Question about Outlook Express

·      CPU cycle hog – my Outlook regularly gets “jumpy” where simple things like scrolling through my inbox, scrolling down messages, typing in text get jumpy / stop for 1-3 seconds rather than flowing smoothly.  In some bad cases, I get the pinwheel while it’s doing simple things like this.  When I look at activity monitor, it's always at the top of the list (sorted by %CPU) and usually shows 60%+ utilization.

·      Contacts format – The contact format is awful.  What happened to the great formats like business card address card, detailed address card.  These are all very helpful formats for managing contacts.  But on the Mac version, only list format is available.

·      Cant’ See DL Details – On PC Outlook, you can double click any Exchange DL and it opens up a dialog box showing the sub-DLs or individual names and you can keep going through all DLs.  On Mac Outlook, you get NO details.  Worst case you can click on the down arrows on the DL to have it split out all the individuals into the To line, but on the Mac, even that doesn’t work because for some reason, it doesn’t show people’s names, it shows their “i-number” version of most of the email addresses.

·      Email favorites – On the PC, you could pin favorite folders at the top of your folder list.  That’s gone.  Now if there are some folders you use regularly that are at the bottom, you have to scroll all the way down and then back up to the inbox.

·      Customizing the Ribbon Bar – Can’t do it in Mac Outlook.  I preferred to have the delete button closer to the Move button and closer to my list of emails.  On the PC, I could just move it there.  On the Mac, no luck.

·      Move button doesn't learn from drag moves – the Move button doesn’t learn from when you drag emails into folders.  It only learns when you use the Move button and search for folders with text search.  On the PC, even if you dragged emails to folders, the list of folders on the Move button would be updated with your most recent drag-moves.

·      Capture image in email is terrible.  If you use the standard Mac screen capture, when you paste to an email, the image is HUGE.  And there aren't many free optional utilities.  I've resorted to buying SnagIt for Mac for $49 of my own money.  At least SnagIt lets me add annotations (arrows, etc) and I always shrink it by 50% before pasting into an email.  In SnagIt, it looks TINY, but when you paste it into an Outlook email, it still actually looks pretty large -- but at least it is clear and not blurry like other workarounds I've tried.  I've heard the size problem has something to do with the retina display.  But it is funky regardless and Microsoft should figure it out and fix it.

·      Very poor editing in emails.  On the PC version of Outlook, they’ve made all editing and graphic functions from Word/Powerpoint available directly in emails.  So you could grab an image by corners and shrink, resize, compress, wrap text, spin-rotate, add border, add shadow, left justify, right justify, close-wrap text, etc, etc – anything you can do in Word.  On the Mac, there is NO editing of images available.  Once it’s pasted in, you're stuck with it.  If you want to edit, you have to do it outside email and re-paste.  And any kind of formatting of text and images inside an email -- forget it.  Can't be done.

·      No email notifications if you’re in Outlook.  For some reason, they decided to disable the pop-up notifications if you happen to be working in Outlook.  So you’re editing an email or working in your calendar and when a new email comes in, you hear the “ding”, but it doesn’t show you what email came in.  If your inbox is minimized or hidden under another window, too bad.  You have to find your inbox and see what came in.

·      No ability to zoom email view – On the PC, it’s possible to adjust the standard or specific view of emails.  This is not possible on the Mac.  All emails only show in the size defined by the desktop.  This is handy on the PC especially when using large-area / small size desktops where standard email fonts can be so small to be hard to read.  On the PC, can zoom to show emails with larger view of fonts.

·      Only one timezone in calendar view – On the PC, if you show week view in the calendar, you can show two differnent timezones.  This is required these days when I have conference calls with timezones all over the world at my company.  In Outlook for Mac, you only get to see one timezone.

·      Signatures are either always applied or never applied  – In the PC version, you could have signatures apply for new emails, but not applied for email replies.  On the Mac, you have to decide if you want your signature to show always or never.  I don't want my signature every time I reply to a simple email, so I've turned signatures off and then I have to remember when creating a new email to paste it into the bottom manually.

·      No emailing a file direct from Finder – On the PC, you can right click a file and one of the options is "Send to..." and you can pick "email" and it creates a new Outlook email with the file (or files) attached and the subject line with the file name.  There isn't anything like this on the Mac.  If you're in Finder, there's no easy way to email a file.  If you right click (or two finger tap) on the Mac, there is a long list of things you can do (how many times am I really going to burn a file to a disk), but emailing it is not one of the choices.  Could this really have been overlooked by Apple and MS?  (I know, you can drag a file down to the Outlook icon on the dock... but seriously, that's the best way to do this?  And it doesn't fill in the subject line.)   I've heard there may be a way to create something like this using Automator, but again... seriously?  I've got to become a programmer to do something simple like this?

OK, I listed 13.... sorry!  But there are definitely MORE of these, and this is just what I could think of right now.  Anyone want to add to the list?  Any idea when MS is thinking of an update and could fix some of these things?  I'm also wondering why they chose to start with an entirely new code base rather than working with the existing Outlook for PC?  It also seems like they must have had an entirely different group of developers working on it because it looks very different.

I'm seriously considering installing Parallels and going back to my PC Outlook 2010 and keep it running in Parallels (Win 7) on the Mac.  Anyone done that as well?  Are you happier doing that?  Are there problems that Parallels causes for Outlook that I should be aware of?  Do the files work with other Mac Office products well?  Or did you switch entirely over to your Parallels version of Office and run everything in the PC versions?

Thanks for your thoughts and input!

Chip