Outlook and Word Opinions
I made a comment at a get together with some friends recently that I thought Outlook was a good email program and an exception in the office suite. One of my friends retorted “Outlook is not that good an email program”. Here is why I think its better than pretty much everything else out there (I haven’t tried Lotus notes or evolution though).
- With some patience, tasks sync to PDAs. My @errand and @home list are always with me as I roam.
- With some patience, contacts sync to PDAs, and assigned categories like Services, friends, etc. which I find useful.
- Tasks can be categorized, perfect for GTD since they can be assigned @work, @home, @waiting, etc.
- Email messages can be converted to tasks.
- Later releases of Outlook don’t seem to be prone to viruses. With older versions, it seemed it was easy to be tricked into opening what you thought was an image and turned out to be malware.
I am disappointed the email program that comes with the mac doesn’t do any of the above.
Outlooks main negative productivity feature, email annunciation, can be easily disabled. Support for exporting/importing vcards is lame. Using x.509 certifications for secure email is either confusing or problematic or both - I have trouble getting this working and so does everyone else. Also, if you encrypt a message to someone else, you can still decrypt it with your own key, which is a serious privacy concern.
Word frustrates me. Authors waste a lot of time trying to make documents with consistent formatting in Word. The templates and style methaphor is broken (and for some strange reason emulated by Open Office). Living With the Beast has several pointers and links to alternative suggestions for living with Words styling mechanism.
I think people waste so much time formatting word documents because of its style mechanism that there is considerable opportunity for productivity and GDP growth by using a better tool. Microsoft or an incumbent could make a lot of money and deliver a lot of value selling an upgrade or new tool with a modern styling mechanism - perhaps something similar to CSS. This would increase productivity more than any feature added to word since 1997.