buttons around and put spaces between them, I can't do anything like this to the ribbon in Outlook. Take another example (see below) where the "Delete" and "Reply" buttons are side by side. OK...I get why they might have done this. These are probably some of the most used buttons in an email client (at a guess), but they are so physically close for me that I keep hitting the wrong button. I'd love to be able to put more of a spacer in between them (or even separate them to different locations) but I can't...

Actually I would prefer to move these buttons completely, because (as you can see in the image below) they are so far away from my actual emails, that I find myself moving the mouse far more than I used to. Having "Rules" and "Junk" directly above the emails is a waste of real estate and a poor location for buttons that I rarely use. I'd much rather have the buttons I use most frequently near the things I use them with. But the ribbon appears to be unable to budge...and I think it's a staggeringly poor decision.

Don't get me wrong, I understand why the ribbon has been put in place. It gives access to a lot of the buttons you might need at some point and the tabbed sections hide those buttons that you may or may not use at times. But the fact that you can't customise the ribbon means that Microsoft have determined what I do or don't want to use. It would have been so much easier to allow the creation of a custom tab, where I could drop the buttons on that I want to use (and in the order I want) to satisfy my needs.

But the other argument could also be extended...why even have buttons that you are likely to use so infrequently anywhere near a button interface? Why not just have them in the menus? Well it's because on a PC, you don't have both. You have the ribbon and that's it. On the Mac, applications are required to have a menu at the top of the screen, so the ribbon ends up duplicating menu content. In this instance, the ribbon hasn't translated as well as it should have to the Mac.

So let's look at some positives for a moment with regards the interface. I like the fact that if you have multiple accounts in use in Outlook or store files on your computer, the interface now unifies these in a more logical way. Previously I had (at work) a Massey account that included an inbox, sent mail, drafts, deleted items etc...and then below that, everything was repeated again under an "On my computer" heading. For a local storage of emails, having junk folders etc listed was a complete waste of time.

Outlook takes a new approach of putting all similar folders under one universal folder (all inboxes under one "Inbox" unified folder for example), which you can keep closed and use like a unified email box that the iPhone has, or click the revealing triangle to expose all accounts separately. It's a sensible idea and has lead to less real estate being used up in the left column.

Another nice feature (although I don't think I'll use it) is the conversation view for emails. This is where Outlook takes a series of emails that are obviously an ongoing conversation and sorts them into one collapsible thread. How accurate this is (i.e., if you receive two emails from the same people with similar subject headings or replies to emails you have BCC'd to a group of people does it lump these together?) I don't know. In the image you can see below, I have an email that has a subject heading "Very odd" and you might notice the reveal triangle to the left of my name...

Click on this and you get an expanded view of the conversation. So let's look at what you then see in detail. At the bottom of the thread is the original email (I've numbered that "1" in the image below), then above that is a reply (2) and then my response (3). Finally, at the top ("Thread") is a subject line delineating a threaded conversation and showing everyone who has been involved in the conversation (the other person's name has been blurred by me)...

I like the fact that if you select each of the emails in Outlook, their contents displays in the reading pane, but if you select the top of the thread, the reading pane shows a nice summary of the conversation list...

As I mentioned, I didn't want to use this style of arranging emails, so it was just a matter of going to the "View" manu and choosing another "Arrange By" option...

Now back to some of my dislikes. Take a look at the image below. There is a button named "E-mail". First of all, the name of the button gives no real indication as to its use (it's for creating a new email message...although you could argue it's a good enough title I guess) and right next to it, a "New" button....that includes an option to create a new email message. I don't understand why this duplication has occurred. Why the need to have two places to create a new message, side-by-side? I loved the way Entourage's "New" button worked. If you clicked it quickly, it would bring up a new blank email message. If you clicked and held your mouse button down, you got the pop-up list you see below. So why not carry on that way? Why create a second button that creates a new email message and then, not even call it "New E-Mail"? Answer - because calling it "New E-mail", right next to a button called "New" would have shown us the blindingly obvious....the first button is superfluous!

Whilst the preferences panel is reasonably laid out and easy to access, there are some quirks with the preferences. Take a look at the image below. Where do you set the preferences for the language to be used for spell checking? I bet you're thinking That icon with "ABC" on it and the text "AutoCorrect", right? Well no. In fact there is no way to set the default spell checking language in the preferences section.

So where do you set the spell checking language? Well, you set it when you actually do a spell check of an email, by finding the appropriate button in the ribbon.

But wait...there's more. First, the spelling check button is hidden in a second tab in the email window, so you are required to click to get to the button and then click again. I'd love to be able to move this spell check button to the front tab of the ribbon, but it won't let me.

Secondly, take a look at the image below. I'm pointing out the Preferences icon for the "AutoCorrect" options that I showed you before and then to the right in the image, the icon for "Spelling" in the window of an email message. See something similar? That's right...the icon images are exactly the same but mean different things. Not only is there confusion over the re-use of icons, but the location of where you set preferences seems to be confusing. This is really badly done.

