Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Outlook 2007 - a rant
CWuestefeld:
even 2k3 does some stupid things. My .PST was 1.5GB, and I decided to split it into a current PST and an archive PST. I made the archive PST in 2k3 format and it ballooned to 2.6GB(!).-wraith808 (June 06, 2007, 10:08 AM)
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There's actually a good reason for that. The 2K3 format changed in order to support Unicode, where (for practical purposes) each character takes 2 bytes. This support would have effectively halved the capacity of the file, and thus broken it for many existing users, so they had to do something in order to expand the max capacity.
Anyway, the reason it got so much bigger is that all the text it contains now occupies twice as much space.
If this bothers you, you won't get anywhere by arguing with Microsoft. You're more likely to convince the entire world to speak English so they don't need Unicode. :D
Clive:
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!
-Darwin (June 05, 2007, 12:23 PM)
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I wish I'd known this before I blithley upgraded to Outlook 2007. The reason being that when I wanted to confirm that .pst backups were occurring correctly (in Outlook 07) I tried restoring the backup. As you may know this process opens the backed up Personal Folders below the current Personal Folders. Whenever I attempt this process the computer freezes and I get the error message "this program is not responding". Now I live in fear of losing all my precious Outlook data & I can't go back to 2003.
Carol Haynes:
You can go back to Outlook 2003 but it may take a little effort.
Firstly you can export all your email and contacts to Outlook Express and then reimport them into Outlook 2003.
Not sure about other things like calendar though?
Looking at Outlook 2003 File > Import and Export ... there seems to be an option to export to CSV files (and a variety of other file formats) so it may be worth experimenting a bit - just keep a backup of your current PST until you are sure it has all worked.
Edit:
Just checked and you can export contacts and calendar as Excel files. I have tried the export functions and they seem to work OK but I have not tried the import functions. The only problems you may encounter are:
* The Excel files created by Outlook 2007 may be Excel 2007 format files so you will need to open them in Excel and save them in a format likely to be understood by Outlook 2003 (I'd guess standard XLS format will do it).
* You may need to manually map field names during export and import to Excel files (read the help files in Outlook for this).
* Calendar recurring appointments cannot be exported but you can specify a date range. I tried 1/1/1900 to 1/1/2020 and then it basically exported all recurring appointments in the past from the date they were set up and inserted appointments up to 2020 that have not yet occurred. Obviously you wouldn't want to do that but you could do it until the end of the year to make sure you catch all recurring appointments and then they can be setup again manually after importing the XLS file.
johnk:
Well, I just couldn't stand it any more, not for another day. So last night I moved my email to Thunderbird.
I was very impressed with the Thunderbird import wizard. Just pointed it to my Outlook 2007 PST (500MB file), and off it went. Twenty minutes later, all my mail, contacts book and account settings were in Thunderbird, without a glitch. Message filters don't import, unfortunately, but that's a one-off inconvenience.
I'm sure I'll have plenty to moan about in a few days, but at the moment I'm just enjoying the speed of Thunderbird (relative to OL2007, anyway). Syncing with my PDA will be the challenge...
CWuestefeld:
Does this help the speed issue:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/06/fix-sluggishness-of-outlook-2007.html
-Veign (June 05, 2007, 12:36 PM)
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I installed this yesterday afternoon, and while it's too early to tell definitively, I believe that it has improved the situation.
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