Improving Outlook

  • Thread starter Allen Hillegas AKA Scotty
  • Start date
A

Allen Hillegas AKA Scotty

I don’t know if this message will be well received and any of the
suggestions I am about to make will be implemented in the future, but here
goes. First, let me say I am a long time, adamant admirer of nearly every
program made by Microsoft with only one exception, Microsoft Outlook. I have
been using computers of various kinds, for over 30 years. I find that
Microsoft products tend to be the best, except for mobile devices. For that,
since the 1990’s I have used Palm devices. I truly admire the palm system and
the Palm Desktop program for keeping track of my address information, notes,
calendar and other files. I truly admire the Palm Desktop for its
functionality, simplicity and easy to save backup copies of my information. I
highly recommend the Microsoft software development team to take a long,
detailed examination of the features of the Palm Desktop program that I would
consider far superior to MS Outlook in almost every respect. As I have gotten
older, my eyesight is not as good so I decided to go to a portable device
with a larger screen. This was one of my primary reasons for my recent
purchase of an IPad. Over the one and a half months I have steadily found
more good things, and a few bad ones, to say about the IPad. One of the
problems I have is that it has forced me to once again use MS Outlook to sync
my address files. I have worked with Outlook over the years and diligently
tried to use each updated version since 1997. I will not go into all the
problems I have had with these various versions. Again, I have tried for
hours, days, weeks, and years to use each version of Outlook and have found
crashes and the design to be over-worked and cumbersome. The program lacks
the simplicity of the Palm Desktop program and the ease of importing and
exporting files. Again, instead of writing an entire book on every detail to
each program and compare their abilities and my opinion on the different
methods used by both programs, I implore you to have a software engineering
team do a detailed analysis of every aspect of the Palm Desktop program to
see why I feel justified in my opinion. Simply put, the Palm Desktop is
easier to use and functions more efficiently than MS Outlook. Please look
into modifying the MS Outlook program to have similar abilities. I will give
you one small, specific example. I tried to backup some of my contact
information on Outlook to a .pst file. Now I get an error message every time
I start the program. It is very annoying. I could list hundred of
comparisons like this but hopefully I have made my point clear: Fix Outlook!
Update the program! Outlook does have many outstanding features, but it some
ways it is too sophisticated. This is from someone who has written programs
since 1980 with BASIC, then Visual Basic 6.0-net, C C++, etc. I am well aware
of the features of Outlook that the Palm Desktop does not have. Fine, but I
don’t want to use a program that is cumbersome, difficult to use, and often
gives error messages and does not function properly! Simply put, all the
extra features do not compare with what I could describe as the elegant
simplicity found in the Palm Desktop program. Please modify and update the MS
Outlook program to be more like the Palm Desktop.

I am looking forward to a version of the IPad to be available with more of
the PC software products to go with it. Please continue working on improving
software for computers around the world. Thank you for your attention.


----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the "I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/com...aab8&dg=microsoft.public.office.developer.vba
 
S

Stewart Berman

I agree that the Palm Desktop is superior to Outlook in many ways and still
use it with my Palm Treo.

Unfortunately, Palm has abandoned Palm Desktop in favor of cloud backup for
their newest products. (They demonstrated the fallacy of this when one of
their servers crashed and all of the user data on it was lost.)

So if you want to be able to backup to your own PC - and store a backup of
that off site - you are probably going to have to interface to Outlook as
most (all?) of the other phone manufacturers do not offer a standalone
desktop version to go with their phones. You might try looking at some
add-ins available for Outlook from third parties that make the user
interface a little easier to use.


Allen Hillegas AKA Scotty <Allen Hillegas AKA
 

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