Microsoft is working on a big redesign for its Outlook for Mac and Windows apps. The software giant revealed teasers for the new design during an Ignite conference session last month, and the goal. Both the desktop and mobile versions of the applications have received updates, with Outlook for iOS adding Draft Sync, AI enhancements in Word for Mac, and more. Sylvania HomeKit Light Strip.
Last month, we announced that we’re bringing major improvements to how Google Accounts work in Outlook 2016 for Mac—including an improved setup experience and Google Calendar and Contacts support. We’re excited to be delivering on these highly requested features for Mac users—matching Outlook for iOS and Android—by providing Google Accounts with a more powerful way to stay in control of the day ahead. These updates are currently available to our Office Insider Fast community, and we’ve been excited by the response we’ve seen.
Add/switch to another account, turn on Conversation view to see if it works. You will get a faster and likely better reply if you post the question/issue in the Outlook Mac related forum where folks who focus on Mac based software reside (if the same issue hasn't been address there already). Text/html 1/4/2018 8:06:33 PM Dr. Outlook for Mac improves calendar sharing performance with REST. Eugenie Burrage. Outlook Blog.. Conditional Access in Outlook on the web for Exchange Online. Outlook Blog.. Get Ready for Microsoft Ignite 2018 - Outlook sessions at a glance. The final version was Outlook for Mac 2001, which was fairly similar to Outlook 2000 and 2002 apart from being exclusively for Exchange users. Microsoft Entourage was introduced as an Outlook-like application for Mac OS in Office 2001, but it lacked Exchange connectivity. With the release of 16.9.18010702, Outlook for Mac now supports creating tables during compose.
However, we still need some additional feedback before making these updates broadly available. Today, we are announcing a worldwide preview of these features that will run until June 30, 2017. During this time, anyone can install the earliest Outlook for Mac Preview build and help us test the new Google Account experience. You will have access to the same experience as our Insider Fast community—without the requirement of being an existing Office 365 customer.
Getting the Outlook for Mac Preview is simple—just visit the preview website and click the Download button.
What should I do if I’m already an Outlook for Mac user?
If you are already using Outlook as part of Office 365, this preview isn’t for you. Existing users can get access to the new Google Account features, and all the latest Outlook innovations, simply by joining our Insider Fast community. Just open Outlook, click Help > Check for Updates and then follow these directions.
Account View Outlook For Mac 2018
What if I don’t use Outlook for Mac?
This preview is for you! To try Outlook for Mac with your Google Account and test drive the new updates, visit our preview website and click the Download button. This will install the latest preview version of Outlook 2016 for Mac, which you can use until June 30, 2017. You will receive the same builds and weekly updates as our Insider Fast community. As you use the new features, check out this list of known issues and share your feedback by going to Help > Contact Support in Outlook.
Why stop there? Install Outlook for iOS and connect your Google Account to get the same, rich Outlook experience on your Mac, iPad and iPhone. Your Gmail will get better with advanced features like Focused Inbox and richer experiences for travel reservations and package deliveries.
Once the preview is over, you can become an Office 365 customer to continue getting all the latest features and innovation in Outlook and Office for your Mac and iPhone. Just go to Outlook menu and select Subscription Options.
Make your voice heard!
Got a suggestion for how to improve Outlook for Mac? Please suggest and vote on future feature ideas on our Outlook for Mac UserVoice page.
—The Outlook team
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Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011
[Editor’s note: This is a review of the final, shipping version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. The software was provided to Macworld by Microsoft in advance of the suite’s general release.]
Outlook for Mac 2011 is a new e-mail client and personal information manager from Microsoft, not just an upgrade to its predecessor, Entourage 2008 (). Outlook 2011 has some features that Entourage had, but if you approach Outlook 2011 expecting it to be an upgraded Entourge, you’re going to be frustrated.
As someone who is, by any measure of the term, an Entourage power user, I found that once I stopped thinking about Outlook as “Entourage 2011,” my experience with the new software quickly became much easier.
Version 1.0
Outlook 2011’s Mailing List Manager, Scheduling Manager, and Rules implementation are mostly unchanged from Entourage. Otherwise, Outlook 2011 is all new. Anyone used to modern versions of Outlook on the PC, or for anyone on a Mac who needs to talk to Exchange, will find that Outlook 2011 will be kinder to you than Entourage ever was—as long as you're using Exchange Server 2007 or later. Outlook 2011 does not support the older HTTP-DAV connection method that Entourage used.
Outlook 2011 is a Cocoa application; it doesn’t have a legacy of over 20-plus years on the Mac and doesn’t have the kind of code base that the other Office programs have. Moving forward, the Outlook development team will have an easier time than the other Office development teams with operating system compatibility. Unlike the rest of the Office 2011 suite, Outlook 2011 supports Mac OS Services (so did Entourage), and you get some of the basic niceties that Cocoa has.
