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Outlook 2007 - a rant

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johnk:
In another thread (https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=8734), I praised MS's fine OneNote program, and said it showed just what they can do when they try. On the other hand...

Recently I upgraded to Office 2007, and with it to Outlook 2007. Like many people, I live in Outlook. Which is a great shame for me, because Outlook 2007 is horrible.

The main problem is that it's just slow. Now Outlook has never been sleek and nimble, but 2003 was a pretty good program. Glitch-free, for me, and worked quite well. I am growing old watching emails render in Outlook 2007. It is painfully slow. And when the email finally appears, if you're unlucky enough to open an HTML email....Let me give you just one example.

Here's a daily email newsletter I receive from Variety magazine:

[attachtimg=1]

And since I "upgraded" to Outlook 2007, here's what I see:

[attachtimg=2]

Why? Well, it took some digging to find out, but apparently MS, in its infinite wisdom, decided to stop using the IE HTML engine to render Outlook emails. Now Outlook 2007 uses....MS Word's HTML engine. Really.

A bit more digging, and I found that this is causing plenty of coders endless frustration:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/01/10/microsoft-breaks-html-email-rendering-in-outlook/

Now I know that some of you will say that maybe it's a good thing. Maybe we'll see a return to the good old days of plain text emails. And yes, I'm one of the old timers too - I always send plain text emails. Unfortunately, the commercial world does not, and will not. So email newsletters, invoices etc, all in HTML, and all at the mercy of Outlook's new excuse for an HTML engine.

I wish I could just shrug my shoulders and say "it's time to move on". But Outlook, and its PDA equivalent, are ingrained in my life. It's going to take some long-term planning to move away.

Finally, I inquired about how I would revert to Outlook 2003, while keeping the rest of Office 2007. Apparently I'd have to uninstall all of Office 2007, install Office 2003, then re-install Office 2007 without Outlook. Oh, and mail merge would be broken. And one or two other things as well...

steeladept:
Ugh...As if IE wasn't bad enough.  Word's HTML engine has always been the worst engine around.  I don't know why so many business people in particular insist on using Word to create HTML.  IT JUST PLAIN DOESN'T WORK RIGHT!  Another reason to stay away from Office 2007...

Curt:
On the other hand, if one must try to think happy thoughts, this could hopefully soon be the occasion for Microsoft to vastly improve Word.

Darwin:
I remember howls of protest about this when Office 2007 was still in beta but can not for the life of me remember where (probably here!) I read about it. Too bad MS didn't listen... One assumes that this was done for security reasons, but it would have been nice to have retained the option of switching the engine.

On a related note, another thing that was made clear while Office was in beta is that Outlook 2007 can import pst files created in 2003 and earlier, but pst files created/updated in Outlook 2007 can not be exported back into Outlook 2003. I am SO glad that I caught that before blithely migrating everything into the beta, which is what I had planned to do!

Veign:
Does this help the speed issue:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/06/fix-sluggishness-of-outlook-2007.html

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