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A Treatise on Outlook 2007

May 24th, 2007 · No Comments

The pictures are coming. I promise. But I was busy with Paper Mario on the Wii (fantastic game), and then I managed to remove an import tag from my whole collection so I have to go fix that. In the mean time though…

My company has moved from simple POP3/IMAP email to Exchange. There are various reasons. But what this means for me is switching from Thunderbird and Outlook 2000 (which I used for a calendar) to Outlook 2007. It’s been interesting. Let’s look at the facts:

  • It’s slow to launch. No surprise. But then Thunderbird slowed down noticeably when 2.0 came out.
  • Automatic shared contact list, at least of internal people. This is quite nice.
  • The interface. There is so much.
    • Why is it when I’m in a window, the title bar is so dimmed that I can’t tell it’s the active window?
    • What’s with the giant throbbing office logo in the top left of the mail windows? Who decided THAT looked nice?
    • The calendar colors look strangely like the colors in iCal.
    • The calendar overlay mode is week. iCal does a much better job.
    • What’s with turning on ClearType by default and making it nearly impossible to turn off? It’s HIDEOUS on my computer. Yes, I’ve adjusted it, but it’s still ugly.
    • The rest of the interface looks kinda nice though.
  • Why is it that it automatically turned on Windows Update and started resetting my computer installing patches? I didn’t tell it it could do that.
  • Why did it change my default browser twice? I didn’t tell it that it could do that, either time.

PS: I am formally suggesting we get rid of parts of speech. I base this on the word “Oligarchical”, which I figured was spelled wrong but my Mac says is correct. Too hard to say. We should abolish these kinds of things. Just an idea.

Tags: Photography · Reviews