And let's stick with spelling for a moment. Take a look at the following image. In a sentence I have typed "fr" instead of what I wanted to type. In Outlook, I can right-click on that word and Outlook will offer me alternatives to the word it knows I have spelt incorrectly...

So..fr. I can think of far, fir, for and fur to begin with as words it might offer. So what did it suggest?...

And what of the option to choose a sound set (the noises made when certain things happen in the interface)? How many options are there? Well, as you can see in the image below, there is a pop-up menu to choose a sound set. And how many other options are there? Answer - None. The pop-up menu has no other sound sets to choose from, so why make it look like there is currently a choice?

Unfortunately the application is full of these sorts of inconsistencies. Take a look at the following image. It's a nice progress bar that appears in the left-hand column of Outlook when you send an email. Great! But does it show progress when downloading emails? No...it doesn't even appear! This progress bar only shows progress on one activity...and then it goes away.

But hold on...didn't Entourage have it's own floating progress window? Yes it did...and it's still there in Outlook. But, the progress window won't stay open by default like it used to.

I always used to have this window showing, so that as I launched my email client, it ran a script to check for emails...and I would know it was happening because I could see that in the progress window. Now I have to manually go up to the "Window menu" and bring up the progress window to see any progress occurring. Oh, except of course when sending...because sending has its own progress bar, but in a different location. Confused? You should be!

I also experienced some technical glitches, one of which required I restart the application. The preferences have a setting to hide "On My Computer" folders. In essence this is all the mail folders on your Mac that are listed in Outlook...

In the image below, I have ticked the box to hide the folders, but then unticked it. However the folder list has not appeared again...leading to a mild panic by me for a moment, thinking I had lost all the folders on my computer. As mentioned, quitting the application and starting it again brought the folder list back...

Other issues include (for me) the removal of the various text pasting options. I have my email set to text format (as opposed to HTML) and I often take things from previous emails or off the web and use them in the body of my email. Previously there was a "Paste as quotation" option that would insert the text with the ">" character at the beginning of each line. Now there is no such option in terms of pasting text, leading me to find it difficult to quote text from other sources (even at times, now going through and manually adding the ">" back in to rows of text!). Cleanup of text (a superb tool to remove all the ">" characters from text) has also been removed and I'm staggered by that.

I've also noticed that URLs that I am convinced previously would have fitted into one line or at least been clickable, now seem to be truncated and damaged more quickly in text mode...

So you're not impressed then?

Outlook 2001 for me is quite rough around the edges. I have to confess that I am not surprised by some of the interface issues, given that I've never really believed that Microsoft fully pay sufficient attention to the user interface (both on Mac and PC). David Pogue rightly points out some of the other considerable omissions with the Outlook application (see half way down his article - http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/office-for-mac-isnt-an-improvement) so it's great not to be alone on this. David also points out synchronisation and performance issues, but I confess I've not experienced those. The application loads fast and is responsive for me. If I was using Time Machine I would also welcome the fact that emails are now no longer stored as one big database, that meant that Time Machine backed up the whole thing each time one email changed the database. Now TimeMachine should just backup what is new.

Am I going to change back to Entourage though? I actually wish I could, but I feel I have committed to Outlook now (given that the way in which files are stored has changed, I would have to lose any recent changes in order to go back to where I was). I hope that with quite visible reviews like that of David Pogue's criticising the application, that we might see some changes in an update. However, I doubt very much that Microsoft will make many changes or allow for some form of customisation of the Ribbon...and that's going to be the biggest disappointment of all.

Whilst it's great to see that Microsoft have committed to Outlook on the Mac, I'd really like to see them quickly work to fix the issues. Historically though, the Mac unit appears to have not heeded concerns and have made bold decisions (the removal of scripting within Excel in the last version of Office for example) that leads me to suspect that they may not be as responsive to concerns as they could be. This has me worried.

I worry that Outlook 2011 may go the way that Outlook 2001 did...never quite reaching it's PC counterpart; never quite meeting the needs of the Mac user; never quite being promoted as much as it should be as a strong email client (as mentioned much earlier, it seems students don't need it and I don't get that!)...and then ultimately being killed off.

If these changes don't occur, I wouldn't be surprised if in 2 or 3 years time, Outlook for the Mac is killed off in favour of Apple Mail, with Microsoft saying people just weren't using it. But it would be the wrong decision by Microsoft. A company whose Office suite is needed by many on the Mac, and whose email client needs to reflect the demands of the Mac user and the grace of the Mac user interface.

The review literature tells me that the Mac team at Microsoft have been working on this for over 3 years, so it's frustrating to see these interface glitches that don't appear to have been considered an issue or something that might frustrate users. Did they really listen to the customers? The literature says "Work the way you want", but the reality is that Outlook won't let me.

You've committed to Outlook on the Mac (again) Microsoft. Now I think it's time you commit to making it a better email client.

 

 

Many thanks to Microsoft for supplying the review copy of Office 2011. A subsequent review will look at the other applications that came with the Office suite.