Though I did no benchmark testing, Outlook 2011 feels faster than Entourage. Outlook 2011 launches minutes faster for me on the first launch of the day after a shutdown. Some of the user interface (UI) lags in Entourage while checking mail or doing other tasks never appeared or were far less annoying than in Entourage.
Cocoa magic aside, drag and drop in Carbon applications always works more intuitively. As a result, Outlook 2011 takes a step back when it comes to drag and drop. You don’t have to do the click-and-hold delay when dragging text, and dragging an attachment into a background Entourage mail window is a far simpler experience than doing so with Outlook 2011, where I had to bring the message window to the foreground and then drag the file from a Finder window in the background to the message window. I’ve seen the same behavior in other Cocoa applications—Cocoa just doesn’t do drag and drop as well as Carbon.
I tested Outlook 2011 in the same configuration that I use Entourage on a daily basis: six IMAP accounts total, with three accounts using SSL for both send and receive, two Gmail accounts, and one Exchange 2007 Exchange Web Services (EWS) account. Back-end servers run the gamut from MobileMe, Kerio, and Communigate Pro to Exchange 2007. I have over 70 IMAP rules, a handful of SMTP and Exchange rules, and too many Mailing List Manager rules to count. I also have an Exchange Calendar with gobs of public folders (I live by my to-do lists), and I have three separate Directory Service accounts that I use as part of my work.
The database
Entourage's database was a big file that changed constantly, which made for painful backups. The big news in Outlook 2011 is that there is a new way of dealing with Outlook items, and each item is stored as an individual file or files—however, there’s still a database.
According to the Outlook development team, the database is there purely to optimize search and other non-essential routines. So what would happen if I deleted the database? After quitting Outlook 2011 and the Database Daemon process, I deleted the database file and restarted Outlook 2011. The program popped a message saying that since I had restored from Time Machine, (amusingly, this message is hardcoded into Outlook 2011 based on the assumption that the only time you’re going to have all the individual files and no database is after a Time Machine restore), it was going to rebuild the database, which it did. The database is not only non-critical, it's much smaller; in my case, my Entourage Database is under 5.5GB, and my Outlook 2011 database is over 500MB. Not a bad reduction, and you can ignore it completely for backups.
Time Machine support is a mixed bag. Because everything is in individual files, once you’ve done your initial backup, then any changes only require backing up those changes, (just make sure you exclude the Outlook 2011 database from Time Machine.) However, there’s no actual Time Machine integration, a la Apple Mail (). And due to the requirements of Spotlight and others, the deeper folder structure is incomprehensible. For example, to get to my signatures, the folder path is /Volumes/jwelch/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity/Data Records/Signatures/0T/0B/0M/0K/—not the things easy selective restores are made of.
The Outlook development team acknowledged that doing a partial restore, such as a single message or a single contact, would be quite tedious. In this release of Outlook, the restore is all or nothing, but a lot better than the state of Time Machine with Entourage. For anyone in a business or educational setting, where you’re using Portable Home Directory (PHD) sync, I noticed no problems with PHD sync at all. In a quick comparison, the synchronization works as it does for Apple Mail as long as you exclude the Outlook 2011 database.
Bringing in data from Entourage was a snap. Accounts, rules, signatures, e-mail, events, contacts, categories, and so forth, all imported without a problem on the first try. Importing from other programs was similarly pain-free. I also tried dragging a few thousand messages that existed only as .eml files into a folder in Outlook 2011; it took a while, but they all imported correctly. The only caveat about importing is that if the Entourage Database Daemon is not running, the Entourage import may fail. I did not test .pst file imports.
I’m pleased to say that IMAP/SMTP accounts worked correctly in my testing. Outlook 2011 handled both SSL and non-SSL accounts with ease, and HTML and plain text e-mails worked fine. Account setup is similar to the way it was in Entourage, except that the account settings have been merged into an all-new application preferences dialog box. The only glitch I noticed is that when you tell Outlook 2011 to use SSL with your SMTP account, it leaves the port at 25, instead of changing it to 465—minor, but annoying. If you have an account with a mail provider Outlook 2011 knows about (like MobileMe), then the software does a good job of automatically setting up the account details.
One feature that's still missing is support for Kerberos as an authentication mechanism for IMAP/SMTP accounts. It’s available for Exchange, but the lack of Kerberos support means that you can’t use Single Signon for IMAP in Outlook 2011 as you can with Mail.
Another quibble is that the default compose setting can’t be set per account, so you can’t have one account that defaults to HTML and another that defaults to plain text. It’s a power feature and the Outlook development team said that it wasn't able to add it to the initial release. Other power features that are missing are the ability to add custom headers to e-mail messages, and the option to view the full headers of a message.
