On Friday, Macworld published John Welch‘s review of Outlook:Mac 2011.  It’s a big review, but then there’s quite a lot to say about an all-new application, and John’s never been anything short of verbose anyway.  John’s a hard guy to please, so I feel like our four mice in his review would’ve been at least 4.5 mice in anyone else’s review!  His final advice is that “[i]f you need an Exchange client on the Mac, Outlook 2011 is the king … or just want something more than Mail, iCal, and Address Book give you, Outlook is a no-brainer”

Since it’s such a big review, there’s discussion of some of the subtle work that we’ve done to improve your experience when you’re using Outlook.  For example, he noticed one of my favourite features in the calendar.  If you select a specific category in the list on the left side, the events that are in the other categories fade out a little bit.  It’s subtle, but it’s a great visual indicator to help you focus on the category that you’ve selected.

John also talks about our Ribbon.  Here’s part of what he has to say:

The Ribbon is a bit of a controversy. It’s a user interface element in all of the Office programs that sits at the top of the document window and provides quick access to the most commonly used tools. At first, because of my experience with Entourage, I hated it. I like to have a minimal UI. After using it for a while, I’ve changed my opinion. The Ribbon is a bit garish, but it does keep the options I use frequently right where I need them. It doesn’t get in the way and it takes up a minimal amount of space.

If I had any complaints about the review, I have to admit that I find it perplexing that Outlook’s use of Exchange Web Services (and thus the requirement that it requires Exchange 2007 or later) gets three separate lines in the “cons” section at the top of the review.