Gratifyingly, Outlook 2011 continues Entourage’s limited support for HTML e-mail. You can set basic options, such as font, font style, lists, indents, and alignment, but no flashing text or tables. If you were expecting a full-on HTML editor, it’s not happening in Outlook 2011. However, Outlook 2011 is better at handling received e-mail than Entourage, which had a tendency to do bad things to HTML e-mail when you forwarded it. Outlook 2011 finally lets you insert proper hyperlinks into an HTML message, something that Entourage couldn’t do unless you used Word as your editor. (I didn’t test to see if Word 2011 [] can be used as your e-mail editor.)
For attachments, Outlook 2011 can use Mac OS X’s Quick Look function to easily preview the attachment contents. While Outlook 2011 does have an updated junk mail filter, it’s still the same kind of filter as that in Entourage. It also seems to be unclear on the concept of “If someone is in my address book, then their messages aren’t junk”—I got inconsistent results.
The ability to reply to a message as a meeting is handy, although unless you’re running Exchange, you lose the ability to use the scheduling assistant to check availability. In my tests while running Exchange, this feature worked flawlessly.
The UI for managing IMAP folders has changed quite a bit. It’s actually part of the new Public Folders window, and this is where you now manage subscriptions to IMAP folders. Unfortunately, all you can do with this new UI is subscribe or unsubscribe to folders. There’s no way to get any of the properties of that folder, or share the folder (Outlook 2011 doesn’t support IMAP folder sharing), or even create a new folder here. You can create a new folder in the main mail view, but to have that option be only available for Exchange Public Folders in this window is frustrating, and hopefully this will change in a future update.
Calendar
Microsoft Outlook For Mac 2018
Outlook 20011’s calendar contains some notable improvements on that in Entourage, such as better event displays, the ability to create multiple calendars (categories are still available), and more.
If you have multiple calendars, then Outlook 2011 by default shows you a merged view for all calendars, local and Exchange. You can turn individual calendars on and off with ease. Categories are common across all calendars; there’s no way to have separate categories for each calendar.
One thing Outlook 2011 does that iCal could take a cue from is that if you have a specific calendar selected, the events for all other calendars fade out a bit. It’s a small feature, but very helpful when trying to keep track your calendars. By default, all calendars have the same color; if you want events to have different colors, you have to assign a category. One trick Outlook 2011 could stand to learn from iCal is the ability to change the calendar for an event from within the event itself.
Setting up events has changed a bit. There are now two different kinds of events: appointments and meetings. The difference? You invite people to meetings, not to appointments. This separation is a bit pedantic, since you can invite someone to an appointment, but when you do, it changes itself to a meeting. Do you really need two buttons for what is really the same UI? I’ll hazard that this is one of those “Outlook on Windows does this, so shall we” issues. It’s not evil, just tedious.
As part of the Ribbon UI change (I’ll specifically address the Ribbon later), there’s some handy controls added to Outlook 2011’s calendar, such as dynamic resizing of your calendar view if you’re viewing your calendar as a grid, in Day, Work Week, or Week mode. There’s no resizing for month other than resizing the window.
Outlook 2011 has no CalDAV support. There are reasons for leaving it out of the first release (this version was heavily focused on Exchange), I hope future updates add CalDAV support—Outlook 2011 is entirely too useful to be solely bound to Exchange calendaring. You can use .ics files, but it’s not the same.
There’s also no Sync Services support for Events, so you can’t have Outlook 2011 talk to iCal that way. The Outlook team stated this was due to the complications in syncing events in a transparent manner, and so rather than ship with the same kinds of problems that marred Entourage’s Sync Services implementation, they decided to wait until they could guarantee better results. Microsoft plans to add calendar sync support in a future update.
Contacts
Contact management stays much the same, with any changes in the UI being more for the benefit of Outlook/Exchange than anything else. If you’re using Outlook 2011 with LDAP directory services, you can’t browse those directories, but the search works well. One complaint here is that Outlook 2011 assumes all directories are Active Directory (AD). If you’re using, say, Apple’s Open Directory, some things don’t show up correctly. Data like supervisor/supervisee information don’t show up if you aren’t using Exchange/AD, and you get an incorrect error message for that screen that there’s no directory service available—there is a directory service, just not AD. Providing directory/LDAP mapping information would be helpful in allowing system administrators to work around some of these issues.
Microsoft Outlook for Mac 2011
Pros
- New interface makes many tasks easier to access
- Improved Exchange support
- Faster than Entourage
- Redesigned AppleScript dictionary
- No longer reliant on a single database
- Better support for Time Machine and Portable Home Directory Sync
- Redesigned preferences make setting up the application easier
- UI more compatible with Outlook on Windows
Cons
- Assorted 1.0 bugs
- AppleScript implementation holes mar improvements to AppleScript Dictionary
- Exchange support requires Exchange Web Services
- Exchange 2003 and earlier not supported
- Exchange support limited to what EWS allows
- Time Machine limitations
- UI changes hardest on existing Entourage users